General advice for wannabe medics/dentists?

[cardamoncoffee]

Dd has just sat her GCSE's and is thinking of applying for medicine or dentistry. To date they have had little to nothing wrt careers advice, so wanted to ask what the general expectation is now for applicants? I know experience in a care setting is essential, should I be advising her to sort out some voluntary work from now, or is the 5 day work experience considered sufficient?
Any general advice greatly appreciated.

[RedHelenB]

Dd1 is about to enter her 3rd year of dentistry. Main bit of advice would be to look for work experience now as that was the hardest part for her as she had no contacts

[M0RVEN]

it used to be the case that Oxford students did the first three years at Oxford, without much clinical experience and then had the option of doing their clinical years in a London uni

You can also do three years in St. Andrews followed by 3 years in London ( QMUL) or Manchester.

[BlueCornsihPixie]

I did dentistry, graduated 2 years ago so fairly recent idea of applicants.

If they want to go down the dentistry route I would say they need 100% need dental work experience plus another specialism of dentistry e.g. orthodontics, or maxfax. I had 4 weeks work experience and some of my friends had a lot more! Plus I would also say some volunteering over a period of time. Doesn't have to be in a care setting but if they don't have anything currently I would go down the care route. A lot of my interviews asked "why dentistry not medicine" so it can be useful to show you've experienced medicine and rejected it, so medicine based work experience is also useful

In terms of A levels, sometimes they will let people in with AAB, but only if they have space. So if they have 80 places, and give out say 150 offers, if all 80 places are taken by AAA students they won't, if 76 are taken and you have AAB they will. They have a quota which they aren't supposed to go over or under.

I did 4 A levels, and I would actually really recommend this. If someone is capable of medical/dental school they are capable of doing 4 A levels, it gets you in a much better mindset of working hard and I think with 3 I would have been bored. Plus I had wiggle room if I fucked up one of my extras.

I would also say a sport as well is good. I think most people on my course were also quite sporty. It gives you a break from work as well

I agree with the spreadsheet. Look at your strengths as an applicant and apply to universities that look for those qualities.

[Bimkom]

Thanks Decorhate. But that means he would have to get into Oxford. That seems to mean he needs a minimum of 10 A*s (ie 8s or 9s). We are hoping for some good results on August 22nd, but that's really tough. We would be amazed if he made that! 8/9 in French and both Englishes is a bit out of the realms of possibility I think.

[mumsneedwine]

We are the too poor for bursary but not rich enough to have full choice category. And anyway, DD has been going to London on her own for years and it's not her favourite place. She loves Nottingham as nice size, fab public transport and a great integrated course. The Uni arrange or pay for all their placement travel. And houses are cheap!!!

[Decorhate]

Yes it’s still an option
www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listing/medicine#

[Decorhate]

Bimkom, it used to be the case that Oxford students did the first three years at Oxford, without much clinical experience and then had the option of doing their clinical years in a London uni. Not sure if that is still the case

[nothingtowearever]

My SIL is a doctor and my DH is a dentist. I would massively urge her to do dentistry over medicine

[Bimkom]

Part of the reason DS does not want London is that there would not be any accommodation costs, as he would be expected to live at home and commute in (OK, the general catering and washing costs for the family will be greater with him still at home and we would need to pay for the Tube). Don't think it is an unreasonable journey to any of them. He thinks he wants to leave home. But for us it would be a huge saving if he would go in London. What in some ways would be ideal is if he could do his first years somewhere else, and then transfer to London hospitals afterwards (I believe you used to be able to do that at some universities), so he could have and tire of the student experience. But I gather that is no longer an option anywhere, and at most places it neve was.

[Needmoresleep]

Mumsneedwine, did your DD look at bursaries? Imperial offer some very good ones, as do UCL. Whilst SGUL is some way out of the centre where things are a lot cheaper. And honestly I am not sure that second year accommodation in places like Oxford or Bristol is much cheaper.

I accept that cost in London is a factor. But equally London boasts some world class medical research and some distinct advantages (and disadvantages) for medical students. I would advise potential medical students to look at each place in the round and if cost is an issue consider whether there is a solution before ruling it out altogether. (And to do your own research, as some London costs quoted on MN are higher than we experienced. Also factor in things like ease of transport. In her first year DD used to have to leave student halls at 6.30 to get to her GP placement 9.00am, quite a shock for a London girl. In her second year the group of eight managed another weekly placement only because she and a friend had cars, so could give the others lifts. Otherwise it would have been infrequent rural buses.)

London medical schools want students who will make a good contribution, and they can work very hard to make it possible for students from lower income backgrounds. DD did not get offered a place in London. Whilst at school she played sport for a good Club which had a handful of medical students on the team, so was reasonably content to stay at home and do the same.

[mumsneedwine]

One last thing to consider if you're a bit short on cash like us is accommodation expenses. DD didn't even look at London because no way could we afford it. It is a factor for us and even though we never mentioned it to DD she figured it out on her own -£10,000+ I catered vs £7,200 catered is a lot of money.

[Needmoresleep]

Sir Toby's advice sounds good. We tackled it a bit differently. DD went to couple of local (London) open days on her own. Neither were right for her, for different reasons. This gave her a better sense of what she was looking for. (She realised she wanted a University in a city with a medical school more or less on site, which was reasonably academic and with the scope to intercalate in a specific area, but with early patient contact, and a good mix of placements.)

In the end she did not go to any open days. One booked out quickly, and as a low UKCAT score meant her choice was quite limited she assumed a two year process, and simply applied to those were both likely to interview her and which met her criteria. Most Medical schools will offer some sort of tour/chance to meet students on the interview day, which helps if you end up with a choice. Given it is so competitive there is some advantage in keeping an open mind.

However others will have stronger applications and so will be in a better position to choose.

[SirTobyBelch]

I agree with @mumsneedwine. It's quite a prolonged process but he needs to start off by identifying half a dozen medical/dental schools he most likes the look of (in terms of location, campus, etc.) and look at these in detail. As soon as he spots a major problem - e.g. a detail of the course he would really hate or an entry requirement he can't possibly meet - he should chuck that one out and put another on the list. You don't really want to be having to go to more than about four open days, unless you have a couple of universities close to you or you can visit two on the same day. Even four can be pretty expensive and a big time commitment.

Some open days are on Wednesdays but most are at weekends. A few medical schools will let you visit for personal tours on working days but you won't get the chance to see things like accommodation if you do this. (Well, you can see it form the outside, of course, but unless a friendly student offers to show you her/his room you won't get to see it from the inside.)

Re campus vs city, it can be a bit difficult for someone at school to really work out what the difference will be. For example, the University of Manchester is in the middle of a big city but it absolutely dominates its particular area, so it feels like a campus anyway. The accommodation isn't in the same place as the teaching buildings but each accommodation site has its own campus feel. It's natural for someone going straight from school to feel more confident about somewhere that they can just get out of their accommodation building and immediately be in the university, but they do have to recognize they usually won't be able to do this for more than the first year. Fairly obviously, students who already have to get a bus/train to school/college are generally more relaxed about living on a different site. Some students worry that they'll be distracted if they're in a city and would prefer to be on a campus a little way from the centre. Somewhere like Nottingham has a campus quite a way from the city but with excellent public transport links. However, Nottingham's campus is so big and well supplied with entertainment options that it probably has just as many distractions as a city anyway.

[mumsneedwine]

Bimkon get him to look at the prospectuses on line for a few. Look at the Unis themselves as well as the courses. What's the campus look like, how many students are there, what are the sports facilities like if he's sporty, how close to a city and the nightlife, accommodation in first year etc. Then just make a quick tick box to see if he likes them enough to visit. He can only chose 4 and only needs 1 offer.
But getting the interviews is his first priority so those selection criteria matter.
And don't believe anyone who tells you any certain Uni has the best of anything - everyone always thinks their Uni is the best wherever they end up !

[M0RVEN]

@Bimkom
AFAIK Dundee has the best facilities in the Uk for dissection as they use the Thiel embalming system.

[Bimkom]

OH but he is now not sure he wants a city university, thinks campus may be give you more of the "university experience". I certainly don't know. I think we have to go and look. He agreed however that Scotland (and Belfast) was too far, and he didn't really want London, if there were other options. So that seems to reduce it to 31 of 40.

[SirTobyBelch]

You can try using sites like the studentroom.co.uk to ask current students what the courses actually involve. There are quite a lot of fakes on the site, though, so don't take one person's word for anything. Groups like MedicPortal and MedicMentors will provide information that's a bit more useful than universities' marketing materials.

Part of the difficulty is that students have only experienced one course and have nothing to compare it to. Also, a student who is on a PBL or CBL course and not enjoying it is likely to describe the PBL/CBL in a way that makes it sound like nobody would enjoy it.

Dissection/prosection will account for a relatively small proportion of the course, and there's often none after the first two years. Personally I think it's quite important but it shouldn't be a deal-breaker as long as there are opportunities somewhere for potential surgeons to do some dissection, e.g. in student-selected components (SSCs).

[Bimkom]

@SirTobyBelch - thank you, I have passed that on, although I am not sure if the difference is huge - enough to choose a university on.

I had a bit of a chat to DS tonight - and he said that he thought he would prefer dissection to prosection, because he feels he is a hands on learner - he says he can remember every aspect of the animal heart that he learnt about in GCSEs, because he did the dissection, but that something whether the teacher did the dissection and they just watched, he found much harder to retain, because he was just watching. He thinks therefore that he might thrive best somewhere that is very hands on from the beginning. And he is quite a people person. On the other hand, is he is quite academic in some ways - but instead of producing and reading over notes, by and large for his GCSEs he turned them into quizlet type quizzes and practice questions (which in default I had to ask!, although mostly he used techology to do it).

If it is not clear from the descriptions of the universities on their website, how does one identify the more active learning models without visiting every one of them, and asking questions at open days (and looking at the open days that are listed for a few that are sounding likely, I think we are going to have problems going to many of them - do they all do them on weekends? That will be tricky for us.

[SirTobyBelch]

Is somebody able to give me a bit of a summary about the strengths and weaknesses of PBL versus CBL versus integrated.

Unfortunately, like "integrated" and "early clinical experience", terms like PBL (problem-based learning) and CBL (case-based learning) can mean whatever an individual institution wants them to mean. What Bristol medical school calls CBL, for example, isn't what I would call CBL.

Broadly, it goes like this...

In PBL, students are given a clinical scenario ("problem", although the word is misleading) that raises a number of points that students need to learn in order to understand what's going on. For example, you might have a patient calling 999 because he has chest pains, being picked up by an ambulance, in which an ECG reveals ST segment elevation, arriving at hospital, having blood samples taken for tests, receiving reperfusion therapy (alteplase or percutaneous coronary intervention), being monitored, having blood test results reported/interpreted, having drugs prescribed, being discharged from hospital and being referred to specialist clinics. Students then have to come up with an explanation of what was happening at each stage (e.g. how the infarct arose, what risk factors the patient had, etc.), why particular tests were performed, why particular treatments were used, and so on. It makes everything directly relevant to clinical practice but some students dislike it because they're not directly told what to learn.

CBL uses clinical cases - which might be real or made-up - with patient documentation, test results, radiological images, etc. Depending on the stage at which it's being used, this might either (a) form the basis for a process like PBL, where students have to find out what all the stuff they've been given means and how it would be used in forming a diagnosis and management plan, or (b) provide triggers for students to identify patients on the ward with similar presentations and go through their history, examination, diagnosis, etc., to see how such patients are managed in real life and what differential diagnoses might be possible for similar presentations. At a much more basic level, students might just be given a case and a set of questions related to it, which they then have to answer on the basis of their lectures and other learning activities through the week.

The point of both is to get students into the habit of reasoning rather than recalling. Although it's might appear straightforward to apply a recall-based approach to diagnosing a patient with chest pains, being able to do it without potentially missing important details really requires them to be reasoning through very basic questions like: what are the structures in the chest? which of these have sensory nerves (and therefore might be hurting)? what could cause these to hurt (including damage to neighbouring tissues that don't have sensory nerves)? and so on. Practising clinicians don't do this consciously or visibly/audibly, but their reasoning is based on their long experience of applying knowledge of anatomy & physiology, considering a full range of possible differentials, working out which can be excluded on the basis of available evidence and which need to be tested for, etc. Doctors might do it almost subconsciously but they do it. Students need to work their way up to this by doing it consciously, and explaining what they're doing.

[mumsneedwine]

Nottingham is a beautiful campus with a very good nightlife if my DD is anything to go by. It's quite cheap too and has a cat cafe. Birmingham is campus too as is UEA - sure many others are but these are the ones I know. Southampton easy to get to or Bristol and the new one in Kent too. Most will have open days in Sept time so could try a few then.

[Decorhate]

Bimkom we went to Brighton as we could get there easily by train.

Re Nottingham- it is definitely a campus uni though obv Nottingham itself is nearby & quite lively.

[Chuckie88]

Ash - It really is frightening how tough both dentistry and medicine are to get offers if you aren’t strategic about your application but I wouldn’t try to discourage anyone from trying. DS1 is loving his time at Leeds medicine while DS2 is really motivated to the offer grades for Birmingham dentistry. Their experience showed me that resilience and sometimes bloody mindedness are key to the process.

On other threads it’s been suggested that you see this as a two year process as there’s a chance of something gong wrong first time round. My DC know friends who didn’t get in first time but dusted themselves down and tried again with success having learnt some lessons.

The other thing to be prepared for is just how long it takes between the UCAS application and getting the offer. It can go right up April when thought should have turned towards the actual exams. DC will get down that friends already have offers while they might still be waiting for interviews.

[Bimkom]

If one wanted to go and see a campus to see what it was like - as I don't think I even know what a campus university is like (where I grew up all the universities were in the cities!), which would people recommend (eg closest to London, to get a feel, most campus like)?

[Bimkom]

What about Nottingham - is that a city or a campus?