How Your Students Can Explore More Countries with BridgeU

Rebecca Hambery Schools Content Writer

For many guidance counsellors, it’s important that students can explore a wide range of courses and institutions when it comes time to begin university applications.

But for this, students require a straightforward way to independently research their options.

The BridgeU platform helps students learn not only about universities in new locations but also how well their applications will perform there.

In this blog, we’ll take you through how your students can utilise different BridgeU features to explore and research a wider range of study-abroad destinations.

Set your students up for success with BridgeU’s Profile Builder

One of the first things your students will do when they log onto BridgeU is go through the Profile Builder. The Profile Builder allows students’ BridgeU experience to be tailored to their strengths and interests.

After filling in basic information, such as their age and where they’re currently living, students will have the opportunity to select which countries they’re interested in studying.

In addition to this, they’ll fill in their targeted grades and the subjects they would like to study at university. This will be helpful later on when they get to the Intelligent Matching portion of BridgeU, which we’ll discuss in more detail further down.

Last but not least, students are asked about their personal preferences, such as their preferences for class size, location, and lesson types.

Tip: Students can always go back and adjust their answers on the Profile Builder, so build some time into your guidance programme to allow students to play around with this feature.

Exploring realistic university choices with your students through BridgeU

When your students have completed their profiles, they’ll be prompted to explore universities that align with their interests. Their Intelligent Matching results will show courses available to them in the countries that they selected when filling out their profile.

Exploring universities and courses

Additionally, your students can use BridgeU’s Explore features to further facilitate their university research. Explore allows students to look through institutions based on popularity, country, or subject.

This feature can be especially helpful for your students, regardless of whether they’ve filled out the Profile Builder yet. They can easily research new locations by filtering by size, setting, region, and more!

With BridgeU currently providing students with information for over 140,000 courses around the world, there are many opportunities for them to discover new study-abroad destinations.

Through the Explore feature on BridgeU, students can access an overview of each university and course, which also displays their chance of acceptance and preference fit.

The preference fit differs from the Reach, Match, and Safety tool because, whilst the preference fit is built using insights from the Profile Builder, the Reach, Match, and Safety features focus on their chance of acceptance.

Reach, Match, and Safety

Students can use BridgeU’s Intelligent Matching feature to determine which universities are right for them based on their chance of acceptance, which is calculated using Reach, Match, and Safety.

But what do Reach, Match, and Safety mean?

Reach is when the student has less than a 35% chance of being accepted to the course or institution.
Match is for universities that are a good middle ground for a student, with typically a 35-75% chance of acceptance.
Safety refers to any institution or course where a student has at least a 75% chance of being accepted.

Tip: We recommend that students apply to a variety of Reach, Match, and Safety universities for the best results during application season. For example, applying to 2 Reach, 2 Match, and 2 Safety universities.

Researching study-abroad destinations with BridgeU

Once your students have found the courses and universities they’re interested in pursuing, it’s time for the fun part, researching!

BridgeU’s Resource Center provides your students with a range of resources to help them through university application processes all over the world. But if your students are currently exploring different countries to study in, we recommend pointing them towards our destination guides.

We understand the importance of fully preparing your students, so we have guides available on the platform for popular destinations. The guides cover everything from degree options to accommodations, tuition fees, and even the application process for popular destinations.

Once your student has decided on a destination, they can move on to more in-depth information dedicated to subjects, student life, applications, and more. The Resource Center is updated regularly, so make sure to encourage your students to check for new articles often while researching universities!

If you’d like a more in-depth look at how BridgeU can facilitate your student’s exploration of different universities, book a free demo below.