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Spanish student here...

Hello fellow students!

Currently I am doing my second year of High-school in Spain, looking forward to study Medicine at college. As I have always wanted to study abroad and further improve my skills at English, for the past few years the thought of studying at an university in the UK has been as tantalizing as it can get.

So I have been doing my homework, and it seems that I need to fill an application form through the UCAS website. At times it was utterly confusing, deriving in countless nights of distressed sleeping. An unassailable task by all standards ( keep in mind that I am not that familiarized with the UK education system), but in the end, after getting used to the yammering of my mouse while trawling for some enlightening information about the whole thing, I found my way out of this mess thanks to the TSR.

Still, I am left with TWO major problems, which I hope you can help me with so I can get this thing to work :

-I am planning on sitting both Bmat and Ukcat. UKCAT aside, BMAT involves science-oriented knowledge( at least for part 2). In the Admin test service website, it states clearly that one must know everything in the England National Curriculum till stage 4 in science, is that correct?

Basically what I have to do is revise those contents or ONLY stage 4 contents of science?

- The other thing that has been bugging the hell out of me for the past month is directly linked with the reference. I had the best marks of my high-school last year (10/10 in all subjects), I have been doing some heavy volunteering and shadowing of my desired subject( medicine in this case) and it seems that those kind of things must be included. Yet it happens that I do not have a clue on how a reference letter is written.

Hold your horses! What I was trying to say is that I do not know who should I get to do the reference letter. Think about it for a second. I live in a country where English is hardly spoken and the only reasonable person that could write the reference in my School is *roll the drums* my English teacher.
How could this person predict my grades if he only knows my skills in English but not maths or chemistry or biology? So I was thinking of my Principal, who does not know that I exist, with whom I have never had a word with and who does not know English.

So my scheme is asking my principal to write the reference letter, get my English teacher to translate it and finally send it back to the my principal.

For what is worth, I am not asking you for a better plan but rather for tips because I am near 100% sure that this person has never written a reference letter and I do not want him to make a mistake that could have been prevented if I had actually told this person what does it entail. Some insight in how do you predict a grade ( y'all know that it needs to be realistic not some over inflated grades) or the information that needs to be included would be great so I can tell my Principal how to (UCAS is quite vague about this subject anyway...)

All in all, I hope I did not sound overly conceited. But I am telling you, there is no one that I know that can help with these issues so that is why I am trying with you people!

Thank you!

edit: tl;dr some help with what to study for bmat and how to make a reference letter.

(edited 9 years ago)

Reply 1

laurabri_7

I know it's been a long time simce you wrote this, but I am having this problem too. I want to study Mathematics and Physics and I asked my Maths teacher to write my reference. She doesn't know how to speak English, but she is the only person capable of writing about my skills in maths.

We've got the problem with the language sorted out, but as UCAS ask for her phone number, I am afraid they'll call her and realize she doesn't speak English. Did that happen to you?