Success for Oscar – Kings Bournemouth

“I cannot speak more highly of my son’s experience on his academic studies at Kings Bournemouth. The transformation of his academic prospects over the last year has been remarkable. The teaching and wider support he has received from both the academic and administrative staff have both been excellent. More than anything he has enjoyed his time at Kings Bournemouth and can look forward to commencing his undergraduate studies at a top university later this year.” Mr Bushell.

Oscar’s story:

Hi, my name is Oscar Bushell.  I’m preparing for university entrance at Kings Bournemouth. I take Art, Government and Politics and Business. It’s very enjoyable and I really like Politics. We talk about different ideologies, different ways of thinking and why people think a certain way. For Business it’s the same thing, why people make the decisions they make. I’ve always enjoyed Art, I’ve done it for a few years and I just wanted to take it again for a subject. Here we have a really nice teacher. He’s really friendly, always encourages us, keeps us doing our work and everything like that.

The teachers

Teachers seem to spend more time looking at how we revise and are we going in the right direction of the course; if we understand everything, because there’s a lot of material. A big benefit of that is its definitely more focussed revision time and more study time. I didn’t have that in my old school as much..

The course

This whole course and support prepares us for university and a lot of kids go straight to university from school and they don’t know how to plan their time, plan their hours; when should I revise, when should I have a break? Kings definitely helps here, I learn much more about how to manage my time. So that’s definitely a huge benefit for me going into the next thing, which is university of course.

“ Hearing from my other friends: here, most of them got their first choice university too so I think that also goes to show that Kings does support you extensively in getting to the next stage in your life. ”

University offers

My first-choice university is Surrey doing a BSc Business Management (Entrepreneurship), I think it’s a really nice course. Your first year you’re in the UK learning new things at the university and learning by going to work in different businesses as well. Then in your second year you get to go abroad as part of the course, you go do another year in another university. So hopefully I’m going to America for my second year. It seems like a very good course and I’ve had a few friends who’ve done this or a similar course at Surrey and they were really happy what they learned, know and what they did.

I applied to Surrey, Bournemouth, Reading, Winchester and Royal Holloway. I got offers from all of them, thankfully, but at the end of the day I thought Surrey was the better choice for what I wanted to do.

Personal tutor support

Sean (Personal Tutor) helped me a lot, I have to say he did a lot. You know I came in on some days and he just gave several hours to discuss where I wanted to go. I applied quite late compared to everyone else. Everyone applied much faster because I didn’t make the decision and then I decided to go and to get these choices at the last minute stage, it just goes to show how much dedication Sean put in to trying to get me to get my choices and I got all of them! So I’m very thankful for him for helping me there.

Previously I didn’t even think about going to university, I was doing work experience and other things. And now I’m here and having come that far and actually seeing the next stage of my life at university and then what I’ll do after that. Kings definitely helped me in that area a lot. I think everyone is different. We all know of some people who just want to go to university ‘because they want to go’. But I spent time to really think about it. Kings has given me more confidence and ensured that the decision I’m making is the right decision for me.