Medicine 2020 (part 2)

[Monkey2001]

This follows on from the first thread - www.mumsnet.com/Talk/higher_education/3380915-Medicine-2020

Has anyone had offers yet from Cardiff or Leeds? Or UCL

Hi all - well done on all of these amazing offers!
We are a year behind so have all this to come.

I had a question about work experience please. DD has some set up in a local hospital, but it’s mostly shadowing of course. She’s done a bit with occupational health where she was a bit more hands on.
She volunteers with the activities coordinators at a care home every Saturday.
But do you have any tips/ideas for more “hands on” experience if this is preferred by some universities?

Also, how did you decide which University to apply to. I know all of the criteria and trying to be strategic, but it just still seems hard to narrow it down! Maybe we need to spend more time on it and just research research research!

I would try for a GP practice half day it gives more insight into people's lives and leads to more ref ok action that way.

Reflection

Great thank you. We will try that too.
The Occupational Health was quite varied and for 5 days. She’s had one day with radiology and saw loads and loved it!
If it doesn’t get cancelled, she has a week with the Head and Neck department and two days with elderly care/stroke rehab. So a GP would be something different.

Should she ask for a day with the dementia nurses at the care home maybe?

Congrats on all the v lovely offers. Can help with any Nottingham info as DD there. She helped (well got paid) at the interviews so may have met your DCs. So so lovely to hear all your news.

Could do either as volunteering or just fir variety.
But I would get some GP experience - day home visit, a nurse led clinic, gP surgery etc to understand what life as a doctor is like

Ds just got offer from Manchester this evening . Well done to all the offers coming out

kingofkings, Dd got an offer for UCL about 3 weeks ago.
She interviewed at 3 other London Unis who have stayed quiet.

I seem to note a lot of folk who posted earlier on thread who are quiet, now I hope their DC are making the progress they wanted to.

Thats interesting because they must have therefore given out offers before all interviews completed. Ds interview in ucl was only two weeks ago.
No news from other interviews yet and one still left to do. It is a long wait from the first on December.

Actually that makes sense as people also applied at different times.

Oh well done everyone with offers! Such a relief.
Glad we’re not the only ones with more interviews to come.

Re work experience, DS has been volunteering at a local children’s hospice and St John’s Ambulance and, since turning 18, started work at a nursing home for people with end stage dementia.
Through this, he has been able to get half days of observations with some of the GPS and hospital doctors he has met.

Any relevant experience helps and the schools know it’s not always possible to get hospital or GP exposure.

Best of luck everyone.
Work is going to be extremely busy for me until June at the least so I’m hoping it will make the wait seem less deranging

She volunteers with the activities coordinators at a care home every Saturday.
But do you have any tips/ideas for more “hands on” experience if this is preferred by some universities?

Volunteering with an activities co-ordinator in a care home is very hands-on. Keeping this up would be a good idea, especially as the co-ordinator will trust her with more responsibility the better she/he gets to know her. One of the most impressive prospective medics I've dealt with in recent years volunteered regularly in a care home, where she played the piano for the residents to sing along. (Of course, she needed a good repertoire of songs from the nineteen-forties.)

It might be helpful to volunteer for some other roles at the care home during a school holiday, although the value of this will depend on what kinds of things the home does. As LaLaFlottes suggested, if the home has nurses there might be something she could do with them. I wouldn't recommend doing anything for a day, though: it's difficult to get any understanding of the challenges of the role or the experience of the residents from one day, and if she mentions it in an application/interview it will look like box-ticking. Would the home like someone to talk to residents' relatives about how having their loved one in a care home is affecting them? It can be difficult for the carers to do this without being interrupted by residents' demands. I know my mum would appreciate someone in my dad's home taking time to ask about how she's coping.

Sorry not really intending to disagree with those amazing sounding volunteering works just differentiating between those and the WE more designed to try and get a feel for and have an understanding of reality of life as a doctor.
The medicine taster days are very good as they discuss the course and you can do some clinical skills.

the WE more designed to try and get a feel for and have an understanding of reality of life as a doctor.

I don't want to belittle it, but I'm not sure workplace observation really does this. Being immersed in looking after demanding elderly people with dementia, very young children, or people of any age with special needs - where you actually have some responsibility for their wellbeing - gives you a much better understanding of the reality of life as a healthcare professional.

The value of hospital or GP experience really lies only in seeing what the most likely working environments are like. Finding out that even consultants might only have a desk in a corner under a staircase rather than their own office can be an eye-opener.

In terms of convincing yourself - and a medical school - that you have the right attributes to become a safe, effective doctor who isn't absolutely destroyed by the job, experiences where your commitment, motivation, patience, tact, sensitivity and empathy are tested are the most valuable.

Well it's ok to have different opinions. I'm sure that a lot us are hcps and we'll still all have different views.

Seems to be some Manchester offers coming through tonight on Track - still no news for us. @SouthernCross hoping your DD was one of the luck ones tonight. Sunderland also starting to send out their offers, nothing yet for DS :( No rejections either so should take comfort from that.

Looking at the uniadmissions site Cardiff offers begin to be sent out end of February.

@LaLaFlottes re choosing medical schools:

1 - Which ones match your stats? Obviously won't know UCAT/BMAT scores yet, but GCSE results range from a little bit important (ie 6 in English/Maths) to very important (no point applying without 9 A*s

2 - If not doing both Bio/Chem, that is another limiting factor.

3 - Traditional/Integrated/PBL, full dissection?

4 - University style - city/campus

5 - Location - close to home/far from home, love/hate idea of London, cost of living.....

There are probably other things to consider too, the others can add their thoughts,

Thank you for all of the thoughts on WE. She will definitely keep up the volunteering and hopefully the observation type work experience she has secured will supplement this. I will definitely suggest she asks for any additional responsibility at the care home too. Speaking with relatives is a fantastic idea. She has met quite a lot of them, especially over the xmas period.

Re choosing a University, thank you @Monkey2001 that’s useful. We do have a list of criteria and a spreadsheet we are constantly adding to, but even taking her preferences into account we seem to be left with quite a lot of places! Her GCSEs are good so maybe we start with medical schools where that is important?

It may sound like a silly question so I apologise, but how do you identify the less competitive/desirable medical schools? She’s keen to apply for one aspirational option where it would be considered a long shot, one that’s somewhere in the middle and two that are less competitive. Should we consider league tables?

In case anyone has any suggestions, her details so far are:

1. GCSE - eight at grade 9 and two at grade 8
2. Would like traditional or integrated course and isn’t too fussed either way about full body dissection.
3. Undecided about campus or city as is a real city girl but likes the idea of a community.
4. She would consider London. She is also keen on Scotland (DH is Scottish and we have family there) but a little put off by the small amount of places for RUK students)
5. She is doing Biology Chemistry and Maths at A level
6. She is considering an EPQ (not sure how valuable this is though)

I guess then we identify schools that would be ideal if her UCAT/BMAT is good, and also where might still consider her is they don’t go as well as she hopes.

Again, congratulations to all those with offers. It must be very motivating to receive these and then work towards A levels.

Thanks to everyone offering help and insight into this process. Much appreciated.

2. Would like traditional or integrated course

Do you mind if I ask what she's basing this on? Has she explored the course styles that involve more self-directed learning?

I've posted somewhere on here before about why the labels "traditional" and "integrated" aren't very meaningful, and how there aren't really any purely "traditional" or purely PBL medicine courses, and, indeed, how what one medical school calls PBL (or CBL or any other TLA) might bear little relation to what another school calls PBL but might bear a strong resemblance to what another school calls traditional. "Integrated", in particular, is a pretty meaningless term as it means whatever the medical school chooses it to mean (ditto "early clinical experience").

I think it's quite important to go to any conferences where current medical students and recent graduates talk about their experience: look out for events run by The Medic Portal or Medic Mentors, but quite a few large schools or sixth-form colleges run these, too. Getting to open days is also useful, but particularly to get a chance to talk to students rather than to listen to sales talks from staff.

Thanks @sirtobybelch

I think she's basing it on what she's read about those teaching styles in general, whereas it sounds like she needs to properly research each individual University. They did a mock PBL type of thing in future medics club at college and she wasn't really a fan, but agree she needs to look into this more as it sounds like most schools offer more of a combination.

We did go to a Medic Mentor conference which was interesting and useful to an extent, although some of their information was definitely out of date!

I will take a look on the Medic Portal too. We've been to a couple of open days but are hoping to get to more soon too.

Thanks again. All very useful.

It may sound like a silly question so I apologise, but how do you identify the less competitive/desirable medical schools? She’s keen to apply for one aspirational option where it would be considered a long shot, one that’s somewhere in the middle and two that are less competitive. Should we consider league tables?

Personally, I wouldn't pay much attention to league tables. (My own medical school ranks pretty highly in league tables, so this isn't sour grapes.) There are a few criteria that contribute to league tables that you might want to look at, but even these won't have any value for new medical schools.

One thing worth looking at - but only at the extremes - is performance in the National Student Survey. In general this is not a useful measure of anything, but if a medical school is consistently right at the top or right at the bottom it suggests there's something you should explore. However, the reason why final-year medical students at King's College London, for example, consistently record very low levels of satisfaction might not be something that particularly bothers your daughter. Furthermore, the reason why final-year medical students at the University of Nottingham gave it appallingly low scores one year is almost certainly something to do with a one-off occurrence that hasn't affected any other cohorts of students.

There are data collected by the GMC on how well foundation doctors approaching the end of their first year of employment feel their medical school prepared them for the role of a junior doctor. I tried to set up a link for you to view this but I can't get it to work properly. If you follow this link and then click on "1. Questions by PMQ awarding..." you can play around with the filters. As a very brief summary, this puts Plymouth, Keele and Norwich (UEA) at the top and Imperial, Warwick and Manchester at the bottom. It's worth keeping this in mind alongside how your daughter feels she would enjoy studying at a particular medical school (and wider university). Remember that in most cases she'll only actually be spending two years at the university, with most of the rest of the time spent in various hospitals and GP surgeries that could be quite a long way from the university.

Of course, none of this helps her to make decisions regarding new medical schools that haven't produced any graduates yet.

Sorry, I was looking at a list of only English medical schools for the GMC survey. For the whole of the UK the top three are still Norwich, Plymouth & Keele (looking at standard-entry courses only); the bottom three are Queen's Belfast, Imperial and Manchester, with Cardiff marginally above Manchester.

league tables are a waste of time for medicine, time better spent looking at schools that might be inclined to take them. Once you have a list of those where they have a reasonable chance of a place narrow it down by where can they see themselves living for 5-6 years. Since a lot of students will also want to stay with hospitals they know they may end up living there a lot longer than 5-6 years.

At one time I knew quite a bit about why kings students rated it poorly, and it was a good enough reason, imv, not to apply. However I hope it's changed. I'd always ask students currently at the med school about anything in the satisfactions survey that might cause you concern.

Feeling poorly prepared to be a junior doctor can be an indication that actually you know just what you are getting into! I'd be (and was) more interested in why some students perform a bit better than others in specialty exams.