Newcastle or Manchester med school

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The biggest factor should be that Manchester is PBL and Newcastle is lecture based, which do you prefer?

Personally i would say Newcastle is the better choice, but i'm slightly biased cause it's the one i'm leaning towards firming.

the thing is i would like a mix between lectures and pbl, i heard ncl does lectures but also does seminars/pbl sessions (although no that often) so thats whats making me lean towards ncl a little more than manchester,

during the open day i heard from some students that people in ncl uni arent that nice (however most people i met were nice), do you know if theres any truth to that?

Newcastle don't do any PBL - I think we had a cursory nodd (1 seminar once in pre-clinical) to fulfill the GMC requirements that say there's needs to be at least some PBL in a medical course. The seminars we do have in pre-clinical are taught/facilitated sessions mainly discussing sociology, public health, communication skills, etc.

The biggest deciding factor is between lecture-based (Newcastle) and PBL (Manchester). I don't think it's true that Newcastle students aren't nice - certainly not my experience.

hey, thanks for the reply, could you tell me exactly what the teaching is like at Newcastle medical school especially for the first year (i know its case led, and lecture heavy but whats it like on a day to day basis.
also could you give a general idea of what a 1st year medics timetable looks like at newcastle.

thanks

Days are generally 9-5 with an hour break for lunch. Seminars will always be held in the afternoon for pre-clinical. Teaching is integrated and is systems-based, and loosely case-based. For example, consider teaching on the heart. There will be a 'case launch' lecture which generally provides some clinical context (i.e. describes the case of a woman having a heart attack), with the hope that this clinical context helps you learn all the forthcoming basic science. This is followed by lecture-based teaching on cardiac physiology, DR sessions on the anatomy of the heart, clinical skills sessions on examination of the CVS, etc. The cases really are just a way for you to organise the learning into discrete chunks and provides some clinical context, which is useful, but it's perfectly possible just to kind of ignore the case. Interspaced within all of that is teaching on professionalism, communication, law, sociology, etc. Here's an example of a timetable for first year, describing the cardiac stuff I mentioned:



There's not just 1 case running at once - in addition to the cases, there's the modules that these cases sit within. There's usually around 2-3 cases running at the same time (e.g. cardiac and you can see at the end of that timetable the beginning of a metabolism case).