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Medicine gap year or pharmacy?

SO i've applied to med school (one pharmacy) for the sake of my parents even though i'm planning to take a gap year due to my horrendous predicted grades.
all the med schools rejected me, as expected, but i got a more than generous offer for pharmacy and thats changed my mind a bit. i'm not sure what i should out of these options:
1) take a gap year and work (healthcare assistant), volunteer etc then apply
2) accept pharmacy, do this for a year, apply to med school and drop pharmacy (if i get in)
3) do pharmacy and then apply for medicine graduate entry?
my option right now is number 2, mainly because there's not heap of effort- i've been told that working in a gap year can cause crazy burnout- however, my careers adviser has said that this is too risky. number 3 is something i really dont want to do because itll take too longg.
any advice on this?
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Work Experience as a Graduate or Mature student
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medicine gap year
Reply 3
Original post by StormyInk202
SO i've applied to med school (one pharmacy) for the sake of my parents even though i'm planning to take a gap year due to my horrendous predicted grades.
all the med schools rejected me, as expected, but i got a more than generous offer for pharmacy and thats changed my mind a bit. i'm not sure what i should out of these options:
1) take a gap year and work (healthcare assistant), volunteer etc then apply
2) accept pharmacy, do this for a year, apply to med school and drop pharmacy (if i get in)
3) do pharmacy and then apply for medicine graduate entry?
my option right now is number 2, mainly because there's not heap of effort- i've been told that working in a gap year can cause crazy burnout- however, my careers adviser has said that this is too risky. number 3 is something i really dont want to do because itll take too longg.
any advice on this?


If you're not that sure about pharmacy then it may be hard to motivate yourself to do the work required on the course and incur the debt when you're really yearning to do medicine, particularly if you do it for 3 full years. Working as a healthcare assistant would give you opportunity to have paid work experience to develop your medicine skillset? If you do opt for pharmacy, you'd need to do well and work hard in it to get a good reference for your medical application and you'd need to keep up volunteering and work experience on the side. Good luck with whatever you decide.

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