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IB?

Hi!
I want to go into medicine, looking for advice from people who have done the IB and then gone on to medical school about things like workload, social life, depth of scientific knowledge and the application process. The IB really appeals to me (I may end up doing A-Levels but the IB is probably my preferred option as of right now).
Thanks!

Reply 1

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

I know someone who did the IB then did medicine at Cambridge - she seemed to think the IB was a good background as on arriving, she was one of the few in the cohort who could actually write essays worth a damn since all the A-level students had just done all STEM subjects and not done any long form prose writing since GCSE. Anecdotal of course but, it's something.

The application process for medicine will be the same. You might even be able to double up your medicine work experience for CAS stuff - I think they also require you write a reflective essay for that now or something, which would probably be good practice in thinking reflectively about your experiences since reflecting on things is pretty important in the scheme of applying to medicine I gather.

Social life will be what you make of it. In my experience doing IB (albeit I was never applying to medicine) there tends to be a strong "cohort" feel due to schools often offering IB alongside A-levels and fewer doing IB, and with the workload there often is a sense of everyone being in the trenches together. So that can be kind of nice to pull people together socially. The downside of a small cohort is that it can be prone to cliqueness I guess.

"Depth of scientific knowledge" seems a bit redundant - it's accepted by medical schools (and all other scientific courses, which I gather rely on the background much more than medicine where I get the sense some of the requirements are a bit arbitrary and just for a general awareness of some topics) so you will cover what you need to know. Anecdotally again, I was told by someone who did A-level Chemistry after her sister did IB Chemistry (both did medicine at uni) that IB Chemistry was apparently considered much harder out of the two in terms of how much depth it went into on some topics. So I'm sure you will be fine on that front.

That said the workload is higher than A-levels and you really need to keep on top of things (and if stuff starts getting away from you it can be hard to catch up at times!). However that could be a useful transferable skill once you're in uni and studying there as you'll be used to managing your own learning directly a bit more perhaps, and organising yourself etc in that way.