University College London(UCL)

    After we've conducted the cross-reference study between the location of the best college in the UK and the famous tourist attractions last week, we're going to take a closer look at these three college located in London:
1.University College London
2.Imperial College London
3.King's College London
    Most of the information provided here are based on what I found on the two website, "the complete university guide" and "QS World University Rankings". If you're a international student, I highly recommend you to browse thoroughly the former website in your leisure time. The complete university guide provides extremely details about the school itself and some other extra but essential information about the area around the campus that a student would need; for example, info about student house hunting, crime hot spot near campus, the average living cost survey, etc. Most importantly, they offer totally free access to the website.

University College London

    UCL is founded in 1826, which makes it the 3rd oldest university in the UK. Situated in the heart of London, UCL is very near to the world's most important collections, including the British Library and the British Museum. Alongside world-leading departments across all of the arts and sciences, UCL also boasts a top-rated architecture school, and one of the UK’s best art schools, the Slade School of Art.  At undergraduate level, international students at UCL can expect to pay £14,750-19,500 per-year for most subjects (roughly US$22,500-30,000).

    Even though UCL could be the best choice for any student who wants to pursue a high academic achievement, I don't think UCL will be the right place for NCCU graduates. First of all, the subject strength of UCL is manly in the field of At and science, which are exactly the weakness of NCCU. If you want to find a top university that offer a leading management or business school, the Imperial College London would be a better choice for you. Secondly, the annual tuition fee is outrageously high for international students. This is a common phenomenon that happens in higher educations in UK or USA, however, compared to that of the local students', international students should be well-prepared to pay for their doubled tuition fee. Apart from these seemingly disadvantages, the location situation of UCL is a clear victory, students who are abundant of money will never regret their choice of UCL.

Cross Reference the Locations of Colleges with Tourist Attractions in UK and Europe

Referring to our outcome last week, now we are certain that London has the most convenience transport systems among the top four locations, which travelers should care most. However, we cannot conclude that London will be the best choice for "backpackholics" simply because the city surpass the others on one part. This week, by doing some cross reference research by overlapping the locations of the most recommended tourist attractions in UK with the location of London, the results might provide sufficient evidence to conclude that London is the right choice. The table below lists the top 10 must-go tourist attractions in the UK based on several tour-guide sites, www.squidoo.com, www.visitlondon.com and www.touropia.com.

Rank	Spot	Location
1	Stonehenge (a prehistoric stone circle)	Wiltshire
2	Tower Bridge	London
3	The British Museum	London
4	York Minster	Deangate, York
5	Tower of London	London
6	Big Ben	London
7	Palace of Westminster	London
8	Buckingham Palace	London
9	The London Eye	London
10	St. Paul's Cathedral	London

The result showed here might not be so surprising that tourists can fill their travel schedule full only by wandering around the city of London. Moreover, these top ranked spots are located closely to each other, and the London Underground has stations that transport backpackers to each of them in an convenience and economic way. If you have enough of the Great Britain's heritage and culture, you might want to expand your expedition to the whole Europe, then it will be perfect if you are fortunate enough to live in a city that has several international airports. Before that, let's take a look at another table that indicates the top 10 European travel destinations for 2013 based on an article written by Andy Murdock on Lonely Planet.

Rank	Spot	Location
1	Porto & Douro Valley	Portugal
2	Budapest	Hungary
3	Northern Iceland	Iceland
4	Cinque Terre	Italy
5	Moravia	Czech Republic
6	Bern	Switzerland
7	Marseille	France
8	Croatia	Croatia
9	Northern Ireland	Ireland
10	Copenhagen	Denmark

Apparently, it won't be a problem to book any ticket to go to these places from any international airport from London. Hopefully, this week's article do provide some more evidence to persuade you that choosing London as a base for backpacking and pursuit academic achievement will be a choice you won't regret.

The Location Challenge.

    Referring back to last week, we've went through a couple of simple steps and already chosen 8 universities which rank within top 10 out of total 800 schools on the QS World University Rankings list. This week I'll show you even more details about these schools to offer more references which might greatly help while making choices. Before we start, I decided to cross out the two Swiss Universities due to the language problem. French and German was the official language in Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, respectfully. The purpose of the study trip do not include learning or improving European language proficiency, furthermore, it could be a serious problem if students went to those schools without taking any local language lessons in advance. By doing so, now we have only 6 options on our list, and ALL of them are located in English speaking country,  the United Kingdom. Allow me to remind you again what we have here in the list below.

Rank	University	Location of Main Campus
3	University of Cambridge	Cambridge, UK
4	University College London	London, UK
5	Imperial College London	London, UK
6	University of Oxford	Oxford, UK
17	University of Edinburgh	Edinburgh, UK
19	King's College London	London, UK

    Apparently, these schools are mostly at the same level, any admission letter from these schools could literally bring you on the top of the world. Therefore, we will come back later to discuss about the featuring departments of each . Let's first focus on the locations and do some analysis. From the list above, we have 4 different locations of main campus to decide, which are Cambridge, London, Oxford and Edinburgh. 

Transport	London	Cambridge	Oxford	Edinburgh
Airports	6	1 (Cambridge Airport)	1 (London Oxford Airport)	1 (Edinburgh Airport)
Bus Routes	More than 700	the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway	- 280 - 5 park and ride sites with bus links. - Oxford to London coach route.	Lothian Buses
Metro system	The London Underground, serves 270 stations.	N/A	N/A	Edinburgh Trams(scheduled to open by May 2014)
Railway Stations	- London Waterloo station. - The Euro Star.	Cambridge railway station.	Oxford railway station.	Waverley Station.
Source: Wikipedia

It's totally not surprising that the capital city London won this round while comparing with the other 3 components on the topic of transport convenience. With the charts above, hopefully you can make your own decision within 15 minutes! See you next week.