Please need urgent help for medical uni advice

It's nice to see a prospective medic with the same a levels Also as ecolia Has rightly Said, you do not Need To Be 18 To Get Hospital Work Experience !

If you have a C in maths you have to make sure all your university options are smart. Do research and email universities that arent very clear about their admissions policy. for example bristol explicitly say you need an A in maths to apply.

Ahhh okay thank you, but i have researched soooooo much and no luck

sally120 – before you get too far into this I think the C-grade for maths could be a problem but I’m not sure - both my daughters studied medicine at Leeds - one is intercalating atm (i.e. taking a year out between years 3 and 4 to study another degree subject for 1 year, something she was particularly interested in); the other graduated in June 2017 and is now working at an F1 (1^st year of two years of foundation training) in a hospital – she will do 3 rotations (i.e. work in different roles) in each of those 2 foundation years – she’s been in an adult psychiatric ward and is now in upper gastro (intestinal surgery), I’m not sure where she’ll be off to after that. She did the BMAT. Both had to do the UKCAT – Leeds didn’t ask for BMAT at the time they started but they are now. From what I recall - Birmingham were looking closely at the number of GCSE A-grades (I think they wanted 6-7 and they may well have specified something for maths and probably english). I think it has now become more common for universities to look at GCSE grades for applicants for medicine.

I think you might be looking at work experience in the health care system in a very narrow way - experience in a hospital is secondary care (a care home is also secondary) - as a minimum you need to understand that there is primary(GP,pharmacy, dentistry) and tertiary care (specialist surgery) - you could gain useful experience in any of these areas (and other areas I'll mention below) but more importantly, insight into the field of health care. TBH it sounds to me like you have left your decision to try for medicine quite late. It could well be that, without the right input from your family and your school, you have not realised how difficult and important it is to arrange some kind of useful work experience - you want the experience to help understand what you might be getting in to and whether you can see yourself working in some part of the health service. You also want to be able to talk about what you have learned or understood from those experiences - both face-to-face at interview (if you are lucky enough to get that far) and in your personal statement. Sorting out work experience in a hospital is difficult – you are going to have to keep ringing, asking and pestering to get anything sorted out – it can take many months to arrange. From what my daughters have said, some people didn’t have huge amounts of work experience – surprisingly little from some of the stories I’ve heard. My daughters did quite a lot but don’t but put off by what I’m going to list. Between them they helped other children with homework at an after-school club – that’s working with younger children, they worked with a local charity that runs a club 1 night a week for children and young adults with a range of mental, physical, behavioural and social difficulties – they also helped out at a 4-week summer school (my younger daughter did this as a volunteer/helper for 3-4 years then took over the role of running the summer school herself – even though she is at uni she still gives up most of her summer to do this), both managed to organise a week (or the best part of a week) working in pathology - it consists of many different departments/labs (histology, virology, microbiology, etc – they both got some experience in microbiology), one did get some time on a renal unit. One also volunteered at a care home – most Wednesday afternoon’s for 2 years. One also had the offer of some experience at a GP surgery but, in the end, didn’t take up the offer because of the cost of having to live away from home for a week. The work at the care home was. IMHO, the most important – I would recommend that as something to look at. You only have 4000 characters for your statement so you can’t possibly write about everything – the art is to distil the experiences down into something powerful, very definitely personal and insightful – it must say something about you and your personal response to what you have seen and understood – I think with the right kinds of experience you may not need to experience as much as my daughters did – obviously it helps to have a range of experiences to choose from but it seems to matter more how you communicate your experience in your statement – the mistake would be to simply list what you did, i.e. a worked for 2 weeks in a.... I remember one of my daughters saying things like – how, in the care home, she had seen exactly how a retired doctor, suffering from Parkinson’s, deteriorate over a period of a year that she had known him – or how the teenage lads at the club for young people really latched on to any male helpers – they were so desperate to spend time with them as most care workers/volunteers/helpers that they encounter are female – these are small personal insights that you can probably only make if you experience these things first hand and then go on to reflect deeply on what you have seen. In both the care home and the activity club they learned about a wide range of conditions and about treatment, medication, the tasks of supporting and caring, the practical and emotional problems the families encounter and the impact it can have on siblings, etc. You might also think about trying to arrange some experience in a laboratory at a university where they are doing medical research – not everyone that goes into medicine ends up as a GP or a in a hospital, a few (desperately few) end up working in research. No one in our family is a medic and my girls went to a regular comprehensive school. Both left with 2A* and an A. If you can’t hit those grades the chances are very slim that you find a place – rest assured that the people applying have some confidence they can get those kind of grades (I know 1 person who ended up with a B for something and she was turned down by her 1^st choice – somewhere on the south coast but, by some miracle, was offered a place at (imho) a better uni – Edinburgh – she had some problematic family circumstances that genuinely affected her in the run up to her exams). A very large number of people accepted on to medicine already have first degrees – the number going straight from A-levels to a medical course is not as high as you might think – at Leeds *I think* (and I’m really not sure now of the figures my daughters have mentioned over the years) as many as 30% enter after a first degree – some transfer from another degree (I know 4 people – 1 from physics, 1 from biomedical science,1 from chemistry and 1 from pharmacology), other have worked in the health service (1 as a theatre nurse).

You should not underestimate the preparation needed for the UKCAT and the (even more challenging) BMAT which even more universities are asking for - good scores could open up many possibilities - if you are serious about it then you really need to get cracking on practicing for them - they are not easy - practice will help a lot.

I hope some of this is a help – it’s a very brave decision to even try for medicine – sadly it is massively over-subscribed and imho, there is almost no difference between many who get on a course to study medicine and those who don’t - you’ll know that many people apply several times – it’s very sad that so many talented people are unable to get places.

Hello everyone,
I am intending to apply for medicine, however i have reached a point of utter confusion. I am the eldest so my parents do not know much about university applications.
My question is that, when do i need to apply to University for medicine? (as in which year, month and when do i take my UKCAT exam ect...) As i am currently in year 12 and i am doing chem, bio, english lit and EPQ. Furthermore, what uni accept a C in gcse maths?
PLEASE any help would be very very much appreciated, as i am going through a lot of stress and depression.
Thank you guys.