An Applicant’s Perspective

When it comes to actually choosing which medical schools you want to apply to, you’re a wee bit restricted, cause UCAS only lets you choose four. So you have to look at different things that appeal to you. So first thing I would always look at is the course and what that actually entails, because that is what you’ll be studying for the next what, five to six years. I knew that Glasgow I really liked, because it was a spiral structure. And you would like come back to different things. And you wouldn’t learn everything at once and then never talk about it again.

You’d always like learn a bit about it, then you’d come back in a few months, and you learn about it again. And I think that’s really helpful. And then also I looked at the different cities and like their atmospheres and what they had to offer. So with Glasgow, I really like music. So I was looking at the music life and what it had to offer and also with the uni, what kind of societies it had to offer and extracurriculars. When it came to getting my interview, I did a few mocks So my school organised a mock interview with one of the deputy heads. I told him I wanted to do medicine.

And he was really very good at asking me like the basic questions– the why do you want to do medicine, the why did you want to come to this uni type questions. The interview at the University of Glasgow was split into two different parts. The first part I remember doing was a basic interview. So they asked me the questions like why do you want to do medicine, what attributes do you need to be a doctor, things like that. Very sort of basic interview questions. That lasted about 10 minutes. And then the next station was a wee bit more interesting or different.

So I got given one of two scenarios to choose from, and I had to go into the next station and talk about that for a bit. And I think I had to talk about solutions, NHS budgeting, or like cuts and like money crisis and things. And then after that, I had to talk about just my hobbies and like general non-medicine related questions. So like what I did for fun, and I think they asked me what kind of hobbies I had that would relate to medicine. And they just asked me to like relate things back, like have you ever worked in a multidisciplinary team and stuff like that. So it was really good.

I actually really liked the way Glasgow did their interview.