Earlier this week, the results of the 2014 National Student Survey were released to the public. As in previous years, Surrey has done very well, both as an institution (joint 8th nationally) and for Politics (4th nationally, with 97% satisfaction).

Coupled to our excellent record with graduate employment (100% in 2014) and our 6th in the Guardian’s league tables, we’re pretty chuffed.

At the same time, we also know that these metrics don’t tell you everything about what it’s like to be a student here. If nothing else, all this data relates to students who are leaving or have left the Department, rather than about you, as an individual.

This is true for all programmes at all universities, which is one of the reasons why we spend so much time trying to help prospective students experience us first-hand, so they can make an informed choice.

It’s why we run lots of open days before you make your choice, and then invite all applicants to a full day with us, so you can meet the staff and the students and get a real feel for what we’re like. It’s also why we spend a lot of time online – with this blog and our Facebook and Twitter feeds – talking about our research and current events and generally interacting with people. the more you know about a place, the better informed you’ll be when it comes to making a decision.

That’s particularly important when it comes to Clearing.

Today might be the day when you get your A-Level results confirmed and you know you’re joining us: we’re really looking forward to that, to carry on the conversations we’ve started with so many of you when you’ve come to visit us before. It’s a great time to be studying politics, in all its forms, and your input to our debates is going to be vital, both in the classroom and outside.

But for some of you, it might be that today is about finding a new place to study. The University’s Clearing service should be your first port of call, to see what’s available, but you might well want to look around what we have elsewhere online, to see if the fit’s right for you. From our Departmental homepage, you can find links to all the different things we do.

The students who do come here seem to like being here and we get consistently good ratings from them. Likewise, we spend time with all our students, trying to help them to get the very most out of their time studying with us. We’ve got a great group of people here, who really put a huge amount of time and effort into supporting students. Couple that to a professional or study placement year that’s more popular than ever before and we like to think we’ve got something worth sharing.

However, much of what makes us are our students: if you think you would like to join them, then we’d love to hear from you.