Sign up

Southampton

This week I've actually had a job - gasp - working for the university on their Clearing Hotline. The deal is that 18 year olds get their exam results this week (they had them on Thursday) and those who are going to university check what they got against their offer. If they got the grades they needed, great! They're off to uni in October. If they didn't then they enter a process called Clearing, which all universities use to fill up spaces in their programs. All I'm doing is answering the phone and either transferring calls to various faculties' admissions tutors, or telling students that they need to look elsewhere...

The most over-subscribed course by far is Medicine - it's completely full and didn't even enter Clearing this year. That hasn't stopped hundreds of people ringing to ask for a place. I personally have turned down three students with AAAA grades and four or five others with AAA grades. On the other end of the scale, there have been people ringing up with one E, or DD and asking for a place on various courses. Unfortunately there the answer is always no!

Thursday was rather busy - I took 101 calls during the day but still had quite a lot of time off the phone. Today, though, was practically dead in comparison - I took only 25 calls in 7 hours of working! The boss started to ask us to leave from about 1pm because it was so quiet (there are nearly 30 of us working there) but I figured that I'd rather get paid to surf the internet than go home and do it for free. Goodness knows what it will be like on Sunday...!

Tonight my housemate Brian and I went to see SNAKES ON A PLANE which is a simply awesome film. Samuel L Jackson kicks butt, which is always fun to see.