There are a wide variety of postgraduate taught and research courses available at Bournemouth University and starting the application for your course can be a stressful process. As a follow-up to my blog discussing postgraduate funding, this blog will go through some key tips when it comes to submitting a postgraduate application and what information is useful to have prior to starting the application. The start of my application process was slightly different for me having studied for my undergraduate degree at Bournemouth meaning there were some pieces of information I didn’t need to provide compared to an application from a student studying at a different university.

Types of applications: 

If you are a current undergraduate student at Bournemouth, all you have to do to start your application is submit a Fast Track postgraduate application form with the main key pieces of information you need being your student ID, whether you are a UK-based or international student, the name of the course you are looking to study and what entry year you are applying for. As the university will already have you in their records, they will use this information to complete your application and determine the conditions of your offer. Following this application and you receiving your offer, all you need to be aware of is what the conditions of your offer are e.g. A 2:2 Classification in your undergraduate degree programme (unless the offer is unconditional) with the second stage of the application coming after you receive the results of your undergraduate degree.

If you are applying and have studied for your undergraduate degree at a different university, the first place to go is to Bournemouth University’s website to find the right course for you as each course page will link you to whether you can start your application – myHub. During this application, you will provide most of the key pieces of information e.g. evidence of qualifications & VISAs. One crucial difference between this application and the fast track is the requirement to give the details of a referee who will be contacted as part of the process so having one secured prior to starting the application can be helpful. Alongside this, if you are an international student, think about how much time might be needed for your VISA application to go through alongside working on your application to make sure everything is sorted before your course starts. Similar to the first application, the university will l0ok over what has been provided to determine the outcome of your offer with the next stages of both application styles being completed on myHub.

Next Stage: 

• Fast Track: One aspect to be aware of when moving onto the next stage for this application is whilst the fundamentals will be the same as the other application, you won’t need to provide evidence of qualifications as BU will have a record of your grade allowing you to select the option of having studied there previously with the main elements being setting up tuition and confirming your identity.
• Normal application: MyHub is BU’s application portal and this is where you can accept your offer and complete any additional requirements your offer has with the main one being tuition payments.

As mentioned in my recent blog, there are a wide variety of tuition discounts available to students (mainly in the form of scholarships) so it is helpful to check when working through your application to see if you are eligible for any of the discounts. The main section of this stage is setting up a payment plan for your tuition fees which can be set up in a number of different ways, the most common being paying in instalments spread out across the year. The first payment comes as you complete your application where you will pay 1% of your tuition to set up whichever payment plan suits you best so one key tip is to compare this to how much student finance you have been offered to see which plan will work the best,

One final tip for submitting a postgraduate application is that there is no official deadline for you to submit the application but it is recommended that you do it as early as possible although this may be different if you are looking to apply for a postgraduate research course given the differences in the applications. How long the application process takes will depend on what course you are applying for and all the key information on how to get started can be found through the link below.

Find out more

Applying for postgraduate study