Planning Your Preference List
You’ve got an idea by now about what you want to do next year and you’ve hopefully found your dream course! So how do you work out the rest of your preference list?
Preference #1
Hopefully it goes without saying that the first preference that you put down should be the course you absolutely want to do the most. There’s no need to be “practical” here (there are 7 other preferences for that!) so put down the course that you really want to do, even if you think it’s out of reach. Having said that, try not to fall into the trap of putting Medicine or Law just because they’re prestigious and popular courses unless you really want to do them. If you’re putting Medicine first and the rest of your list has nothing to do with health science options, you might want to question whether that is actually the course you want to do.
There are a couple of important points that I want to make sure you understand at this point. Firstly, the university never finds out what number preference you listed their course. They won’t know that you put it second or third instead of first and decide to offer the place to someone else instead, so if you’ve been concerned about that, you don’t need to be.
However, you do need to be aware that you will only get one offer per round. The basic idea is that VTAC lets the tertiary institutions know who has applied for their courses, they decide who they want to make an offer to and send that information back to VTAC, but VTAC will only forward you the offer for the highest course on your preference list where you received an offer. So you could technically be given the green light for every course on your list, but in that case you would only actually be forwarded the offer for your first preference. So please make sure your first preference is the one you actually want to do the most.
Have a range of options
For the rest of your preference list, ideally you want to have similar courses to your dream course but with a range of lowest selection ranks from last year. This means that if you don’t get an offer for your first preference, you will still likely end up studying the same course at a different institution or a similar course that could either be a pathway to your dream course or help you to be qualified to work in a similar field.
Depending on your dream course, you might have lots of options for similar courses. For example, if you choose a broad course like a Bachelor of Commerce, you can easily get 7 similar courses to put on your preference list that likely have a similar lowest selection rank. If this is the case for you, I suggest you make a second list of courses and keep them in a drawer somewhere, so that if you don’t end up achieving the results you hoped, you have already got back up options that you’ve researched and are happy with.
Look at alternatives
Lastly, if you have chosen quite a broad degree, before you finish your preference list take a little bit of time to look at some alternative courses that are maybe more focused in on a specific area and that are similar to what you have as your first preference. Take a look at these blog posts to help you identify some other options you could look at:
You might find that one of the more specific courses is actually more interesting to you but you hadn’t considered it because you hadn’t heard of it or thought to look for something like that. And if not, then at least you know you’ve looked at all your options!
