A small project that I developed when I was 16, applying for university, has become quite the tool for students applying for university. Between 1st September 2015 and 4th January 2016 (UCAS’ interim comparison point), the site saw 37,000 unique visitors. You could crudely say this was 10% of all university applicants using UCAS’ interim figures, but realistically it’s probably less than that due to the way Google analytics calculates unique visitors — but still, it’s a sizeable representation of people applying. In fact, it ranks number 1 for a number of UCAS-related queries on Google (such as “ucas count”, “ucas line count” and more — above UCAS).
Enough bragging: it’s a very simple tool that simply works out whether someone has exceeded UCAS’ line and character limits (as this is not a traditional character/line count and so Word won’t do).
TL;DR, it gives an okay representation of who’s working on their personal statement and when.
Briefly analysing the data you can see how students work: with the general peaks and troughs representing weekdays and weekends. What’s interesting to note is there is a fairly consistent level of applicants across the entire period (minus the brief dip over the Christmas/NYE period). The initial peak is actually the Oxbridge/Medicine deadline, which is slightly earlier.
If you are to take anything from this article, it’s one thing: people are applying right until the bitter end and there’s no need to panic. While there is a slight weekly decrease in the number of people working on their statement, there’s still plenty applying in January. Of course, there’s numerous reasons why you should apply early (as universities start handing out offers from the beginning) but you’re certainly not alone if you don’t!
Data collected from maccery.com/ps
