Happy New Year!

Updates on the Agents’ Conference^

Thank you for all your kind words and constructive feedback on the Agents conference. We are keen to update you on our progress as we work our way through it all.

Thanks for your Feedback on the Conference Organisation

Thanks to all of you for your comments on the sessions. It seems as though the presentations from Departments (Engineering, Management, Science and Social Sciences) and from central services (English Language Centre, Student Support and Careers, Admissions) plus the introductions were generally very well received. Next time, we will definitely include a more detailed ‘overview’ of our recruitment strategy and targets in the introductory session by the International Office.

We do also appreciate that the Admissions Briefing was initially a little ‘stormy’ but that real progress, understanding, and change was achieved during the conference. We will definitely make sure that the next conference includes a much wider tour of all the facilities at the University and we will try to hold some of the sessions in different Departments if rooms are available. We will also hold a ‘meet our students’ session.

From our side, thank you for the Agents’ Fair. This was crucial in introducing the academic staff to international markets and your role in particular. For many of the staff involved it was the first time they had really engaged with these issues and it has really helped to raise the awareness of international recruitment.

We are glad you enjoyed the Bath Tour and Party: so did we! We will try and think of an alternative idea for the ‘dinner’ next time: maybe by breaking into smaller groups with your country manager or going for a reception/buffet style of event to make it shorter. One idea is to have a reception with some of our students in one of the historic buildings in Bath.

We agree that it would be good to offer more opportunities for delegates to meet with each other and share good practice and get ideas from each other. We very much wanted to be able to offer more opportunity to do so. However, as this was our first event we aslo wanted to offer our Faculties the chance to present and consequently ran out of time to include everything!

Our plan is to hold the next conference in November 2011 and regularly every two years from then on.

What is happening in the Faculties? How are we moving forward?

We (Andy, Virginia, Zoe and Jo) are working our way through all your feedback one Faculty at a time. We met last week with a focus on Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences to bring together all our ideas, including all your suggestions. This has been written up into an initial plan and sent to the Dean and we will be meeting with his senior team to take things further. In the next newsletter we should be able to update you on some key developments such as:

• Proposed name changes for Departments and programmes, including MSc International Relations
• Proposed new programme MSc International Money and Banking. This is going through the approval process at the moment.
• Proposed visits by International Development staff to Japan (March / April 2010) and Economics staff (tbc)

We are currently working through the same process for the Faculty of Sciences and will then move on to Faculty of Engineering and School of Management.

Update on Admissions and Applications for 2010 Entry^

Our applications from overseas students are up this year and in some cases the increases are very large. For example, the applications to MSc Accounting and Finance are up by 150% and for Management (MSc Management, MSc Marketing) by 50-60%. The advice to candidates and to you from the School of Management is to apply as quickly as possible. 

Both our Admissions and Departmental staff are working as quickly as they can but the increase in applications and lost working days over Christmas/New Year and due to 4 ‘snow days’  where the University had to close during bad weather, does mean that there is a backlog. We thank you for your patience and understanding as always under these circumstances. Everyone is working to try and clear this as quickly as possible.

Many of you have queries about ‘Applicant Tracker’ and other areas of the application process. Here are the latest tips and information from Admissions to help things go more smoothly.

User names/passwords

We have had a number of queries from you regarding logging in to Application Tracker. User names and passwords are issued by Bath University Computing Services (BUCS) not the International Office or Admissions Office.   If applicants are having problems, we want them to contact Admissions@bath.ac.uk directly as Admissions are keen to see what sort of issues are coming up: they will then forward the query to BUCS

Additional documents

1) Due to recent feedback we have now added additional upload facilities for all applications.

• Online Application - We have added "Upload a second document". This makes a total of six upload facilities: Degree Cert, Degree Transcript, English, Reference, Additional Document, Second Additional Doc.

• Application Tracker - We have added "Upload another document". This makes a total of five upload facilities: Degree Cert, Degree Transcript, English, Reference, Additional Document.

Please try to keep the number of documents uploaded to the minimum as above. Encourage applicants to include all additional information about their skills, internships, hobbies, scholarships and so on in their personal statement.

2) If an applicant has already applied and later has additional documents to upload, they must use Applicant Tracker. Please don’t make a new online application or send the additional documents to the International Office staff as this causes confusion.

3) Please do not send additional hard /soft copies of applications by post, fax or email after you have made an online application, as it causes delays for the admissions team.

Acceptances

Please encourage your candidates to think carefully before clicking to accept an offer online as they can only use this facility once.If they change their mind they will have to contact Admissions directly.

Please be aware that the deposit is now a condition of offer and not a condition of acceptance. 

Email Queries

All queries about applications should go to admissions@bath.ac.uk or to the Department. It is useful if you can group emails for a particular course together.

Application Fees

Just a reminder that MSc Economics, MSc Economics (Development), MSc Economics and Finance, MSc Management, MSc International Management, MSc Accounting and Finance, MSc Marketing all have a £25 application fee. Please send fee payments directly to the Department. You can use email with an attached credit card form if you wish.