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.

To be honest I have no idea about the subject but they do stay in Nottingham (I think). The advantage for DD and us was it doesn't take an extra year - money is tight and 6 years would be a real push. They just don't get a holiday between year 3 and 4.
Nottingham have a medic thing where they become first responders so bit like mini paramedics. Bit of a waiting list but sounds an amazing experience.
Think any course they get to do for medicine is fab. They all come out doctors in the end (hopefully).

Needsmoresleep - how does one find out about:
a) which courses are more practical/early patient contact;
b) which courses allow one to incalcate and options (DS has already mentioned he thinks he wants to - wants to spend a year in research)
c) which courses do whole body dissection/presecution
without going to visit all 39 medical schools I have now put into a spreadsheet!
BTW, going through the medical entry requirements pdf linked above for 2020 entry, it seemed to me that, except for Oxford, that wants a very high number of 8/9s, nobody seemed to want exceedingly high GCSEs - a few want 7s, most seem to be happy with 6s in just about everything. We are hoping for better than that (he needs six 8s for his conditional offer for the sixth form he really wants), although of course who knows. I got the impression that GCSEs might count for more, at least in some places - are there real thresholds that they tell you at open day, rather than the ones set out in the pdf?

And although he is currently at a State School, he won't fit any of the widening participation criteria, with both parents with university degrees (even if not in medicine), postcode high with university participation etc

I can help a bit. GCSEs are less important at some places as long as reach the threshold - not Cardiff though ! Most require minimum and then look at UCAT/BMAT, but some combine eg Nottingham score top 8 GCSEs and UCAT and then interview. It's a complicated process !
For full body dissection I can ask DD when I get home as doubt that has changed much. The on line prospectus are best place to start - although if you look at the guide I linked to (think on this thread as there's another one going) it does say for some that they do it.

The intercalated degree in Nottingham was a BMedSci - done within the med school with a dissertation in 3rd year. Range of topics within cell biology, sports med etc. It’s ok, good for people who might drop out as you still leave with something. As an NHS consultant I would suggest talking to as many real life doctors as possible and really thinking about your choices. It’s a long and difficult road

And you'll be surprised about outreach programmes. My DD2 is currently on one for state school kids. We both went to Uni and her comp is pretty successful but they still took her. Guaranteed contextual offer should hopefully be coming her way after completing the programme.

I felt bad originally and then realised that with classes of 26 and only 8 hours teaching a fortnight she is at a bit of a disadvantage against kids who have 6 in a class and 10-12 hours. And the contacts for work experience which she's not had. Unis want to level their playing fields, especially for Medicine.

Agree you've got to know what you're letting yourself in for as it's tough. But DD loves being on the wards and has a job as an HCA this summer. 13 hour shifts clearing up poop and she's still happy. Her academic tutor is quite famous and he has talked to her at length about the realities and she's still keen. She is an ardent supporter of the NHS and becoming quite active politically to change things. Doubt she can but nice to see her and her friends trying !
And thank you for the degree info. I'm sure I've been told but head can't hold that much info these days.

This is an official guide about what each medical school's features.
DD won't do a spreadsheet.
She found 4 in London she liked names of & will apply there only.
Yeah Yeah we all know the reasons why that is risky strategy, but it wouldn't surprise me if it works for her. She only needs one offer.... and excellent grades & entry exam results. She's working very hard to nail those.

Best to apply where she likes. It's all a bit risky 😁😁. Good luck ! One offer is all you need

some random thoughts that may reinforce what you've been told already

school advice on medical careers can be very good - or pretty inaccurate. They rarely seem to know how much can change from year to year.

University websites will tell you minimum requirements but not what they actually take - the standard is higher than they say.

The Student Room website is not prefect but it's one of the most up to date sources.

No-one should be pushed into medicine, it's a hard life.

Encourage them to earn as much as possible before they start - it's a long course and when non-medical friends graduate your child will want to do things with them.

Try not to be ill at the beginning of August, it's when the new doctors start.

All medical schools offer interesting opportunities outside the course. I wish I could say what mine has done but it would be far too identifying. Taking some of the opportunities available will help them decide what specialty might appeal.

It is sensible to get involved in research early on if they may have any interest in academic medicine.

Students are frequently weak on medical ethics. Ethics questions appear at most, possibly all, interviews. They should study this guidance www.gmc-uk.org/ethical-guidance

All really helpful stuff, taking notes here!

Absolutely, definitely taking notes. And I have now been through the Official Guide - linked to by @MedschoolRat and others, but it doesn't say anything about disection versus prosection, immediate patient contact versus not, and which allow incalcation, for example.
And for the GCSE specification for Cardiff it specifies grades 6, 6 for Chemistry and Biology (assuming taking triple, and similarly grade 6 for Maths and English Language. Those are not onerous GCSE requirements - that is why I was querying whether that was their real requirement, if they take GCSEs into account. If they had said eights instead of sixes I could understand what the issue was, but surely there aren't many people applying for medical school with 5s (Cs or a good pass) in science and maths!

I totally agree about not pushing anybody into medicine. I have tried to push the other way! I gave him the Adam Kaye book in the hope of scaring him off (I thought his previous ambition of architecture, was a better bet). But after doing work experience in architecture in Year 10, he said he didn't think he wanted to sit behind a desk all day, and he wanted to make more of a difference, and has fixated on medicine (actually, when he was in primary school he kept saying he wanted to study medicine, then he seemed to grow out of it, and now it is back with a vengence). I don't know if it is the right career for him, although he has decided that it is, and I am quite keen he take a gap year, although he doesn't want to wait to apply, even if he might apply for deferred entry. That is another question that I would like to know, which medical schools allow deferred entry. And is it even more difficult to get deferred entry?

I just feel they are so young to be heading off on this journey. The American way of at least a couple of years of college pre medical school seems more sensible in terms of maturation. DS is pretty mature as boys go (it is one of the things that people have commented about him for years), and even so!

Minimum requirements are one thing. You need to look for the interview selection criteria. Here's a bit from Medic portal where they explain their scoring system.

www.themedicportal.com/blog/where-to-apply-with-a-low-ukcat-score-2018-entry/

You have to assume everyone has the minimum criteria. They have to rank the thousands of applicants somehow !
Unfortunately you need to read all the prospectus if Unis you like the look of to find all the other info.

See this is more interesting to me than planning lessons 😁:

Nottingham:
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/medicine/study/medicine/faq/a100-selection.aspx

Exeter (heavy on predicted grades)
https://www.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/undergraduatewebsite/documents/BMBSDetaileddAdmissionsProcesss2019entryy_FINAL.pdf

All the Unis have this info somewhere - it's good research practice for the kids !

However then you get the 'pass the minimum threshold and it's all down to UCAT' ones :

Sheffield
Liverpool
Southampton

To name 3.

Bimkom Leeds fulfils all those criteria you have asked about. I was amazed at the things dd could do within a short time (under supervision obv!)

But at the end of the day, they can’t be too hung up on course content. It is impossible to predict who will get interviews & offers & who won’t.

You really have to look at which places they have the best chance of getting interviewed at. And how they fare at UKCAT/BMAT will really influence that. Being realistic, most applicants will have similar A Level predictions so the assessments are how they will decide.

Dd wanted a biggish city and a traditional rather than PBL course. After that it was just looking at how those unis decide who to interview & see which best fitted her profile. She was lucky to get interviewed at all those she applied to.

mumneedswine - Ah sorry to have been thick, but yes, I get that they need to rank them to decide who to interview/offer, and it is the ranking criteria, not minimum requirements that are key. Slightly irritating that brochure doesn't set that out, as it seems that is far more important than the minimum requirements
Decorhate - in order to get a chance of getting an interview/offers, we presumably need to whittle down the 39 medical schools to a short/long list to go visit. At this stage, we have nothing to base any whittling it down on. Once the GCSEs come out on 22nd August, we will know whether the ones that prize good GCSEs are a good fit or not, but I understand that DS would not sit the UCAT until - what, maybe spring next year. And we would want to work out where in the country to go for open days before then. If DS doesn't want London (which he is saying he doesn't at this point, although I guess being here, we might as well go to open days at what there is in London), then a fair bit of planning needs to be put into working out where we should trek to. And that can't wait on the UCAT or BMAT results, which will only come out later, so we have to assume that they could be anywhere between dreadful and brilliant, and plan to cover all bases accordingly.
DS is a bit dismissive about his personal experience, saying that most people who go into medicine have had personal stories and reasons that they did so, and have had close brushes (eg close relatives like his brother) with medical conditions, so he doesn't reckon it would make a personal statement anything special. I am not so sure, but what do I know.
On the subject of UCAT and BMAT, if one's heart is set on taking the BMAT, and taking it early (as in, wants a shot at Oxbridge - probably madness IMHO, but I am not the candidate), when is the best time to take the UCAT, to give a spacing between the two?

On the subject of Leeds, their website says:

"We assess your application form against academic criteria, considering both your past and any predicted grades. We also consider your Biomedical Admissions Test (BMAT) score."

Any idea what that means in practice. it does seem clear from the website that they absolutely need a predicted grade of at least AAA, any B's in there cannot be offset with As. Not clear though whether, any As in the predicted grades means a greater boost, or at that point they turn to the other criteria. For exampl, is it BMAT all the way, or GCSE grades, or a combination of the two, and if so how.
And how is one supposed to find that out.

I think UKCAT is still done during the summer between Y12 & Y13? I agree that if you wait till you have the results you won’t have much time to visit before UCAS has to be in.

We started by visiting a few in June of Y12 - first a campus one that was easy to get to by train. From that she decided she wanted a city rather than campus. Also did the London ones as close by. And ruled them out. As dd did not want PBL and didn’t want to go as far away as Scotland or Belfast, in reality the list became fairly short after that. Her UKCAT was not high enough to risk some places that put a lot of emphasis on that. So she ended up applying to 2 BMAT, one that didn’t use either & Cardiff as they did not put as much emphasis on it. That may have changed.

Re Leeds, you could just ask them at the Open Day. I’ve found that admissions tutors are happy to be transparent about the process. The advantage of going to Open Days is that you often find out snippets that would otherwise be hard to glean from the website.

I know that last year they did not look at personal statements at all when deciding who to call for interview (dd heard this from someone helping in admissions).

But it is important to check the criteria each year as it changes.

I’m not sure how feasible it is to get an offer with predicted grades lower than AAA unless it is somewhere that does contextualised offers. I know someone who got offered AAB from Newcastle this year but her predicted grades were much higher so I think it was because they really wanted her.

One last thing about Leeds. Yes they say on their website that they won’t accept A A B instead of 3 As. But they did take dd with A A* B

But obv no way of knowing if that was a one-off

I can confirm that Leeds will take with A star, A B. That’s what mine got after his AAA offer.

Another thing to bear in mind generally is that our DC sometimes struggle to cope with the change from being one of the top dogs re grades to being “just average”. They can struggle to adapt their work ethic. Mine certainly though he wasn’t working hard enough because he wasn’t getting top marks in his cohort. That put him under pressure to cut back on social life which was not good as they need that safety valve.

The other point about the length of the course was correct in that they will have friends graduating and wanting to celebrate while they are just half way through especially if they intercalate.

Sorry but one more comment. I think further up there was a comment about being undecided between medicine and dentistry. May have been another thread though. Experience from DS1 and DS2 (prospective dentist) was that you need to commit to one or the other really early as admissions teams are brutal in rejecting you if you’re not showing commitment to one career choice. The personal statement and work experience will show clearly if the student applicants are trying to hedge their bets. If so, the application will be quickly pushed into the rejection pile. DS2 asked this at several open days at Medicine and at Dentistry talks. Same answer.