Tips for applicants/mentors to medicine at Oxbridge, Imperial, UCH.

[jamesforsythe]

Medical School at Oxbridge or Imperial/UCH

I'm a consultant dr. and my wife is a former dr. and admissions at Imperial Medicine and hence I am asked a lot about getting into medicine at Oxbridge, Imperial and UCH. I cannot speak for the many other excellent schools.

Firstly, Maths & Chem. both required - 3 &/or 4th A level grade A
(usually 4 A levels 2 x A* 2 x A, 1 x A if strong suite of GCSE's
(12A*/A is typical)

Re : Physics vs Biol A level. Biology is no better than Physics because no complex human biology is taught on any A level syllabi, which is why the gear-change in complexity once at med school in Biochemistry and Physiology slightly throws some candidates in year one.

Also, many applicants are thrown by the ubiquitous use of Applied Maths in modern medicine and research. You cannot really fudge your way here if you're just average at maths. But, you can apply for teaching support - in your limited extra time.

At Oxbridge, Imperial and UCH all that stuff about sport etc is cool but it is secondary to being truly excellent at maths and all sciences,having a superb school report - and having done some reading into medicine. IE at these schools you will very likely be questioned on what you claim to be interested in. Eg: An applicant claiming to be interested in Psychiatry as a career might reasonaly expect the question : may we discuss book(s) you have read?

But - note this well - the more difficult the questions are getting at your interview, the more interested the faculty is in you. If you've really done some reading into a field, they'll be impressed, provided you've understood it (even some of it)

Lastly, it's true: getting into Medicine is harder than the degree. Medicine is lots of hard work but, it's not as intellectually demanding as for example - the Cambridge Maths Tripos

• I know because I switched from that to medicine myself!

Good luck to all med school candidates and their parents.

Hi Lonicera
My DS has had one week rest home at 15, care home from 15, St John from 15 and 4 weeks in different hospitals on the ward from 17. The only placement where he had to come back at 18 was for a day in surgery. He did travel between an 30 minutes and an hour for some of these placements so not all local.

How long ago did your DC have these work experiences? Have they changed the age rules very recently? Believe me both she and I have tried and the answer has always been "you're too young". And don't forget at 15 DD hadn't even thought about what she wanted to do.

She tried at the local pharmacy Mrsramsayscat - too young.

We don't have any children's play centres near us. We are pretty rural and public transport only goes to specific places from our village, and DD doesn't drive.

The current students going through our school aren't hitting the 18+ problem Lonicera. We're rural too and almost no Y12s drive. Patient confidentiality has been mooted in our area as a reason for students not to get placements at their own GP surgery but why is it relevant to age? . It's too late for your DD now anyhow and if she opts for a gap year then she'll be 18+, so it won't be a problem. A perfectly legitimate reason for not having work experience is because she hasn't had medicine in her sights for very long, but it's probably best for her to be honest about that in her upcoming interview - it's not a problem -rather than being too defensive about the difficulties of rural living etc. Lots of students get to these placements despite seriously infrequent rural public transport. I also think they'll tend not to buy the 18+ thing since it just doesn't seem to be an issue generally.

We are not rural but have 3 big hospitals within a 30 minute radius so he applied to all 3 from when he got his GCSES so in September before he was 17.
He chased up weekly until they started saying yes he had one last February half term, one at Easter and was asked back for another two weeks at both of these before he was 18. He has also had a week in another hospital before he was 17 and then they asked him back to watch surgery when he was 18.

Same July only DS did far, far less than your DS but mine did have to chase for things to supplement the week's outreach at the hospital. Is yours now at med school if so which did he choose? (they seem to have liked him on his placements!).

No we are still undertaking the stressful process :/ 4 interviews no offers yet I am hoping at least one of them liked him at interview ha!

4 interviews is top of the pops! Impossible to imagine he won't get a slew of offers. Good luck to him!

Thank you I hope so days are going very slowly at the moment :)

The sum total of my DS's work experience was a week in an adult day care centre, a week in Glaxo Smith Kline and a few months serving food to patients in a hospice. The hospice in particular was a useful experience as it enabled him to talk about what he had seen and the stark reality of medicine. Hospices are always looking for help, even on the tea round.

sluj DD isn't even allowed to serve tea to the residents at the care home she volunteers at

That's tough Lonicera but hopefully she will have been able to interact with the residents enough to be able to talk about the difficulties they face and a good view of the branch of "medicine " concerned with quality of life and palliative care.

It's all about the spin 😁

She does arts and crafts with them. The care home people are not very helpful and basically won't let her do anything else.

That will be enough if she thinks about what she has learnt from that. For example, having to adapt her own pace and communication style, looking for adjustments needed, observing any changes in engagement, observing benefits of the activities, awareness of others limitations, patience...!
All valuable skills for a medic

Ah great, thank you.

I wonder would the school help her out? My sons (state) school ran a scheme which linked A level students with the local hospital for a two day shadowing placement. My son volunteered at a care home for a year on most Sunday mornings, but he wasn't allowed to provide care. He was allowed to chat to residents and walk them in the garden and hand out tea. And play his guitar to amuse them one afternoon. And help the office staff sometimes. It doesn't have to be direct care. He was 16-18 at the time, and this was last year.

I definitely heard Cardiff university say at their open day that work experience was more useful than anything, and that they understood that some students were advantaged by personal contacts.

This talk about work experience I feel is much overhyped. I literally cringe when I read about people spending years doing WE of one kind or another or in some cases people with multiple varieties of WE. Don’t get me wrong, yes, indeed it’s nice to have done something relevant to the medical field in the form of giving care, demonstrating empathy, understanding, etc. but it’s not the be all and end all in a successful application to medical school.

I remember once talking to a Cambridge medicine admissions tutor specifically about this subject on WE and for how long one should do this together with the importance of other extra-curricular activities in relation to a successful Medicine application. He gave it a little thought and replied: “Put it this way, I’d be more concerned about someone who’d played rugby for England coming into this course as he’d be asking for more time off for training than to study medicine”.

Personally, I can’t remember any significant WE that my DS did in his medicine application days. For a start, being at a full-time boarding school didn’t allow him much opportunity to do that even if he had wanted to do so. The same would apply for all those kids who were at boarding schools and eventually went on to become doctors. Likewise, DS is today a F1 junior doctor after having graduated brilliantly last summer. Medical schools would have known that you don’t need a catalogue of impressive WE on your UCAS Form and still go on to complete your medicine degree with flying colours.

Similarly, DS’s good friend at boarding school who’s one year older and currently F2 doctor had four offers from (in alphabetical order) Cambridge, Edinburgh, Imperial and KCL, i.e. two BMAT and two UKCAT schools. At the time, when I asked him what ‘work experience’ he had for this impressive “full-house” offers, he looked at me in a slightly cheeky manner and sarcastically replied,

“What work experience?”

Pete, I don't think people would disagree if you are talking about Cambridge, Edinburgh, Imperial and KCL. However other schools do place more emphasis on it, and perhaps less on, say, A*s or a high UKCAT. OP was usefully clear about which medical schools his tips were for. I don't think you do potential medics much of a service to suggest that WE is not particularly important for every application. I suspect even schools like Eton might advise that a student aiming for, say Bristol, should write a very different PS to one designed for Oxbridge and focus more on WE and other forms of engagement. When my daughter went back to her old school to talk to potential medics the organisers commented that her PS worked for the schools she applied to, but should not be considered a useful template for many others.

I "literally cringe" when faced with an arrogant hospital consultant, who lacks the ability to communicate, is sarcastic and lacks empathy!

Me too!

I personally think WE is important. Medicine has changed asa career, and students should be clear about the sort of life they will be engaged in. If they dint like caring work, don't apply. We need empathic medics.

Mrsramsayscat one problem with work experience is that it can be difficult to come by and even more difficult to travel to in rural areas without considerable input from a parent which not all can have. It's also become a bit of a tick box exercise to some extent, the volunteering in a care home for months etc etc.

Interesting about the Etonians. The only Etonian in our village (we have many) who wanted to go into Medicine had some very swanky work experience in the US set up for him by his parents (friends of mine - completely lovely but strongly believe in connections). He went to a London medical school, helped less by his grades (which had to be boosted at an Oxford crammer) than by his undoubted ability at rowing. That is absolutely not apocryphal; I'm happy to bet my mortgage on it - it still happens even in modern times :)

I fail to believe that with all those long, long boarding school holidays those pupils don't have time to do placements! It's far easier for them time wise. Still, I'm dubious about just how valuable work experience is, it seems to have got a bit out of hand. Working in any ordinary job will provide examples of the skills needed, especially since those jobs will be hands on whereas, as Lonicera points out, so much of work experience is simply looking on, not actually getting hands dirty. I think this is why the interviewers at most of DS's interviews made reference to the job he'd had since Y9, rather than to his various placements.

Yes stranger. But which Universities was he aiming for? The courses at Oxbridge are very different to some others. Yes they have the same outcomes, but Oxbridge can be three years of mainly academic learning, whilst other courses are hands on (as in working as an HCA in a difficult ward) very early on. Ergo some schools may be looking for a different set of skill and experience from the get-go. It may not be true for your DS, but it is very common for successful Oxbridge to receive one or more rejections from other medical schools. Which is why my advice to potential medics is to study requirements and keep as many doors open as possible. DD was very glad she had lots of different sorts of experience, when she was too ill to take BMAT and a lacklustre UKCAT.

There is a regular MN assumption that only Oxbridge counts, and that those that fail to reach the dizzy heights then slot in elsewhere. This is emphatically not true with medicine. Different courses are looking for different skill sets.

DD learned a lot from spending a summer, aged 16, working in a care home. Sure she did not get to do any care work, but being part of a team, and doing things like cleaning, kitchen work and "waitressing", which involved helping cut up food etc, gave her the same sorts of skills and understanding Lonicera's DD will be getting. Especially how to communicate with older people with respect and understanding. (Its already proved useful in her course.) The nicest part was that her colleagues thought she was being exploited (lots of double shifts) and successfully demanded she got paid. I personally think that given she will be always be working with colleagues with a range of skills and backgrounds, six weeks experience of some of the grottier jobs will be of lasting benefit. The first thing she noted was that many of her colleagues were bright and capable, but without the opportunities she had had. The message they passed to her was that she had to make the most of those opportunities.

He applied to Oxford, Imperial, Birmingham and Bristol Needmoresleep and I think that was his order of preference also, perhaps because students at his school regularly went to Birmingham for Medicine but Bristol seemed to take almost no-one from the school for years for either Medicine or VetMed, which may have coloured his views. Anyhow he got three offers from his 'top' three and no interview from Bristol who rejected him at an incredibly early stage, before interview. They didn't mess around :)

I don't see that your DD's experience in the care home gave different exposure to the necessary skill set than DS's job in a cafe where for years he waited on tables, scraped dishes, filled dishwashers, washed floors, cleaned the loos at the end of the day etc. Because young people at school simply don't get involved with the nursing end at care homes simply the same sorts of things you learn anywhere (the things you've mentioned) if they have a long term job. Which is why he wasn't that worried about getting masses of experience in a medical setting because he'd got his hands dirty (and got paid for it :)). Interestingly, despite not having had a long stint in a care home he's been drawn to geriatric medicine because he says the problems are more complex and therefore more interesting so to an extent I agree with peteneras - I don't see that work placements shape what you develop into, and I don't think anyone without access to placements should worry overmuch whatever the med school they're targeting, provided they can demonstrate understanding of the skills required, with examples from real life - but not necessarily in a medical setting.

Oh dear, we seemed to contradict the advice.

Double science IGCSE.
Maths dropped after AS level.
Biology, chemistry and drama A levels.

Daughter seems to be doing well at a large, fairly historic Midlands medical school. Obviously not Oxbridge/Imperial, though.

Drama A level has quite a bit of essay writing, and she says this has helped her with writing essays at medical school.

Obviously it was an unusual A-level combination (the school had not come across it before and struggled with timetabling at first) but the communications skills acquired are also proving useful in the placements.