How to work best with your university counsellor

Depending on where you are in your journey, you may or may not yet have worked out that UK Higher Education is complicated. And if you haven’t already, you are soon going to find out that the same is true of the application system.

So naturally, you’ll want to find someone to help you navigate it, right?

Your first port of call should be your school or college. If you are studying in the UK or at an international school abroad, your school will almost certainly have this covered. At the very least, they will have identified a teacher, perhaps the Head or Deputy Head of Sixth, or similar, who will have UCAS guidance as part of their job. They may even have a full-time university counsellor, whose entire role is to support students in their next steps. Depending on the school they might be called a careers teacher, a university counsellor or something similar. For the purposes of this article, I’ll call them a university counsellor.

So, what should a university counsellor be doing for you?

It’s extremely tricky to generalise. I’ve been into hundreds of schools over my career, and no two had exactly the same set up. That said, if you are at a school that regularly sends its students off to universities in the UK, then it should have a person, or a team to support this, and generally this support comes in two parts.

A careers and university guidance programme

Firstly, they should be providing a programme for each year group that informs you about your options post-school and shows you how to apply for these options. This may be delivered predominantly by your university counsellor, may be delivered by form tutors, and may include visits by universities and other specialists.

You might have an hour a week for this, or perhaps these sessions will be taught as part of your PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) or equivalent classes. You may even have a full week or two, perhaps right at the end of your year 12, where you focus entirely on your options.

Many schools in the UK will also organise their own careers and university fair, where they will have local employers and universities present to talk to you about options. If they don’t do this, they will hopefully take you along to a UCAS exhibition in your nearest city, where you will find a huge number of universities with stands and staff to talk to you.

And some schools will have bought a university guidance platform for you to use; something like Unifrog, BridgeU or one of their competitors. If they have, there will be loads of resources on this. I am a big fan of Unifrog in particular.

This sort of support is the bare minimum that I think a UK school, or an international school abroad, should be offering. And if it's not there, I would hope that at the very least, you’ll be taken through the application process, shown how to fill in your UCAS form, and told a bit about writing your personal statement.

Careers and university guidance counselling

The second part of your university counsellor's role is to provide you with individual, one-to-one guidance. Guidance, you see, is far more than just providing information (as I do here at betterunichoices.com), and far more than providing advice (which I sometimes do too!).

Guidance involves listening to you, getting to know you, and understanding your challenges, your aptitudes and your ambitions. Good guidance doesn’t tell you what to do, rather it helps you by showing you your options, and directing you where to find the resources to help you make good decisions. By understanding your strengths, weaknesses, likes and dislikes, a good university counsellor will help you find a course that will work for you; the right subjects at the right universities. They’ll help you choose a good range of options from which you’ll get good offers. And then they’ll help you with your application, your personal statement, and will give you a reference that will accurately reflect your strengths and your potential.

But however good the counsellor is, they can’t possibly do all this without your engagement and support. Guidance is a two way street, and they can only listen if you speak. They can only get to know you if you let them.

Getting the most from your university counsellors

So… how should you work with your university counsellors (or your team of support teachers)?

Firstly, engage with the programme of events and sessions that they offer. They will have chosen the timing to suit the decision-making and application timescale. It takes nearly a year to apply to university, and so they’ll start early with their programme.

You may find that you aren’t really ready, and want to leave your decisions till later. You may feel pressure to make decisions that you aren’t ready for. That’s fair enough, and understandable, but be aware that there are always options and mechanisms to change your mind later, and it is better to have a well prepared application for the wrong course than it is to have no application at all. So, engage as much as you can with the programme that your school delivers, at the time they deliver it.

Secondly, make an effort to allow your counsellor to really get to know you. They will have specific points in the year when they will want to have an appointment to see you and discuss your future choices. Certainly don’t miss these, but more importantly make it your business to meet them outside of these meetings. And don’t be afraid to share your worries and your uncertainties with them; they are there to help you! If you are struggling with a decision, want some feedback on the latest draft of your personal statement, or are having second thoughts about your decisions, just make an appointment and go and see them!

Finally, please, please stick to the deadlines that they set. Every year I hear of students who missed the opportunity to apply for a particular course or accept an offer because they hadn’t realised how the deadlines worked, had technical issues, or didn’t get the right information to their school in time. Running deadlines close can only damage your application and reduce the chances of you getting to where you want to be.

At this point I’ll let you into the fact that right now my wife is a university counsellor, at an international school. The last thing she did before the summer break was to deliver their Next Steps programme, giving the year 12 students a full rundown of their university options all around the world. She loves events like this where the whole focus is on future choices, and making great decisions for the future of her students. But what she loves even more is really getting to know the individual students. She takes great pride in the fantastic and impressive destinations of those students each year, but she takes even more satisfaction when an individual student makes a great application and gets an offer from a university that is perfect for them.

What next?

Of course, it is possible that you don’t have a Mrs Tinnacher at your school, or that for one reason or another, you feel that their support is not enough for you.

If that’s the case, check out my advice on independent university counsellors and student recruitment agents.