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Reapplying to Medicine (UK) - A comprehensive guide

2018-08-06 · Podcast or interview · Ali, Anton · recording, 30:24 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Medicine and his doctor years · mode: Conversation and interview · tags: Aimed at students

In the first Medical Mondays video, Ali interviews his friend Anton, who got no medicine offers at the first attempt and a Cambridge offer after a gap year: get feedback, rebuild the personal statement with more experiences, get a job, be tactical with the fifth choice and make the most of the year.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Ali opens Medical Mondays, a new series for medical students and medicine applicants

  • ★★ Ali starts Medical Mondays, a series for his niche videos for medical students and medicine applicants, because his audience has grown far beyond them and he does not want to confuse other viewers. — 00:00:00
  • ★ Ali's 30-minute interview with his friend Anton was filmed a few months earlier, and Ali had completely forgotten it existed. — 00:00:29

00:01:23 — How it felt to get no offers; a week to mope, then decide whether you really want medicine

  • ★★ Anton: At his first application to medicine Anton got one interview, at Nottingham, and straight rejections from the rest, which he found absolutely gutting. — 00:01:52
  • ★★ Anton: After his last rejection Anton was full of self-doubt about whether he was good enough for medicine; friends and family pulled him through. — 00:02:17
  • ★★★ Anton advises medicine applicants with no offers to give themselves a week to mope, then work out what to do and get practical. — 00:03:00
  • ★★★ Anton says the first question after getting no medicine offers is whether you really want medicine, since the next year will be tough; friends of his with four rejections chose other paths, which he calls fair enough. — 00:03:00

00:03:42 — The action plan: feedback from the universities and the Leeds score sheet

  • ★★ Anton says medicine applicants learn of their last rejection by about April and personal statements are due the next September, leaving about six months to improve the application. — 00:03:42 · Personal statement
  • ★★★ Anton advises finding out what was wrong with your medicine application: his senior tutor emailed the four universities he had applied to for feedback, and only one replied. — 00:04:23
  • ★★ Anton: Leeds sent Anton a sheet scoring his application: as he recalls, out of 40 points, with 35 or more needed for an interview; he scored 34. (hedged) — 00:04:23
  • ★★ Anton's main problem was his personal statement: on the Leeds score he recalls about 25 of the 40 points were for the personal statement and about 10 for academics. (hedged) — 00:05:05 · Personal statement

00:05:28 — Work experience as hoop-jumping that shows willingness to sacrifice

  • ★★ Anton: At his first application Anton dismissed work experience such as shadowing doctors or volunteering in a care home as unnecessary rubbish, and only at medical school saw why it is asked for. — 00:05:56 · Work experience
  • ★★★ Anton says medicine work experience teaches you no medicine: it shows you are willing to sacrifice your free time to do something you do not really want to do. — 00:05:56 · Work experience
  • ★ Anton dreaded going to volunteer in a care home but loved it once there, and tells medicine applicants not to be put off. — 00:06:44 · Work experience
  • ★★ Anton says medicine is much about sacrifice, such as doing rectal examinations he did not want to do and giving up weekends and social events for deadlines, and work experience is proof of that willingness. — 00:07:09 · Work experience
  • ★★★ Ali personally did not find work experience useful, since you learn nothing medical, but takes Anton's point that it shows you are dedicated enough to medicine to jump through the hoops. — 00:07:38 · Work experience
  • ★★ Since every medicine applicant has good grades, Ali sees required work experience or volunteering over a long period as a way of screening applicants out. — 00:08:07 · Work experience

00:08:37 — Using the gap year: a job in a GP practice; getting feedback through the school

  • ★★★ Anton advises medicine reapplicants to do something with the gap year, such as a job, rather than travel on their parents' money; his interviewers liked that he had worked. — 00:08:37
  • ★★ Anton: In his gap year Anton asked his local GP practice for a job and got an admin role doing about 50 audits, work medical students start only in their fourth year; he suggests others try the same. — 00:09:03
  • ★★ Ali thinks a request for feedback on a medicine application is more credible coming from your school than from a random person. — 00:10:18
  • ★ Anton: If your school will not ask universities for feedback, Anton says to try yourself, though going through the school was much easier. — 00:10:18
  • ★★ After his UCL rejection Ali emailed UCL asking for feedback and got really good feedback, which he says he will talk about another time. — 00:10:18 · University College London

00:10:51 — Comparing the rejected and the successful personal statements

  • ★★ Anton: A whole paragraph of Anton's rejected personal statement was on tutoring a friend; in his successful one it shrank to a single line, because his other experiences left so little room. — 00:11:24 · Personal statement
  • ★★★ Anton came to see that the introduction of a medicine personal statement matters much more than a single cheesy line, and expanded his. — 00:11:53 · Personal statement
  • ★ Anton's successful introduction adds his love of science, eagerness to learn and desire to care for others, and traces his interest to the history of medicine, naming Ignaz Semmelweis and Ambroise Paré. — 00:11:53 · Personal statement
  • ★ Ali will link Anton's two personal statements in the description so viewers can compare the before and after. — 00:12:43 · Personal statement
  • ★★ Anton asks applicants not to copy his personal statements but to see what they can take from them, even just the structure. — 00:12:43 · Personal statement
  • ★★ Anton: In his first personal statement Anton padded out very little experience, a few days at a GP and time with a surgeon, into wordy sentences. — 00:13:12 · Personal statement
  • ★★ Anton recommends unusual experiences: he shadowed a coroner for two days, which mattered for death certification and which his interviewers liked as something unusual. — 00:13:42 · Work experience

00:14:25 — Being 18 for hospital work, extracurriculars and sport as a tick box

  • ★★ Anton was refused hospital work experience before he turned 18, but once 18 he got a role in the hospital. — 00:14:25 · Work experience
  • ★★ Anton: In the X-ray department Anton could help, moving films and helping patients, rather than just shadow, experience he says the year off gave him. — 00:14:54
  • ★★ Anton says medical schools want extracurriculars but not at a high level, such as his football for two teams he captained: they really like applicants to have a life outside medicine. — 00:15:37 · Personal statement
  • ★★ Ali recalls his school's head of university admissions telling of a private school that put every medicine applicant without a sports team onto one, which shows how much of a game medicine applications are. — 00:15:37
  • ★★ Anton agrees that a medicine application can be very much a game, with a tick box for extracurriculars. — 00:16:25
  • ★★★ Ali advises a medicine reapplicant with no sport in the personal statement to use the year to take one up, for example at a local badminton or squash club, which accept beginners. — 00:16:25 · Personal statement
  • ★★★ Ali says the personal statement is probably what a medicine reapplicant can improve more than grades. (hedged) — 00:16:56 · Personal statement
  • ★★ Anton says resits come too late, so a reapplicant applies with predicted grades again; because he did not resit anything, he could get an unconditional offer. — 00:16:56

00:17:14 — Loneliness and golf, resitting exams, the money from a gap-year job

  • ★★ Anton: The gap year can be lonely when friends go to university, so Anton recommends joining a sports team; he and two friends took up golf because it can be played as a three. — 00:17:21
  • ★★ Anton: Resitting is easier a year later with plenty of time, Anton says, if you pick only the one or two modules you really need to bump up; resitting the whole year is as hard as the first time. — 00:17:50
  • ★★ Anton: Living rent-free with his parents in his gap year, Anton started his job part-time and moved to full-time as he got bored. — 00:18:28
  • ★★ Anton probably earned well over ten thousand pounds in his gap year, working nearly full-time above minimum wage in a well-paid GP job. (hedged) — 00:18:58
  • ★★ Anton spent some of his gap-year earnings on a couple of months away before university and kept much of the rest, which carried him through university. — 00:19:24

00:19:59 — Does he regret the gap year

  • ★★★ Anton is glad he took the gap year: he had not applied to Cambridge the first time, thinking he would not get in, applied on a whim the second time and got in. — 00:20:19 · University of Cambridge
  • ★★★ Anton suggests that medicine reapplicants, with a better personal statement and the grade they missed, push for one slightly higher university and keep the other three choices similar. — 00:20:19 · Personal statement
  • ★★ Anton says having had a job helps a doctor, who treats the general public, to understand what a nine-to-five looks like. — 00:21:05
  • ★★ Anton says that although not getting into medicine felt devastating, a year is nothing and makes no big difference. — 00:21:05

00:21:47 — A tactical fifth choice and the interview question about not getting in

  • ★★★ Anton used no fifth choice at first, meaning to reapply; the second time he put Newcastle, for biomedicine (or perhaps biochemistry, he cannot remember), because it offers a transfer to medicine, a route he would have taken rather than another year off. — 00:21:47
  • ★★ Anton thinks four or five universities, among them Newcastle and Leeds, offer a route from a biomedical course into medicine. (hedged) — 00:22:32
  • ★★ Ali points medicine applicants to The Medic Portal's article on alternative routes into medicine, calling The Medic Portal the famous competitors of 6med but the article good. — 00:23:01 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali advises medicine applicants to be tactical about their fifth choice. — 00:23:01
  • ★★★ Anton: Asked at his Norwich interview what he would do if he did not get in, Anton said he would take his Newcastle biomedicine place, try to transfer to medicine, and otherwise finish the degree and apply as a postgraduate. — 00:23:30
  • ★★ Anton thinks his Norwich interviewer liked the answer because it showed he had thought of every route into medicine and would not be deterred. — 00:23:58 · Medicine interview

00:24:09 — Interviews the second time around; what he would have done after a second rejection

  • ★★ Anton: At his first medicine interviews Anton struggled with standard questions such as why medicine, because he had only one or two experiences and kept reusing the same GP example. — 00:24:27 · Medicine interview
  • ★★ Anton: At his second round of medicine interviews Anton never felt stuck: the year off gave him something new to say to every question. — 00:25:08 · Medicine interview
  • ★★★ Ali says a medicine reapplicant who has made the application better in the gap year is very likely stronger than most applicants without one, and one who has not has probably wasted the year. (hedged) — 00:26:04
  • ★★ Anton: Had he failed a second time, Anton says he would probably have applied for biological sciences and then graduate medicine, because trying the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. (hypothetical, hedged) — 00:26:34
  • ★★★ Anton says getting a job is really useful practice for medicine interviews: he did about five interviews to get his job, so the medicine interviews were less scary. — 00:27:04 · Medicine interview

00:27:24 — Summary of the practical advice and parting words

  • ★★★ Ali sums up the advice for medicine reapplicants as having a plan of action and making the absolute most of the gap year. — 00:28:19
  • ★★ Everyone Ali has spoken to who took a gap year was happy they did; new skills and experience from it help in life and in a medicine application. — 00:28:19
  • ★★★ Ali advises medicine applicants to prepare a bank of varied experiences as talking points for questions on communication, empathy, teamwork and why medicine, rather than one example for every question. — 00:28:48 · Medicine interview
  • ★★ Anton's parting advice to applicants who did not get into medicine: keep positive, as the gap year turns out to be one of the best years of your life, and do not get stressed about it. — 00:29:17
  • ★ Ali asks viewers with questions for Anton to leave a comment and says he will get Anton to reply. — 00:29:51

In the description and comments

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Anton · Gap year · Personal statement · Work experience

Also: People: Ambroise Paré · Ignaz Semmelweis

Projects: Medical Mondays

Organizations: 6med · Newcastle University · The Medic Portal · University College London · University of Cambridge · University of Leeds

Concepts: Medicine interview

Places: Norwich · Nottingham

Only in the description or credits: Emmanuel College

Also centred on Gap year: My Last Day as a Doctor - Reflections

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