Sorry, another medicine question! Personal experience please.

[Mindgone]

DS is stuck for a fourth choice, here are his stats:
GCSE. 8A* 3A
AS. AAAB in maths, chemistry, biology and psychology
UKCAT 725 SJBand 1

He doesn't fancy PBL, London, or the BMAT unis.

I was just wondering, bearing all this in mind, where others' DCs have been happy? Any personal experience and/or advice would be gratefully received. Thanks.

BMAT causing considerable pain and stress in this house.... She has a good UKCAT score so I'm wondering about the wisdom of taking on another entrance test, especially one that seems so impossible! Very little school work being done at the moment....

No revision for bmat at all here, DS seems to think carrying the book around will magically help the knowledge seep in. He thinks the offers will flood in any day now. I think it will be a rude awakening for him .

Carriemac, I think that if he puts it under his pillow at night, that will help him to absorb the information from it!

” Early interviews are dished out like sweets in my experience. . .”

“Like sweets” you say?

Early Medicine interviews dished out like sweets?

Considering a straight 60% of any annual medicine cohort don’t even get a look-in with 4 straight rejections, never mind an early interview, I find the above remark pretty arrogant. If anything, this is pretty disrespectful to the current crop of parents and kids who are stressed no end presently waiting and agonising to hear news of their application. Yes, just ‘news’ and not necessarily interviews.

And what’s more, many of these said parents and kids will unfortunately be kept waiting and agonising for the next 6 months till April with nothing guaranteed. . .

The Birmingham website you have to log in to in order to book an interview date has been so temperamental. Down earlier and by the time it worked again all the advertised slots had gone...

Ds1 also has a Birmingham interview Decorhate - v pleased for him. At the moment BMAT seems to have rather eclipsed everything else. Will be glad when that's out of the way!

That's great Queenie. Birmingham seem to be one of the quickest to start offering interviews. Did your DS have any problems with the website?

I don't think so Decorhate, otherwise I think he'd have been complaining! The offer came through a while ago and he very quickly booked a slot - i/v on 26/11!

peteneras yes early interviews are dished out liberally to those with strong grades. That's how it is, nothing arrogant at all, just fact. That's not to say those interviewees will get offers, but they will get first call up. It would be rather odd if were any other way.

Once the interviewing season gets under way the strong candidates - those identified as having a real aptitude for the job, which extends well beyond grades - will get several offers and the weaker applicants will have perhaps one. Weak applicants will get none.

Of course it's a stressful time for med school applicants but no more stressful than for any other applicant chasing a place a uni for a course he or she really wants. There's no reason for medics to be more 'agonised' than anyone else. Indeed they need to be resilient, so perhaps anyone 'agonised' should think twice about the direction in which they hope to be heading. I think sometimes people are too precious about med/ vet applications. They're just the same as any other, tbh.

at uni

thats not true Molio, strong grades do not necessarily get you an interview and med/vet is much more competitive than most other Uni courses.

Carriemac in my experience those with eleven or twelve A* at GCSE definitely do get the earliest interviews. Possibly not if there's something else glaringly wrong with their application, but it's true on the whole.

I know very well how competitive medicine is but it's all relative and I don't see why med school applicants (and their parents) should be treated as having a worse time than anyone else who's set on a particular course. The waiting game is bad for everyone, not just medics.

Do you have a dc applying to read medicine mollo, or one already doing so? Sorry if I've missed that info earlier in this thread. Where have they appled / are they studying?
Ds1 has applied to Cambridge, Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield. .. only heard from Birmingham to date.

Molio the main difference is that almost all medical schools interview. So it does add an extra hurdle. I think my dd is feeling very envious of her friends who have several offers already, some unconditional, knowing that she may not get a single one even though are grades are better.

Speaking as a patient, I would be very wary of any medical school that doesn't interview! I think I would also prefer it if our medical training was more like the US - first you do a degree in any old subject, just making sure that you get to the relevant standard in the core areas. Then you do medical training as a postgrad. Must be easier to screen out the wholly unsuitable people if they're all 21+ rather than 17/18.

In my experience early interviews are not dished out like sweets at all, my experience comes from having one dc at uni reading medicine (Bristol, second year), and from teaching A level biology at a high performing school that gets several students into med school every year.
Even our highest calibre students do not automatically get 4 interviews, and some med schools do not start interviewing until December at the earliest. Some others do several rounds of paper shifting and no applicants will have been called for interview yet.
Please do not stress the parents of dc currently part way through the application process by suggesting that anyone "good" will get early interviews.
However the converse can be true for some med schools, whilst Newcastle will complete all interviews before letting you know if you have a place, Bristol for example will offer some students places almost immediately following interview, ( my lucky dc had an offer from them before the week was out) many others will still get offers from them, but not unitl the end of the interview cycle in March.
Two years ago the brightest cohort i have ever taught were collectively in possession of only one offer by January, in the end in all the would be medics had places at great unis such as Newcastle.

Molio, this is my second dc going through UCAS and it is much more stressful this time round with medicine even though first dc was applying for a very competitive course as well. By this time my first dc had two offers whereas dd is doing well to have an interview at least. Without wishing at all to play down the stress of waiting for other courses we are finding medicine is different. Dd has barely stopped since Easter, with AS exams then summer UKCAT and now BMAT. She is resilient and coping well on the whole and very aware of the stats on applications.

Queenie, those choices are the same as my dd.

Of course applying for medicine/vey med is different! Which other course has almost all applicants predicted at least 3As, and have a 60% of getting no offers at all?! I am interested to know if anyone knows of such a subject!

It's stressful because, really, there is no "plan B" in applicants" minds if all you want to do is medicine. So it's seen as very much all or nothing with no second best.

Been through it with DS four years ago and I feel your pain! He got one conditional offer which came in March after an interview in February. He got his conditions and got in and is happy. What follows, though, is years upon years of hard graft and study and different kinds of pressure.

Agree with PP that the US model makes a lot of sense but it is financially crippling. Doubt if we will ever see it here.

QueenQueenie DS1 is in his final year at Oxford. He applied to Birmingham, Bristol and Imperial as well.

Hobnob I should have qualified my comment, which of course relates only to the med schools which start the interviewing process early. As you say, many don't. So these early interviews will depend wholly on which unis are on the ucas form. My comment was a response to a poster who implied an early offer was 'special' or indicative of overall success, which it isn't. An early interview is likely to simply be a reflection of the first crude sift which flags up those with very high grades and there's a great deal more to the process than that. In that sense, the point was to re-assure, not stress!

Oyster I'm currently on my sixth vicarious round of the ucas process and I don't see much difference tbh, but I'm not sure if that's fortunate or not!
pharmgirl is right about the need to graft; one thing about DS is that he has the capacity to get the work done and do lots of other stuff too and barely get stressed. I think he was able to communicate that at interview, which is very likely the key to his getting a number of offers; probably far more important than grades. That said, it's partly luck, or constitution. Arrogance in med school interviews is going to be a killer, but being too stressy is too.

Molio, I find most of your postings at MN nothing but a cleverly veiled stealth boast designed to indirectly tell us how very clever your DS is. Who was it who said you can fool most of the people all the time but you can’t fool all the people all the time? All within a few postings I see you’re already contradicting yourself:

”Everyone applying has good grades, but the strong ones are those who are able to tick the other boxes too.”

So let’s just get this clear. By definition, everyone will get an early interview because “everyone applying has good grades” according to you.

Next you said, ”yes early interviews are dished out liberally to those with strong grades.”

And then, suddenly, there’s the group “with strong grades” who’d receive the early interviews being liberally dished out. Never mind about offers at this stage, we’re still talking about getting interviews.

So, the question is, which is which - is everyone applying has good grades or is there another group with strong grades? And how do you define ‘a good grade’ and ‘a strong grade’?

What I’ve deducted from your postings is that med admissions tutors are all sleeping on their jobs. First off, send them interview letters, all 85,000 of them - dish them out like sweets - (they all have good/strong grades). We only sort out the wheat from the chaff when they attend interview.

Of course, nothing of that sort is true. Medical professionals are extremely busy people. You can’t even see your doctor even when you’re half-dead. Come back in 3 weeks time, please!

You then go on to talk about ‘arrogance in med school interviews’, Molio. Now hold on, are we talking about a bunch of well-bred idiots coming up to med school admissions tutors’ offices to flaunt their arrogance - something perhaps they’ve worked their guts out for in the last 7 or 8 years just for this moment, or are we talking about a bunch of kids with straight A*s coming for interview? What I’m getting at is, arrogance at med school interviews don’t exist.

And do you honestly believe a UCAS med application in no different to any other application? This is why I call your postings arrogant. It’s another slap on the faces of current parents and their kids.

Various posters have indicated rightly they are different and I’m suggesting to you they are hugely different. In addition to what has already been said:

• You have less time to prepare because your closing date is mid-October and not January

• You sit a tough pre-entry test or two - many other degree courses don’t

• You will cost the government a huge sum of money to support you, appx. £275,000

• Med school places are limited by the government

• You can’t open up a make-shift laboratory or teaching hospital like you do for an extra History, Geography, Economics, etc. class

• Your course/training takes (almost) twice as long

• You are more likely to be thrown out at any time during the course if you don’t perform

”My comment was a response to a poster who implied an early offer was 'special' or indicative of overall success, which it isn't.”

Please show me where this implication an early offer was 'special' or indicative of overall success, Molio. I rather suggest you jumped on the opportunity to stealthily boast of your son’s achievements.

DS got an interview for Birmingham !

Yay! Well done Carriemac"s ds.