If you're not able to travel to a university, or if you're not available on the dates they're holding their open days, you might be worried about making the right decision on UCAS. Worry not, as our guide will take you through the different options you have to find all the information you need.
Updated: 15 Apr 2025
That’s right, you literally don’t have to move a muscle to find out information about the universities you're planning on attending.
Well, actually you'll need to click your mouse a couple of times to navigate to the Whatuni profile pages for the unis on your shortlist, but that’s about it.
Our university profiles provide you with an overview of what the institution has to offer in regards to student support, accommodation and job prospects.
These profile pages make a great starting point for your uni research.
To find out more about the course you're looking to study, you can then visit our course listings page, where you can search for your chosen course and see module information, key stats on dropouts, results and employment rates, and course/uni rankings.
These are great resources for researching your university shortlist – and they're all on one website.
But that’s not all we’ve got to help you find the best university for you.
Another thing we have here on the Whatuni site to help you with your university research is real-life student reviews!
We currently have approximately 200,000 student reviews on our website, covering hundreds of universities across the country – with real, current uni students giving their feedback on courses and lecturers, job prospects, uni facilities, students union and much much more.
These are a great way to see what’s really going on and what current students really think about life at your shortlisted university!
University rankings are really useful for learning which universities are the best for things like learning facilities, quality of teaching and research and graduate prospects.
You can compare which universities are the best by the factors that matter to you most, and see where you could get the best education possible.
You may not feel comfortable going to an in-person open day, so why not see if the uni you're interested in is offering a virtual open day or campus tour? That way you can get a sense of what to expect on your course and learn more about the facilities and accommodation options for prospective students.
These virtual tours offer different perspectives such as promotional videos to actual 360-degree shots of the interior and exterior locations. There may be some live events you can attend online, or you can look at the university's website or social media to see what they have available.
NEXT: See what's available and book your place now.
Facebook and Instagram are great tools for finding out not only what your university's like, but more importantly what the people you’ll be spending the next few years potentially getting to know are like too.
Some universities are more active on social media than others and post regular updates about uni life. Don’t just follow the uni and their student’s union and/or sports teams accounts, see who they're following. They're likely to be following a lot of the uni’s students, which may be worth checking out if they have a public profile to see the uni through the lens of a student.
One of the reasons why we suggest attending university open days is to meet your potential lecturers – those wise fountains of knowledge who'll guide you into the world – and ask them questions about your course.
But even if you can’t attend any open days, that doesn’t mean you lose the chance to speak to them.
Many lecturers will be happy for you to email them to ask some questions and you can often find their contact details on the university’s website.
Contacting lecturers directly will show you as proactive and enthusiastic and will help you to stand out amongst your peers as someone who wants to do well - even before you get to uni.
There are so many options out there for you to fall back on if you can’t attend a university open day, to help you decide which university is the best fit for you. You can find most of those tools here on Whatuni.