3 REASONS I GOT REJECTED FROM MEDICAL SCHOOL: WHAT NOT TO DO! IGCSE's,UKCAT,Interview | KharmaMedic

what is up guys karma medic here and welcome back to another dose Oh almost episode without teeth much better what is up guys karma medic here and welcome back to another dose today I want to talk about the three reasons why I believe I was rejected from medical schools the first time I applied when I was leaving high school hopefully you can hear what I have to say and take my advice that you don't make the same mistakes that I did when I was applying and hopefully that helps in getting you guys and acceptance to medical school okay so when I was in high school I always did really well on all of my exams all of my assignments my homework whatever the rest of it I was pretty studious and I always strive to perform the best that I could academically and so when I finished my GCSEs I think I had 10 a stars and 1 a and that a was in biology surprisingly enough but even with my IB I was predicted 43 points when I went to apply for medical school now 43 points out of 45 as I'm sure a lot of you know is pretty good so with those grades I felt like I could apply to all the most prestigious you needs all the most difficult unions to get into and that I would totally be fine so that's the first thing that I did wrong I only applied to the most elite the most difficult the most competitive universities that I could think of and the reason I did that was because I was under a false impression of having done super well in my high school years that I thought if I had applied to these great unions that since I've been doing so on the past I'll probably still do well in the future and I'm gonna be fine now the thing when it comes to applying to medical schools after high school is that they're extremely extremely competitive as I'm sure you already know and because of that you really need to apply strategically you can't just apply to whatever schools you feel like whatever you think is the coolest school unfortunately you need to look at your grades you need to look at the universities and apply strategically you apply to your own strengths to increase your chances of getting accepted so when I applied out of high school I applied to Cambridge Edinburgh Imperial and King's College London now the stupid thing about that was that I didn't give myself any safety options I only applied to schools that would give me offers which were extremely extremely high and I didn't have a mixture of other schools that would give me more safe offers in case the future didn't go so well make a list of all the medical schools in the UK and really there aren't that many there's something somewhere between 20 and 30 schools I believe just make a list of all the medical schools and you can start eliminating with them one by one logically and strategically once you know what your own grades are or what your predicted grades will be you need to go to each individual University and look at their specific cut-offs if they state that you need a UK account of at least 700 to apply then don't apply if you have less than 700 and if they state that you need two a's and one a star in your predicted grades you have anything less than that then don't apply you want to make sure that you apply to schools where your grades on your background is most strategic and is most applicable for example if you don't end up with such a great UK cats war then you haven't watched my videos but you turn end up with such a great UK cat score then you want to apply to medical schools that don't put huge emphasis on the UK cap as you do research you'll find that some schools prefer some parts of the application over others for example some schools will say that the Dookie cat is a very important part of their application I'm more specifically in the situation the situational judgment section whereas other schools will say we don't really care about the situational judgment section we care more about the other three scores and if you look even further you might find that some schools place heavy emphasis on GCSE grades whereas other schools just use them as a baseline cutoff the point I'm trying to make here is that every school is different I can't sit here and tell you one blanket statement that will help you choose which you need to apply to every single University has their own preferences their own cut-offs and you need to do that research to figure out what is best for you if you're a mature student or someone who's how to previous degree so you're gonna enter medicine through graduate entry then that's something you also want to look into there are some medical schools that will take in more graduate entry medicine students than others you can also look at the previous year's admissions data this should all be publicly available information and if you do your research well enough you'll find it other things you can do to help are look online on forums for people talking about the school itself from previous years maybe they have information to share about the interview process or something that they like or dislike about the school and that can help you make your choices - so anyways I feel like I'm rambling the first point is don't apply blindly to schools I ended up getting three straight rejections and then one interview from Cambridge I went to my Cambridge interview but it didn't really go so well and so I ended up with or total rejections now moving on to point number two point number two is that I didn't take the UK cat and the B map seriously enough now you might have heard from a lot of people that you kick on the Bema is an exam that you can't really study for it's an exam that you just have to take and it determines how clever you are that is not the case at all the UK cat most especially is an exam that you can learn how to do it's an exam that you can absolutely excel at to practice and through exposure to questions and just time dedication a lot of medical schools place heavy emphasis on the UK count and they do that because it's very easy for them to set a cut-off and get rid of any applications that place below that cutoff so the UK cap when it came to study for the UK count in 2013 when I was applying to medical schools late 2012 or early 2013 I definitely didn't take it as seriously as I should have I just thought that since I had been doing so one in high school again I had 43 prediction for IB I felt like I knew all of my academic stuff very well I thought that I would just spend some time practicing for the UK can do a couple practice questions and I would do just fine and that's not what happened at all so please take the time to prepare for the UK cat set-aside a good chunk of time you only really need a month maybe a month in a week a month in two weeks if you want to be extra safe but set aside that time and work hard during is that you can perform really well I ended up scoring pretty much exactly average on the UK cap and so that didn't really help my application in any way it didn't exclude me from any of the cuddles but it also didn't propel me and make me more likely to get an interview and really the hardest part about these medical school applications is getting to the interview the interview I find is the most competitive part once you reach the interview you're out of like 30 40 or even sometimes 50% chance of getting accepted so getting to the interview is the hardest part in my opinion yes moving onto number three number three is talking about how to prepare for and be ready for the interview so once you've already applied for TG CLE to schools based on your strengths once you've already studied for and taken the UK car and hopefully smashed it now you've gotten an interview and you need to prepare for that now interviews especially at the young age of 1718 can seem like a really really scary thing and trust me I know but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't take the to prepare for and be as ready as you can the interview is an absolutely great way to showcase to all of the medical admissions people how much you care about medicine how motivated you are and how much you want to get in and you can do this in a multitude of ways you'll mostly be talking about your past experiences you'll talk about any volunteering and care work or shadowing that you've done and these will all bring out of you your motivations for medicine and why you are a perfect candidate to get admitted to their school now for some people talking in front of others or explaining themselves their motivations their justifications comes very easily and they have no problem doing that for others it's gonna be a little bit more difficult and something that you can definitely improve upon with practice now for me I like to think of myself as a really social person I have no problem getting along with others I've know from talking to and meeting new people but it's something about the interview setting that gets me really really nervous and puts me in a different headspace since I haven't done an interview before when I went to my first medical school interview at Cambridge this all kind of hit me like a bus and all in one go and I sort of discovered that I'm a nervous person in interviews I discovered that I tend to swell law I get really shaky my voice starts to crack and these were all very bad things to discover for the first time during my interview when you want to do to avoid this is get as much practice interview as you can afford the real one at your medical school you want to practice with friends you want to practice with family you want to practice with even strangers who are also doing the medicals qualification who also have interviews you guys can sit down and practice together and you can go through these experiences and see what you do before you're actually in the interview room also don't do what I did and just study biology and chemistry and like scientific subjects the interview for the most part is about you who you are as a person and your motivations to pursue medicine also your understanding of ethics and the different factors that come in to certain medical procedures or decisions yes you need to know your biology in your chemistry but that's not the most important thing because that's something you can easily learn when you're at university however your motivations to pursue medicine the reasons why you want to do medicine those are things that are innate to you and those are things that they can teach you once around medical school so that's something they really want to focus on and they want to make sure that you're in it for the right reasons so before you go to your interview do a lot of googling do a lot of searching for past example questions things that can start getting you to think about your reasons for wanting to do medicine and if you do all that practice when it comes to interview day you should be ready for any questions thrown at you and don't worry guys I'm gonna make a whole separate video about the interview process how to tackle certain questions I'm trying to answer them to the best of your abilities and last but not least for the interview something that's really important to me and I know that it might be important to some of you guys watching as well but it's so so so important to learn to control your nerves to learn to retain your composure and be able to eloquently present yourself when you're in interview for me when I stepped into the interview room my honesty I became a different person I was incapable of explaining myself properly I wasn't capable of getting my thoughts across and that's something that really hindered me long term so yeah that's my little bit about nerves it's the worst thing when you actually feel confident you feel like you know your stuff but then nerves get in the way if you can practice that and try and eliminate that from one of the problems during interviews not be absolutely amazing I just wanted to get that out there talk about the three things that I thought led to me getting rejections when I applied to medical school as a school leaver of course after that I went to the University of Toronto in Canada to do my undergraduate degree in immunology and microbiology and then I applied to King's again as a graduate student and I ended up getting in so if you really want to do medicine don't be put down by the first round of applications if it's something you really want to do you can always take a year off you can always gain more experience you can always do another degree and then you can still apply medicine isn't going anywhere it's still there when you apply and you can still get in alright and I think that's it if you enjoyed this video feel free to leave a like if you want to see more videos from me feel free to subscribe to this channel and yeah I hope to you guys in the next one you have any questions if you have any comments leave them down below I'll be having a great day and happy preparing for your UK cat and your applications and all the rest of it alright guys I'll see you in the next one peace

Channel: Kharma Medic

Views: 162,912

Keywords: medicine, medical school, university, rejection, application, UKCAT, BMAT, IGCSE, GCSE, IB, A levels, A level, Interview, medical student, reject, how to get in, how to, king's college london, kcl, imperial college london, imperial, cambridge, edinburgh, university of cambridge, university of edinburgh, the student room, student room, personal statement, PS, rejected medical school, kharma medic, failed ukcat, medical school uk

Id: 2VzH-xNC8EQ

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 28 2018