Chemistry A' level - the hardest A' level?

[BeingFluffy]

DD1 is starting Sixth Form next term. She is thinking of changing her options to include Chemistry A' level. After spending a couple of weeks on work experience with the Vet, she is seriously considering VetMed again and she needs to take Chemistry to keep her options open.

She is likely to get an A in her Chemistry (and the other sciences) at GCSE but is worried that Chemistry A' level is a lot lot harder and very difficult to get an A or A in. She is a bright girl, but not particularly mathematical.

Can anyone tell me honestly, is a good grade down to sheer hard work or a natural aptitude for the subject or both?

My DD is a chemistry graduate and her BF trained to be a vet.

DD took A level Chem, Biol, Psychology and AS maths.
She went to a "Top 10" uni and came out with a high 2:1.

She got a B for her chemistry A level.

She did have to work very hard, and we paid for a week's intensive A level revision pre final exams, and she also had a private chem tutor.

Her BF did similar subjects and got into vet college- but she gave up in yr 4 finding it all too intensive, and she'd lost interest.

Not sure if this helps, but if she enjoys chemistry that is half the battle. It was my DDs favourite subject and if she had not liked it, it would have been more of a struggle.

Another vet here (waving at Alice) I am also a Business Ambassador and give a lot of my time to help mentor future vets.
Firstly as someone who got a 'C' at GCSE and then an 'A' at A-level anything is possible with the right teacher and enough application.

Work Experience - the key thing here is that most practices get booked up a year in advance so she needs to be writing (not phoning) with an e-mail address asking about next summer now. The writing is important as usually the person who deals with work experience is unable to come to the phone and in a busy surgery the receptionists often default to sorry full. Abbatoir unlikely to get in at her age it is even very hard for vet students to get their weeks experience.

Asking your vet about whether she can do every other or even every Saturday morning is excellent as it shows dedication over a long period. All my recently successful students have served their two year Saturday morning apprenticeship that has then lead to school holidays placements and a reference that states has seen practice with us for two years.

All my recently successful applicants have also been very well rounded, as due to the unfortunate rise in substance and alcohol abuse in the profession coupled with the ever present very high suicide rate the colleges look for individuals who have outside interests which will enable them to meet people and make friends when they graduate and move to new areas often far away from friends and family.
Finally 50% of my recent successful applicants have needed to apply twice to get in so if she doesn't get in the first time round don't loose heart get more experience and reapply.
Over the last 7 years I have a 100% success rate at achieving a place at vet school with the students I have mentored. If you would like any more info please PM me. I am afraid though due to my mentoring program I am now full for work experience to the end of 2013.

Hi Lizcat (wave) - agree with everything you said - we much prefer written applications too, although we do usually respond to phone calls. We have two long term Sat am people at the moment. I also know of people who got in second time round - and deserved to get in second time more than first time, too, which makes me think that the system does probably usually get it right.

It's always been tough - I spent 2 years working at a vet's in the sixth form - 1981-83 - back then the practice I worked at reused needles, and I had to spend an hour or two every Saturday testing used needles for sharpness by sliding them over my finger before they were sterilised for reuse - at least modern work experience people won't have to do that! Lizcat is right about the substance abuse etc - if someone doesn't want to do it enough to go through all this work experience rigmarole, better they find out now than when they've qualified - it's not a job to do unless you really, really want to, and sadly every year there are some people who find it too much. I've been qualified 23 years and I still love it, but I think it helps that I work part time and so can keep things in perspective...

May I ask what it is which tends to grind people down?

I'd like to think I'm a fairly pragmatic type, but perhaps this path would not be for me.

I've a friend who's a small animal vet and says her problems are mostly to do with morons over-feeding their pets due to "kindness".

I would prefer to go in to agricultural work and/or specialised with horses.

PS I wrote to Glasgow a couple of weeks ago explaining that realistically my earliest application would be aged 40. They've said there's no age barrier (I doubt they could admit it anyway!), but between you, I, and the internet at large - what do you reckon?

Different problems in different fields; in small animal, the stress tends to be dealing with people's emotions and expectations plus very long hours plus loneliness (for some) and out of hours work (for some) and stresses of running a small business with little training or aptitude (for some) - entry requires high academic standards and certainly used to require little else; doing the job requires a lot of patience and willingness to compromise but often doesn't involve the high standards of treatment that are possible, due to owners' financial limits - that conflict can be very stressful. People can burn out, especially if they are working on their own or with colleagues they don't get on with. For large animal vets, as I understand it, almost every decision is necessarily a financial one for the farmer, and so treatment and animal welfare is often compromised by reality, and that can be a very stressful situation too. The profession has the second highest suicide rate of all; part of this, of course, is due to ease of opportunity - ready access to controlled drugs makes it much easier for a vet to kill themselves than it is for most people, obviously : (
I'm not sure about starting the vet course at 40. There is a vast amount of purely factual information to absorb - just in anatomy, for example, you have to learn the names and origins and insertions of about 300 muscles, and how they differ between species (or at least, I had to) - of course I can't remember it all now, but if I had to relearn it I would find it much harder to do so than I did at 19. Also, there is the question of finance and of how long you would realistically get to practice after you qualified - what with reduced physical mobility and less acute vision, I don't think it's a job for the truly elderly, really. When I was at vet school, there were a couple of students in their mid 30s at the time - they did qualify, but they found the course harder than the younger ones did; most of them have had good careers afterwards, though. I think if you really, really wanted to apply it would be feasible, but I really would do it ASAP if I were you. Hope that helps.

Alice my 11yr old ds1 has ambitions to be a zoo vet which might change with time. He has had visitors membership to London zoo since he was 3 and still find the place endlessly fascinating. He has in the past year acquired as pets a snake, African land snails and a hamster! What sort of work experience would you recommend for him in a few years time if he's still interested

Getting a job as a zoo vet is probably the hardest area of all to aim for, as there are so few jobs in that field, and obviously they are much sought after. However, somebody's got to do it, and there will be 11 year olds today who will be zoo vets one day, so it's not impossible. He would have to be a vet first, though, obviously, and I don't think it would do his application any favours if he gave the impression that he only wanted to be a zoo vet, so I think his work experience would need to cover exactly the same areas as everyone else's - lots of small and mixed animal practice, a bit of equine, some specialist clinic work if he can get it, plus any animal husbandry placements he can - kennels, catteries, stables, rescue centres for domestic or wild animals, etc. If he can get zoo work experience so much the better for him, but I expect it's almost impossible these days. Lizcat might know. And also, of course, he needs the grades, so working hard academically across the board, but particularly in science, is the most useful thing he could do at the moment to forward his application! I wanted to be a vet from the age of 3 onwards and never changed my mind, but of course lots of people do go off the idea, particularly after work experience, which is why it's so essential.

My experience of Chemistry A-Level is more than a decade old, but my memory is that there wasn't that much maths, and what maths there was was fairly simple. Ther was a LOT of rote learning - you need to memorise an awful lot of X+Y=Z equations for hundreds of different chemical reactions, and memorise the physical signs of different substances being present e.g. if there is X present then the liquid will turn pink when you add Y.

Agree with the other posters above that getting qualified as a vet will require a lot of dedication and the kind of person that wants to do extra work as much as possible rather than someone who will do the minimum they have to then stop, and that she will definitely need some additional work experience somehow.

Friend of DD1s did a WE placement at London Zoo a couple of years ago, so they do take on people (this was in 6th form though). AFAIK she didn't have any contacts there, just wrote to them.

London Zoo do "work experience" courses but they cost several hundred pounds! They don't do the normal school work experience.

that's odd fluffy - it was at the same time as everyone else was doing their WE (end of summer term Year 12), and the school had to sign off on everyone's placement. They may have agreed to it (as she was very very keen to get into vet science of some kind), but DD didn't hear of any payment. I'll ask her because I'm puzzled now.

It could be they have changed in the last couple of years or so? When I looked at their website 18 months ago it was advertising the courses (which were already booked up) I remember a girl at my school doing a summer job there and eventually working there full time, but obviously that is years ago. I think they have some internships at Whipsnade but again that is going on someone I knew vaguely going there a few years ago.

www.zsl.org/about-us/jobs/work-experience,95,AR.html

Here! The Zoo Academy courses for 15-17 year olds are £550 (and I don't think they count towards work experience anyway!) Fully booked up for 2012 so there must be some keen people out there!

that's interesting. I wonder if, because it was a couple of years ago, they still took school WE people or maybe she did have a contact and didn't tell anyone . Sorry for misinformation for anyone else reading .

In general, things you have to pay for don't count towards veterinary work experience, because the profession is so dominated by white middle class women already (like me, like me, I know!) that they are desperately trying to broaden access and therefore anything that can be bought isn't really eligible, which I think is a good thing, except of course that networking and contacts are not so easily detected but still make a big difference to how easy it is to get experience. However, sufficient persistence does still usually pay off. Like Lizcat, I have seen a lot of personal statements from recent applicants, most of them successful, and they have managed to get a huge variety of placements between them - the difficulty of doing so is just one of the hurdles that absolutely has to be overcome.

To obtain an A grade in Chemistry needs hard work, aptitude but also good teaching! I am a Chemistry graduate from RG uni with PCGE and more than 10 years experience of teaching Chemistry.
What I am concerned about in your post is the quality of teaching at your dds school. I would expect a school that is selecting its intake of pupils by ability and having a GCSE entry requirement before taking A level to have results that exceed the national average given in the link in my first post. What you have stated about the school suggests to me that they are covering up for under-performing results in Chemistry by spreading a myth that this is the "hardest" A level. The reason for these results could be because of poor teaching in this subject.
Last year I taught 8 A2 level Chemistry students and they have obtained 5 grade As, one B, one C and one D. The grade A/B students were taking A level Maths and the others were not - so hope this puts my comments in context.
The content of a level Maths is not what is required but a GOOD level of numeracy is needed e.g. rearranging equations, problem solving and this type of Maths skill is often lost when students drop Maths after GCSE.

Alpine you ask what leads to the stress. Below is an example of one stress I have had in the last week.
A 7 week old teacup pomerian puppy presented with symptoms of Parvo my team manged to cannulaise this puppy and get it on intravenous fluids at 700g this was no mean feat. When then took turns at attending it to it through out the nights for the next 4 days we nursed this puppy syringe feeding it, cleaning it and continuing fluids. This puppy turned out to have Parvo, Coronavirus and C.perfringens. The puppy lived and went home to it's owner (3 out of 4 with Parvo die) and the owner complained about the puppy's treatment! My entire team having slogged their guts out for 4 days went from elation to depression in a moment. This is just one example of what we get on an almost daily basis it seems currently that no matter how hard you try it doesn't matter.

Yes, that does sound "frustrating" to say the very least. My mum's a vet nurse and has similar stories... I. Think her worst experience was the horse with tetanus... You can imagine how that went!

I'm happy doing the business stuff as I run my own anyway. Am currently "battling" people as my horse is on a one-way trip later this week and there's more emotion with others than me. :/