This is the blog post to which ASOF owes its existence. I had the idea for it about two years ago and thought “That would make a good resource for students. How to get it to them? Oooh, I could start a blog!” I never got around to it. But then I was asked to deliver a five minute talk at a Betta Kulcha meeting – and used this topic. You can watch the video or just read on…
The first step towards getting thrown out of medical school is, of course, to get thrown in. Each year we receive about 3700 applications for 220 places – about 16 applications per place. Other medical schools report the same sort of ratio. Most of our applicants use all four of their UCAS places to apply to medicine, so that means there are four “real” people for every place on a medical course – competition is intense!
Over the years we’ve honed our admissions proceudres – every application is assessed independently by two trained members of academic staff, and from that we choose who we’ll interview – about 600 in all. A panel of three (including a current student) then see this cohort and on the basis of their opinion, we make around 400 offers. You may wonder why we make more offers than we have places; remember most applicants have applied to multiple schools and may well get more than one offer. And, unfortunately, not everyone gets their expected A-level grades. There’s no magic equation for this – it’s done on years and years of experience!
So you can see that we put a lot of effort in selecting who we think are the right candidates for our course. But every year, we get one or two who don’t really want to be here. Usually, they’re been pressured by family or their school but would really want to be somewhere else, doing something – anything – else. They can’t just walk away – they have to be seen to have been ejected unwillingly. This guide is for them.
