<p>Ok, DrGoogle, that is not true. You don’t have to pay both tuitions. The programs are completely separate. By doing this program you’re taking a leave of absence from your home university, and thus have no affiliation with them during the year and therefore don’t have to pay home tuition. The only costs and fees you have to pay are the fees LSE charges you, which they intentionally price as similar to universities in the US to make this program an attractive option. If they were charging an extra $30,000 beyond US tuition absolutely no one would go on the program.</p>
<p>So this past week I went to LSE and was able to talk with an admissions director in person, and was able to ask him questions about the course. It’s quite comprehensive and I hope this assuages some questions you might have.</p>
<p>Admissions statistics:
“It’s actually probably not as [hard to get in] as you might think. The reason is that in terms of general course admissions, a lot of our applications are self-selecting because a lot of applicants who want to come on the general course basically inquire directly with our office first. And so we’re able to filter out a lot of those students who may not be suitable for the course. … We usually receive about 600 applications and we’ll have about 300 to 350 places on the course.” But he said that since they deal with a lot of applications separately that there’s still a strong element of competition."</p>
<p>Q: What are you looking for in an application?
“First and foremost, academic merit. Your grades are very important. Also as part of your application you have to submit a personal statement and academic references, and essentially we want to know why you want to come study on the general course, what your academic interests and goals are, and if you’ve done any extracurricular type of activity to sort of flesh out your character a bit. And the academic reference in terms of third party opinion. So typically if a student satisfies those broad criteria then usually an offer is made. The main thing you want to think about is to have a look at the courses we offer. We offer most of the undergraduate courses that we have in our repertoire, but there are some that are not available. [And it changes between years as well]. And you have to keep in mind that we do run on a rolling admissions basis, so we’ll open the online application in January. And then once all the places have been taken, that’s when we’ll close the application. Usually it’s a good few months before we’ll actually cut the cycle off, so it’s not a huge rush to get it in.”</p>
<p>Q: I’m looking to apply for economics, what sort of classes are you looking for?
“It depends what courses you want to take. A lot of the courses have pre requisites, so the best thing to check is actually our website. Each course has a kind of summary sheet and that will tell you the course content, and will tell you the requisites as well. Reading these is the best way to find out how challenging a course will be compared to what you’ve already done. A lot of our concept courses can be challenging. Those are our flagship courses so they have to be rigorous. There’s research you can do to inform yourself about what courses you think will be best for you. The other thing is you submit your kind of course options with your application but you can also change your courses once you get at the school, so if you find within the first four weeks that the economics course you are taking is too difficult or not difficult enough then you can apply to change to another course. If you’re taking anything quantitative you need a 3.5/4.0 gpa minimum”.</p>
<p>Q: I’ve read that the number of contact hours is less. Can you expand on that a bit?
“The way it works at LSE, most students take four courses for the year. And they usually run the full academic year. We’ve got courses called half-term courses which are sort of like half year courses, in which case you take two, but for the most part students take four full-year courses. In total you have about 12 to 15 contact hours a week, which includes lectures and classrooms. A lot of the study at LSE is self-directed and self-motivated, which is a little bit different from institutions especially in the US where you get quite a few contact hours. Here we want you to sort of develop your own way of thinking and learning. And the courses demand a lot of independent thought.”</p>
<p>Q: Is it often more application based during the lectures and you’re expected to teach yourself the theory or how does that work?
“It’s a bit of a mix. You’d have to go course by course, and that’s another thing that you can actually find out through the department and course websites or by contacting the department. It is a bit of a culture shift and in the first month or two a lot of our general course students find it can be quite challenging but they do adapt. And being exposed to that difference in the way you think, usually we get pretty good feedback from students as to how they’ve developed over the year.”</p>
<p>Q: Coming from UCLA, some core classes are huge. On average how big are the classes?
“So the way it works is, your lectures, especially for core classes, they tend to be big, so you could have 300, 400 students. But for each of these lectures you get broken down into classes, and the classes are much smaller, they’re about 15 students. So there you have more intimate discussion with your tutors, talking about what has been covered in the lectures, etc. Some courses will be a lot smaller because they’re optional courses within departments, and tend to be a lot smaller than the core courses everyone has to take. So you might have lectures that have maybe 100 students, it just depends on the course selection. But all courses do have classes in addition to lectures. The lectures all have office hours as well, so you can talk with the professors about the material.” He also said that tutors conducting the classes were usually graduate students within the department."</p>
<p>Q) Do most general course students choose to take mainly core courses or mainly elective courses here?
“It’s a mix, a lot of it depends on what they need to complete their programs back home, because most of our students of course will take credit back home. And so it depends what they’ve already done and what they still need to do. And so I would say that the core courses tend to be more popular. They have similar curriculums and they can get those credits transferred more easily. With the options courses sometimes it takes a bit more effort to get the courses recognized by their home institutions.”</p>
<p>Q: Do you usually have difficulties at all getting colleges to accept credit?
“Not typically. It depends on the courses you have selected a lot, and we do encourage our students to have discussions with their home institution before they take the course. We don’t actually involve ourselves in that particular process. It’s all completely at the discretion of the home institution. We sort of assist in terms of providing details to help them make their decisions but in terms of influencing the actual decisions we don’t have a say. But we get 350 students, a lot of them from American institutions and we typically can resolve most issues that arise.”</p>