CREST award or EPQ

Neither will get you any actual advantage - but a relevant EPQ might give you a good topic for PS and Interviews.

I want to study medicine at uni in the future, and I was wondering whether it more beneficial to my application to do a CREST gold award or an EPQ. For further context, I do 3 a levels (bio, chem, maths) and am predicted A*,A*, A at the moment.
Additionally, I wondered if anyone knew of any good further knowledge courses / free mentoring for either biology or chemistry. Thanks!

EPQ for sure if u want to get into a competitive course like medicine or a competitive uni like oxford... but make sure ur EPQ matches to sum medicine related - im doing it on cancer for example - so u can use it to ur advantage in interviews n personal statement n dat

EPQ wont in itself make it anymore likely that you would get an interview.

I want to study medicine at uni in the future, and I was wondering whether it more beneficial to my application to do a CREST gold award or an EPQ. For further context, I do 3 a levels (bio, chem, maths) and am predicted A*,A*, A at the moment.
Additionally, I wondered if anyone knew of any good further knowledge courses / free mentoring for either biology or chemistry. Thanks!

I did a CREST award because I do 4 alevels and my school wouldn’t let me do an EPQ. You can do CREST and then submit it for EPQ or do an EPQ and submit for CREST so you can do both, EPQ reduces medicine offers some unis so is probably worth it if you are interested in something.

hi what was the crest gold award like? how many words did yours have and what criteria did you have to meet?

I did mine as an experiment and report on the effect of caffeine on heart rate, reaction time, grip strength and blood oxygen saturation. I did 2000 words of research around the subject which was probably a bit excessive but wanted to cover everything. I then did 800 words of method research and evaluation. I did a preliminary study on whether reaction time improves across trials and some basic data analysis. For the actual experiment loads of graphs and data analysis and statistical testing on different parameters which ended up being 1000 words. The conclusion was 500 words. It was about 10,000 words by the end but my friend who did it had way less words it was about 5000 on music and memory. There was also a gant chart, risk assessment and some other things. I actually applied to silver but they upgraded me to gold so I must have met most of the criteria that are on their website https://help.crestawards.org/portal/en/kb/articles/crest-gold-criteria-guidance. The paperwork at the end was super easy as well. It was quite time consuming especially the writing up, definitely more than the suggested 80 hours overall, but interesting and my supervisor was super helpful. Mendeley is a super useful referencing software that I used and saved me loads of time. It was quite difficult to know how much to write or how to set it out because it’s very difficult to find resources for CREST online, but I just used some EPQ resources for writing the report and I think as long as it’s scientific and well laid out it’s fine. When I spoke about it in my interviews they were super interested and impressed, great to link to the uni doing research projects etc.