Is Course or Uni more important for IB?

Looking to apply for university next year. Does course or university matter more? For example, would doing Economics at UCL look better/worse than doing say Economic History/Management at LSE. Even though economics at ucl may be harder to get into, lse is a better university so was wondering people's thoughts on this

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Hey, uni is better. Remember societies are open to all undergrads - so you could be doing something like Geography, Music, history etc... but still be involved and know what ib is all about through such societies.

 

Thanks. Would LSE Economic History serve me better then compares to UCL Econ? Thinking of whether to apply for lse econ instead but might be too risky

 
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All is good till you try do it with LSE - LSE's weighting towards their personal statement means if you do an economics personal statement and apply for econ history, they won't consider you as it's not tailored enough (source: people I personally know who tried that in 2022). Can have the best grades, and even if applying to a low requirement course (i.e. ABB requirement course but you have triple A* predicted), you will still get rejected.

Of those who reapplied the next academic year (this year entry - 2023), they decided to take one key topic & follow it across the entirety of their options.

i.e. one friend of mine instead of applying to econ/finance-related courses again decided to apply to geography undergrad courses - including LSE's pure geog. He got a place at LSE this year because of his approach to tailoring his PS specifically to that - as opposed to a very spread-out personal statement, trying to tick all the boxes so that he could put foward a "toothless" application for Banking and Finance here, pure Econ course there, Economic History etc. at LSE and so on....

There are not many courses that are like Econ History so would try stay away from it unless you can 100% tailor your PS to that.

I would say UCL is one of the best regardless. Pure Econ is well-regarded & respected (not that degree matters), further exacerbated by the fact you're doing it at a target university (with a good track record in Econ).

Hope that helps - good luck with your applications.

 

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