Medicine Applications 2017

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As UKCAT season is in full swing and I can't find a thread anywhere else I thought I'd start this off. This is for parents of children looking to apply for Medicine at University with courses starting in 2017. UCAS application is only a couple of months away. It is hard to watch our kids put themselves through so much to work in the hardest profession imaginable and I thought it might be useful to start some sort of discussion here.

He will need to decide soon so that he can fit his UKCAT in! With those results he will get offered for his first choice for chemistry so if he still wants medicine why not give it another crack?

My advice would be to consider Dentistry rather than medicine (having a Dentist and a Medical Dr as DCs). Much, much better work/life balance (Dr DC agrees).

Ive been saying that to him for over a year! Much more sociable hours and less hassle, it seems to me.

I suggest he books his UKCAT test date now. Like tonight. Some test centres are now fully booked.

Funnily enough, just as you wrote that he rang to say he's doing it this week. But I still think he's leaning away from medicine. I expect that he will be more able to decide properly when he gets the results of his UKCAT. He goes to Africa for a month the following day!

So he wont have much chance to put a new application in. I think he's A levels show his academic credibility, it's the rest of the form that might need changing from last year. No chance of applying for dentistry this year if he hasn't done any dental work experience I wouldn't have thought.

I'm confused. How can he sit the UKCAT this week, go away at the weekend for 2 months and return late October to reapply when the closing date is 15 October ?

And he can't use work experience done last year for medicine to apply for dentistry .

TBH I don't think medicine is the right career for someone who is dithering, you need to be a bit more committed. And he woudl just be wasting spaces on his UCAS form which he could use for courses he actually might want to do.

That way he mas more time to research courses and universities that appeal to him.

He's sitting his UKCAT on Tuesday, going away the next day for a month, coming back to apply at the start of October, possibly. Going back again afterwards. He isn't applying for dentistry, he has never wanted to, it was me saying I wished he would as its an easier career!

I think he's allowed a dither. Last year was tough for him, getting nothing but rejections, while all his friends were accepted. He's worked really hard and been really focused on medicine for three years, very committed. It was after the rejections he dithered, his results picked him back up a bit. He will find out the results of the UKCAT and if they're very good he will do medicine, if not I think he will do pure chemistry.

Tbh, I think he's in a better position now with grades in hand. If he can organise some more work experience even better. He could put 4 medicine choices down and later on add the 5th non- medicine choice once he has had chance to investigate other possibilities further. If he didn't get interviews it would be worth reviewing his PS again thoroughly too.

Thank you. He's doing dome voluntary work in Africa in a school for a month.

I think this UKCAT result will tell him a lot. I do worry about his PS a bit, whether it wasn't good enough, or whether it was last year's results that affected his lack of interviews.

My son had friends who didn't get any offers either 😔 despite A* predicted, difficult to get everything right including a 140 word ps!
He was lucky and got 1 offer which he missed by 3 ums so starting the process again this year.
Any advice on how to compile his ps this year would be much appreciated!

Honeyroar - how did he get on with his UKCAT?

I guess he's off on his trip today - I hope he has a great time .

A wishes - my DD is also working on her PS and finding it hard because she struggles with having to write about herself. Her first draft is all about things so noticed during her work experience - all good observations but nothing about her!

She's going to workshop on PS today after school - maybe your sons school or another local school runs something similar ?

My daughter too is struggling with her PS, all the phrases she shouldn't use are all the ones she wants to use. Any advice to give her would be useful!

One tip DD was given was to use ABC

Activity - what did you do
Benefit - what knowledge or skills did you gain from it
Course - link it in some way to the course they are applying for

Also dont just describe their work experience or EC activities, analyse them .

In case it is useful I thought I would gather our experience last year in one place.

It was a pretty difficult time. DD had had a serious accident and DH was very ill, so the big challenge was to get the application in by the deadline. No chance to visit anywhere, a so-so UKCAT score and DD needing to use the half term to catch her breath rather than revise for BMAT.

1. Choice. I ended up preparing a huge spreadsheet with columns on all the variables that seemed to matter. This was useful once we had filtered out those Universities whose requirements she did not meet (BMAT and high UKCAT), and those Universities who did not meet her "requirements" (No PBL, City location with the medical school close to the University) there were three probables and two possibles.

1. PS. The school had an early deadline for the first draft, which given the other things going was extrememly tight. I helped by preparing a list of things she had done outside school which the school might not be aware of. I also downloaded PS advice from the selected medical schools (important given they score PSs to make sure you tick each and every box as best you can), and other general advice. DD then worked with the school to identify the most relevent experience and put it together in an ABC sort of way. She found the guiidance in www.amazon.co.uk/Getting-into-Medical-School-Entry/dp/1911067052 very useful.

1. Tactics. She decided to treat the application as a two year process, and not put down a fifth choice. If she had not suceeded, and had the right results, she would have tried again taking BMAT and a couple where applicant numbers were lower. There is an advantage in not having a fifth choice as these give a (very small) change of being approached by medical schools late in the day or applying through clearing. We also noticed that the "medic fall-back" she was most interested in (Bio-medical engineering at Imperial) was willing to accept applications through till June, so there was no rush. Starting out by seeing it a a two year process, and seeing a gap year as a positive opportunitiy, helped keep the pressure down a bit.

1. Other Plan Bs. One was to apply to the Republic of Ireland. However there are others, both inside the EU (focus on those schools with a good track record) or places like Malaysia with clinical in Nottingham.

1. Was medicine the right choice. DC applying to medicine have spent two or three years leaping hurdles. Once the goal is achieved it is natural to waver. A wise Doctor friend suggested it is easier to leave medicine than to get into it. I think DD will make a good doctor, a view confirmed by career advice she received in Yr 11. Her current Plan B, if she hates it. is to intercalate as a way of moving towards a speciality.

1. Interviews and offers. One advantage of applying to Oxbridge is that you hear pretty early. DD is dyslexic and SEN interviews take place at the end of the cycle so she had not heard anything when all her friends had places. Each interview especially MMIs, where if you fail one station you may be out, are a bit of a lottery. It is perfectly possible to have great predictions and aptitude tests and not get a place. It is important for DC to hb sensitive to school peers, and indeed for equally posters here to be the same. The waiting is awful.

DD ended up with offers from her two top choices. Presumably because she and they were a fit. We had some wonderful help from MNetters. DD is taking a gap year to help catch her breath, so she may find herself the classmate of some of your DC. Good luck!

I have been looking at the wide variety of advice on the Medical School web sites about getting a place for my DN. Some place great emphasis on the PS, others slightly less so. Others like high scrores in UKCAT to determine who gets an interview, others do not rely on this at all and score it quite low in the overall determination of who gets an offer. Nearly all factor in GCSEs as well as A levels. Some give clear advice on work experience and makeing sure the applicant states what they learned from it, not just that they did it. Some want far more evidence than others of suitability to be a Doctor.

Therefore, choosing the most suitable medical schools for your profile is evidently key and gives a greater chance of success - exactly as Needmoresleep says. Must be a huge amount of work though to plough through all of them but the best fit could be 400 miles away from home or just around the corner!

But how do your dc know if your UKCAT score is any good?

A friend whose ds got in to medicine last year told me about a website where UKCAT scores were added to through the summer as people took the test, giving him a clear idea as time went on of which decile he was going to be in.

Is this something that everyone except me and ds knows about or is it a fantasy???? Fairly clueless here and trying to help ds.

There is a poll on the student room website for medicine of UKCAT scored by members.

You literally have to trawl through the medical school website & read many threads on the Student Room (and Mumsnet!) to get a feel for the previous year's cut-offs for each uni. And obv it can change each year. When dd applied (2016 entry, 2015 application) there was an extra section added to UKCAT which changed things. She had an average score of 670 so didn't apply anywhere that was rumoured to have cutoffs of 700 and over. It did mean she discounted one place which turned out to have been lower than she thought.

I think iirc that the UKCAT site itself publishes data on the scores achieved

Thanks RedHelenB I had actually come across that poll but the one my friend told me about sounded more official with all scores added. (She thought it was through Kaplan but I can't find anything like that.)

Ignore The Student Room. Lots of braggarts and fibbers! Or rather I read it to see when interviews/offers were coming through and DD stayed well away to avoid becoming more stressed. And their resource stuff was worth reading through.

Individual University websites may say what scores worked last year, or you can ask. I think we did it by looking at the weighting given to UKCAT by each. Nottingham was a formula based on GCSE and UKCAT and we worked out it would be touch and go. In the end DD was one point short. Bristol (where DD will be going) only give 10% weighting to UKCAT (0% last year), but attach huge importance to PS. Birmingham which was her other offer, again score GCSE highly but you needed an A* in English.

Building the table was quite quick as most lists are alphabetical so it was cutting and pasting into Excel.

Many universities don't operate a cut off for UKCAT score. They use it along with academic results to rank all the applicants and then interview the top ones.

Some include a score for PS and reference in the ranking, others don't . Some just scan it for any obvious problems but then use it at interview .

Some use them as a decider if they have two with equal scores aftre interview or even in the first ranking.

So uni with 1,500 applicants will interview top 500, make an offer to 250 for 125 places .

They know from previous years how many will either not make the grades or turn them down for a first choice .

The UKCAT data came through a couple of days before the UCAS deadline last year. DD got a similar score to Decorate's DD so we knew she had to be careful.

There is a blog at the below page where a 2nd year med student had pulled together as best she can the admission policies and preferences of all the medical schools. Looks fairly accurate from our experience last year but obviously check for yourself before taking it as gospel.

natalierm2707futuredoctorblogs.wordpress.com

Also some are using the situational judgement band and others are not