Academia 33: University of Birmingham Offer-Holder Day

Hello my beautiful friends!

Once you have received an offer from a university, you may be invited to an offer-holder day. This is similar to an open day, but is accessible to offer-holders only. I attended an offer-holder day at the University of Birmingham and have decided to give a review about it. What did I do? Was it a worthwhile event? Did it change my perspective on the university? I hope to answer these questions and more in order to advise you about offer-holder days.

I attended this offer-holder day with my mum. To begin the day, we were provided with refreshments (the university was very hospitable, as you will find out later in this post) and able to talk to students & staff about the university.

Following this, I was split up with my mum because the parents had a separate itinerary. I attended three talks, which lasted a total of 40 minutes altogether. The talks covered the course, teaching, student life (this talk was presented by current students) and industrial links. I found the talks very informative, despite knowing a lot about the university already.

I attended a mathematics workshop with a lecturer, which aimed to mimic the small-group tutorial style of teaching because this is a teaching method at Birmingham. I thoroughly enjoyed this workshop! The content of the workshop was not too difficult as it built up from A Level Mathematics to A Level Further Mathematics to a slightly more challenging extension into university Mathematics. The lecturer was very encouraging, ensuring he involved everyone in my group. Whilst I do not think this workshop was necessary, it was a useful insight into this teaching style.

Lunch was provided by the mathematics department and they provided such a wide variety of foods in their buffet. Due to me being vegan, I thought that there would be a limited number of food items available, but they provided me with a feast of a lunch! I appreciated this. A lot.

Also, I attended campus and accommodation tours. Whilst the campus tour was not useful to me because I had a tour of the campus on the open day, it would be useful to someone who has not visited Birmingham before. I felt the accommodation tour was not very useful because there was only one flat in one accommodation block open for viewing. Birmingham has a separate accommodation open day during March, so this accommodation tour was fairly useless. I would recommend viewing the accommodation on the open day or accommodation open day instead.

At the end of the day, we were provided with more refreshments as we joined our parents again (they even had a fruit salad for me because I could not eat the chocolate or cake). Also, we filled in a feedback form and I appreciate the university considering feedback to improve their future offer-holder days.

The only downside of this offer-holder day, aside from the accommodation tour, was that I found it difficult to make friends. All of the students were very timid, including myself, so maybe an icebreaker session would be useful at events such as these to encourage more student interaction.

Holistically, I found this offer-holder day useful and I would definitely recommend that you attend these to ensure that you choose the right university for you. In fact, I enjoyed the offer-holder day so much that...

I took my unconditional offer from the University of Birmingham! I am super excited to attend this university to grow both personally and academically. Whilst the University of Birmingham was my top choice before attending this offer-holder day, I feel the day confirmed this.

I hope that this blog post has been a useful insight into offer-holder days. Please share your own experiences. I attended one offer-holder day, so I am curious if people had different experiences at other universities.