Sheffield Medicine Applicants 2014

The UKCAT official practices are ridiculously hard and I got about the same as you, but I found the real thing quite a bit easier and ended up getting 705 so I think they must be designed to be more difficult

Really? Thats awesome (: I hope i can do that well. This makes me feel a lot better! Thankyou!

Ah, glad to see a familiar face on here then best of luck for your UKCAT. When is it by the way?

You'll certainly see me around here providing my UKCAT goes to plan! Booked it for mid-September but I might do it earlier. Entering the wonderful world of UCAS...for a second time round!

On UCAS Apply, ALL A level candidates MUST declare their individual module UMS scores in the box marked “Other” adjacent to the module information. UMS scores must be recorded as actual score achieved/maximum score possible for the module (numerator/denominator for each module taken). Candidates with certificated A1/AS level grades should enter their UMS score for each module as above, and their grade for the A1/AS level overall

I'm just wondering if we need to declare every module's UMS scores on UCAS, coz this is mentioned in the admissions policy but not anywhere else? I did really badly in some of my maths modules but still managed to get an A, so I don't really want to expose my module UMS scores....



http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.198034!/file/ADMISSIONSPOLICY_public.pdf

I'd love to get in to Sheffield but I'm not sure I've got enough volunteering and non academic stuff. I've done work experience in a hospital and gp for 2 weeks, and I go in every Saturdays to help out with admin in a gp surgery. I do piano and kickboxing and for a year I did English mentoring. Last year I spent a few days working with adults and children with special needs during The Challenge but that was it I've been trying for a year to get volunteer work in a nursing home but no luck is that good enough to get in to Sheffield or not really??

Hey all.

I'm currently studying Medicine at Sheffield, going into my second year next month. If anyone has any questions about the course, uni, medicine in general or anything else please feel free to quote me or PM me if you don't want to post on here.

I'm sure a few other current medics will show up on here soon too.

Having a quick skim of this thread, I've noticed a lot of you asking about experience, and worrying about the amount you have. The key to experience is what you learnt from it, and this is what all the schools will be looking for in your PS. They don't care if you've spent every single second of your spare time volunteering if you only list what you did without telling them how this experience prepared you to study medicine or confirmed to you that you want to study medicine and have the qualities to do so.

I only had 3 examples of volunteering/experience and only one of those was hospital based, and lasted just 4 days. That was enough for me to be able to get in, so providing you've got some sort of experience, you needn't worry about getting more, unless you feel you need more learning points to write about.

Good luck to you all with writing your personal statements. If you get stuck there is a lot of help on here, and once you've completed it you can submit it to the TSR PS help service to get it looked at.

Most of all, good luck with your applications, and try not to stress too much.

Sheffield are big on your PS, so I would say you've got more than enough. You would need to select relevant information and describe what you've learned/gained and why you think you'd make a good doctor because of your experience and stuff. Work experience is more about quality than quantity, so even if you've done 1 day at a GP, your PS could come out way better than someone who's just listing the 15 placements they've had without actually talking about it or how they've progressed from there

There is a list of criteria that Sheffield use to assess the personal statement which can be found on their website. Its way more important for you to meet these criteria than to talk about the PS solely


This is great to hear. Hope everything is going well for you

Although can I ask when you were applying and writing your PS, did you ever just feel like it was pretty standard?

I'm on my fourth draft and I cover all their checklist, but it doesn't really seem 'excellent' if you know what I mean. I like my last paragraph, but that's about it.

I did have a few doubts over my personal statement, but on the whole I knew that I'd done a lot of research into what I needed to write, what I needed to avoid etc.. On top of that I luckily had a tutor at college who was an ex-admissions tutor (albeit not for medicine) who has looked through thousands of statements over the years. He went through my PS with me one to one about 6 or 7 times, so that made me feel a lot more confident. Do you have anyone at your college who has a little experience in personal statements who could read through everything for you?

I guess you just need to be confident that if you've done your research and you've made sure you've worked long and hard on it, your PS is going to be the best you can make it. I don't think it needs to be "special" in some ways. I didn't think mine was particularly spectacular, I just know that I included everything needed and that it was focussed and didn't ramble on.

I wouldn't worry too much about it. As you said, you've covered the whole checklist, and as you're on your 4th draft, you must have worked hard on it and possibly had some sort of input. You're probably just being over-critical of it, which is just human nature.

That's actually very comforting believe it or not. I don't have a tutor with experience, but a lot of the staff in my sixth form are very supportive and have gone through getting others into medicine so I'll go to them and show them what Sheffield are looking for mainly in a PS.

I do think I've worked hard considering I started writing it some time in May/June, so its probably not as bad as I made out. I'll go through mine again and make sure I don't ramble on and I've got everything to a sufficient detail. I hope I am and I think you're right

Thank you so much

Can I ask you how you found your first year at Sheffield?

I've really enjoyed it thanks!

There's been a few issues and problems that somewhat ruined my year but they were personal issues with flatmates etc rather than any flaws with Sheffield.

The medical school are great, very informative, most lecturers are great (some not so much, but you will get the odd few wherever you go), the styles of learning are broad and the placement we do in January, whilst most other first years at other schools are doing exams, is really great to get used to being on a ward before the main clinical placements come along. Nightlife here is great and very broad for a relatively small city centre (relative to the fact I'm from Birmingham), there's still loads of places I've not managed to make it to after a full year there.

Basically, I am full of praise for the place, and would recommend it to most.

I'm sorry to hear that. Hopefully everything is better, especially since you probably won't be living together again this year

Yeah, that's expected. I really do like the structure of the medical course Sheffield offer. How much patient contact would you say you got in your first year? I'm from London, so pretty much all other city centers will be small but it does still seem an exciting city, I can definitely think of worse.

I've heard Sheffield have the best students union in the country. How true would you say that is? I don't know whether that was an exaggerated claim

We got quite a bit of patient contact considering it was only first year. The 2 week placement is focussed purely on us getting as much contact with patients as possible, and starting to learn how to take histories. I would say I took histories from over 50 patients in those 2 weeks, 2 of which needed to be extended enough to present during our final exam. On top of that we have something called patient encounters, which is a day where we simply go into the clinical skills lab and talk to some real patients who have chronic conditions and take their history. This is really helpful because you get a longer time to talk to the patient than you would in a regular hospital setting so once you'v done a basic history you get to delve deeper in a lot more aspects of their illness and how it affects their life. Finally, we do an assignment called CAS (community attachment scheme) where you are assigned (in pairs) a patient in the local community who has a chronic illness. You are expected to visit them at last three times in their homes and you get a very in depth report from the patient about their condition and many it determines many different aspects of their social life and psychological health. You then write up a report on the patient.

I'm not too clued in on other medical schools, and so couldn't give you much comparison, but I can say that I'm more than satisfied with the amount of patients I've come into contact with over the past year, and it definitely helps to remind you that you are doing career involving people, which is sometimes lost in the endless lectures, seminars, labs etc you get in first year.

The only thing Sheffield don't do, which I know at least one other school does is physical examination skills in first year, ie learning how to carry out a "full physical". I personally don't find this to be a big deal, because we get so much extra patient contact at Sheffield, and learning how to do physical examination often involves meeting more actors/simulators/healthy volunteers than it does real patients.

With regards to the student union, I can confirm that what you heard is officially true; we were actually voted best SU in 2013 in a poll somewhere (don't ask me who ran the poll etc). The SU puts on some great nights out and has a lot of other facilities such as work and social spaces. I personally haven't spent too much time there, as the medical school is very slightly out of the way, but I can tell you that it managed to win that award whilst still under refurbishment. By that I mean, since I started in 2012, at least 1/3 of the building hasn't actually been open or available for use. So if we can win such awards during periods of refurbishment, I'm sure it will be even better in September when the rest of the place re-opens.

Thank you, I think I do actually like how its organised. Plus you don't spend too much time with patients as a first year

Oh wow, pretty impressive, although I think if I did go to a med school, I'd like to be a part of the SU. Is that like a general medical students problem or do others not have trouble accessing it?

I wouldn't say I necessarily have a problem accessing it, I just chose not to, more out of laziness and also because I don't have much need for it outside of nights out.

Put it this way: walking from halls, the closest university building is the medical school. The rest of the uni with exception of a few buildings such as sociology and drama are around 5 mins from the medical school. The only time we have classes outside the medical school is dissection (once a week) and ILA seminars (once every two weeks) amongst a few other one-off classes. So the only time I walk up as far as the SU is when I have one of those two things.

The medical school has it's own library with a cafe, reasonably sized social space and lot of study space. So, because I'm lazy, I tend to just stick to this area rather than bother walking up to the SU.

I do go there every now and again for a change in scenery/something different to eat, and it's never an issue getting there. I would say it's probably quite similar with most medical schools, in that they (or at least the other places I looked at) seem to be a tiny bit out of the way compared to the rest of the campus, and often have their own facilities.