To think I can apply for post grad med school with a 2.2 in languages from 15 years ago?

[Changednameadviceneededxx]

Please be nice to me 🙈

Name changed but I'm a mumsnet lover.

I've been thinking about studying medicine. Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor. But I just never thought it possible.

I've got an english language degree and by the time i apply, would (fingers crossed) have a c2 cert in French.

But i only got a 2.2 😔, and I haven't worked since a corporate grad job that I did after uni, and haven't worked for close to a decade due to raising dc.

I'm a single mum so would study around raiding dc. I can't currently get work experience whilst I raise them, but would be able to study.

How crazy am I to think that a med school, somewhere in London, would accept me, with these circumstances.

I don't have science a levels either, just languages.

Tia x

Agree with PP, looking at being an operating department practitioner. Shorter training and you get to work in operating theatre, and there is some funding available whilst you study.

@Changednameadviceneededxx Have you looked at being an operating department practitioner? That would get you in the theatre. I did an access course many years ago to get into physio (in the end I found my science just wasn’t strong enough - I didn’t get what i needed at a level hence being on the access course needed a B and got a C and couldn’t get through 3years of it) but I wish I had one persevered as I regret not getting into healthcare. However we got an insight into all the allied health courses and I think being an ODP sounded fascinating. Have a look into it, might be something you would be interested in, as you assist surgeons and are involved in pre and post op etc.

Medicene seems extremely unlikely with your qualifications and work history.

Why not consider nursing, midwifery, paramedic etc?

30 years ago my friends sister did a postgraduate medical degree with an English undergraduate. However it was a specific scheme to get people into GP training who’d had some life experience. She is still a GP now.

@CautiousLurker01 Can I suggest you start your own thread? I wouldn’t recommend GEM as a route as it is so much more competitive to get a place.

When you say your DS had a mishap with GCSEs, do you mean he wasn’t able to take the A level subjects he needs to get into med school? If he just didn’t get great grades, he could still apply to schools that don’t use GCSEs to select candidates for interview. Alternatively, he might have a better chance applying post A level with grades in hand and a gap year working as an HCA.

If he is really passionate about medicine, I would explore all the other alternative routes first before pinning his hopes on GEM.

I don’t know enough about it to offer advice like others say I suspect it’ll be a lot of work & a big commitment but if it’s what you really want to do, I suspect it’s not impossible. There’s someone I follow on Instagram who is doing this, she’s now in med school - hannahfgale - she is an influencer so I would guess she makes money/funds it via that, but she also has 2 kids & has followed a less conventional path so might be worth looking at - good luck!

I would carefully look into Operating Department Practice and Speech and Language Therapy, they both sound like they could be possible.
Speech and language therapy is very varied, and some therapists work in very “medical” settings, including things like post-surgical cancer treatment and neurosurgery, radiology, NICU… Although it’s in a hospital setting, it’s much less likely to involve shift work than medicine or nursing.

For allied health degrees, you CAN still get a student loan for an undergrad course, even if you already have a different degree. I don’t know if medicine has different rules.
You also get an NHS bursary, and a bursary towards childcare costs if your children are under, I think 16.

Even if graduate medicine is your ultimate dream, working in one of these areas could be a first step. You’d get a relevant degree, and have relevant experience if you did decide to apply for medicine later on.

Some ODP degrees include a foundation year for people without recent experience of study, which might be another alternative to an access course.
Usually you need evidence of recent (ie within 5 years) study or relevant recent experience.

I'm a staff grade anaesthetist - there's an awful lot of us in our late 40s/50s still covering rotas.

Not to be harsh OP but there is no way. Medicine is a very competitive course and all applicants will have excellent exam scores in the relevant sciences and often maths too.

If you really want to do this then you need to start with the relevant science A-Levels and go from there. There is no shortcut.

I think the entry requirements could be managed with access courses etc if you are determined but if you talk to anyone who has done it with children I would ask carefully what their childcare arrangements are. The parent doctor's I know can only make it work with heavy grandparent involvement (eg one chose a school nearer the grandparents so grandparents could do school runs...). Although their children are younger than yours would be.
Are your children generally quite robust and happy to go to wraparound/holiday care? One of mine is and one of mine would really struggle to cope.
Sorry to sound negative but it doesn't sound realistic if you couldn't manage a full time job.
I'm really sorry about your experiences at uni previously. I'm sorry if this is an unhelpful question, but is it possible that some of your feelings around your degree and your feeling of needing to make up for it in some way/change direction are linked to everything else that was going on in your life at the time? Just ignore if that's not a helpful comment. It sounds like you did well to actually graduate at all in the circumstances.
Wishing you all the best whatever you decide to do.

How do you find that Greybeardy ? I guess if you have done it for a longtime maybe it is second nature ? By the end of my training I didn't need to think too much on a night shift. TBF covering 2nd on call in anaesthetics is different from being the medical 1st on in A&E on your feet all night or the peadiatric doctor attending every complicated labour ward delivery.....

Hi OP, Would you consider doing some self-study A levels, as a start?

You can do them entirely from home through an online school like Pembrokeshire College Online. We are using the school for our DC and they are very good.

You can do the exams as a private candidate at an exam centre like Tutors and Exams.

Alternatively, you could maybe get a job as a translator in your local GP practice or hospital if you are good at languages. That would be incredibly useful and you would get to think about all the medical stuff and talk to patients.

Why do you need to wait until they are at uni?

High school is plenty old enough to be letting yourself in from school.

A medical degree is way more than "normal" studying. When you reach the clinical years of your degree, you will need to be on the wards from, potentially, 8am to 5pm. And in hospitals all over London and beyond. Take a look at the placement map for St G and you'll see where you are likely to need to travel by 8am.

Even the the early, academic years are very full on, with teaching likely to take place from 8.00 to 6pm.

You won't necessarily have a standard pattern either, so you'll need lots of ad hoc childcare.

It's really, really hard to manage around raising kids, unless you can find a PT course.

If this is a dream of yours, your best bet is to talk to a careers advisor at your local college with a view to taking an access course now. Look at getting relevant experience work experience too. This could be working as an HCA or carer (paid) or volunteering. You will NEED relevant work experience to pass the interview let alone the paper screening.

Good luck!

I’ve not read everyone’s responses so apologies if this has been suggested already. But from what you’ve said I would really recommend doing a biology or chemistry degree with the OU. I did a maths degree with them for fun when I had my two babies as I too loved studying (I had a 2:1 undergrad in law from a Russell group uni but always loved maths and wished I had studied maths). I think that’s much more the idea you had in your head of studying. I think it would allow you to get something out of your system (the regret over your original degree) but also; if medicine is still in your head at the end of that - you’ll be in a much stronger position.

Be aware that newly qualified doctors (post F2) are really struggling to find work.

Unless the Government changes its mind and applies some form of Resident Market Labour Test for entry level jobs, new doctors are facing huge international competition with often several hundred applications for quite ordinary jobs. This year over half the specialist training places went to doctors who qualified outside the UK, and DD only knows one of her F2 peers across her whole deanery who has a training place (for GP.)

So at the end of eight years there is nothing. Leave the profession, move to Australia or try to survive on short term locum (NHS bank) work, perhaps supplementing it with another zero hours job.

And expect, either for Foundation (which is now allocated randomly rather than by merit) or if you can find work, to have to relocate to wherever the opportunities are.

On the positive side, this approach means that if you can't find a medical school place in the UK and choose to study overseas you are not at a disadvantage should you then chose to return to the UK. Indeed some overseas medical schools are much more proactive in helping prepare their graduates for the UK job market than UK medical schools.

In a DGH it can be flipping hard work (especially if your only other onsite anaesthetist is a CT1 just on the rota)! We're also at the tricky deliveries (because if the obstetricians can't get them out in the room we're going to theatre... and even if they can get them out we're often heading to theatre), and in resus, and in theatre and on ICU and occasionally on the paediatric ward, and at the cardiac arrests/trauma/medical emergency calls, and putting cannulas in because fewer people seem to be able to, and doing bloods (ditto!). Switching from day to night/working long days in a row does get harder in middle-age, but that's not the reason I'm done. Having to work on my days off, getting no SPA time (but still having to do the work), having career development obstructed, getting completely ignored because only the consultants and the resident doctors are valued... those are the main difficulties.

There are more places than that in London where you can study. I don't realistically think it will be possible for you, having recently done a lot of research about medicine applications, but there are more places than St Georges

Indeed doctors such as yourself are the backbone of the NHS we should be treating you decently, I'd like to think our trust does but one only really knows about one's own department.

Realistically, no. Not yet. You would need access course, re do science a levels ect.

being a med student/ junior doctor I think really is a young persons game. We are talking very long shifts, nights, on your feet the whole time. Have you watched the first series of greys anatomy?

perhaps spending some time with a career coach to really pin down what it is you are looking for in a career?

2:1 is required at graduate entry in a related subject.
There are lists of acceptable degrees of which yours isn’t one OP

Then there are Alevel requirements as well eg biology, chemistry type subjects.

If you have or get a Masters, a pass is all you need you may have a better chance but some sort of science at A levels will give you the leg up you’ll need.

Look at MedStudentLink for things you can do to increase your chances but generally a 2:1 in a related subject is the minimum for this highly sort after career path

I would get some work as an HCA to see if you like working in the NHS and with patients. I also guarantee you won’t know what nursing actually is.

Stepping back from your initial question of whether you can apply with your current qualifications, I strongly encourage you to consider why you would like to be a doctor. Because it's obviously not just about studying medicine, it's about the career itself. Postgraduate medical training is incredibly tough: juggling long shifts, constantly moving posts, the emotional drain of the job, perhaps not knowing where you'll be living or what your rota will be until a few weeks or perhaps days before a job starts. And at the same time as this, doing postgrad exams and polishing your CV to be competitive for the next stage of training applications. It's really not for the faint of heart.

If you were to apply (and with a good enough score in GAMSAT, there may just be places that would consider you with a 2:2 in a non-science degree, but I don't know where), this is something that you will be asked about, along with why you think you will make a good doctor. You would be expected to have explored the career in some way, not only through relevant work experience, and have considered what you have learned from it about medicine, but also ideally have spoken to doctors about the realities of life in medicine.

I went to medical school as a graduate nearly 20 years ago now, when I was 33, with a loosely science based degree. I'm now a consultant, and I am involved in medical school admissions and teaching for a graduate entry med school course, which only takes students who have a 2:1 or above. Some of our students have humanities degrees, and not all are straight from their undergrad degrees. The above is what would be expected from them, plus a stellar performance at interview.

Although I love my job, I don't think I'd do it again if I was applying now. Unemployed doctors post-Foundation training isn't something I thought I'd ever see, it's very competitive to get into specialty training programmes and locum jobs (how many of my peers spent their post-Foundation years if they didn't go straight into training) are hard to come by. The NHS is also in a terrible state.

Many years ago medicine was romantic. Junior doctors were worked to the bone but they were paid well, did really cool things, there was real camaraderie and no barriers to career progression.

It’s not like that anymore. I really can’t stress that enough. Being a junior doctor is a hoop jumping slog where you often feel like little more than a column on a spreadsheet. There are barriers at every stage of progression, which are getting worse year on year.

I would not consider medicine now as a career as an 18 year old, let alone as a graduate I’m presuming is well into their 30s if not their 40s.

In DDs last F2 rotation only 8 out of 16 training posts in the Deanery were filled. so they were short a significant number of Registrars. Consultants were routinely on call one night in four.

It was a speciality with 8 years training so those with training numbers were reluctant to commit to an unpopular, hard to recruit, region. Instead they will hang on till something "better" comes along, or else will transfer out midway through, leaving the remaining pathway vacant. Specialist numbers were so low that it was a two year wait for an urgent referral, despite prompt treatment making a huge difference, and eight years for a non urgent one. DD wound up with a couple of lovely personal letters from her consultants saying she would make a great clinician and encouraging her to stick with it. The rules do not allow them to hire her, so instead one of the consultants is approaching hospitals/doctors in Australia that they know, and suggesting they give her a job. The hope is that one day things will be more sensible and she can go back.

They are, however, allowed to hire Physicians Associates. Better pay, regular hours, more training time, less responsibility. This is what OP should do.

Though DD had very much wanted to build her career in that part of the country, the sticking plaster that was dedicated staff, is not longer working. She is starting to see advantage in experiencing medicine somewhere that is not in crisis. In her current rotation 50% of F2s are MIA. Stress, essentially, though not helped by the lack of recognition and career prospects. She recently saw a patient who has been waiting eight years for surgery on a huge disabling hernia. She can't offer him anything other than sympathy. It is not why she signed up to a medical career.

Look at Physician Associate careers. The Government recently announced they are expanding the number of training places. Even if you have to do a first, sciencey, degree it will be quicker. (Things like geography or sports science will do fo0r some places, though you might as well do something relevant.) Or other HCP careers.