Showing posts with label Edinburgh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edinburgh. Show all posts

Thursday, 26 November 2015

Plymouth Medicine Interview

After having a rather relaxing week off school, tomorrow I must return to the dreadful 6:15a.m. rise. Although, this time, it's for another interview!
I'm off to Plymouth, which is thankfully only about 40 minutes away, for my second medicine interview. Again, I'm a little nervous but now that I've done one interview, it doesn't feel quite so daunting.
Despite the fact that my top two choices are Cambridge and Edinburgh, Plymouth would be quite a nice place to go to as I will be able to still live at home. Why is that a good thing? Because someone else can still do my cooking and cleaning and be my personal assistant whenever I'm ill.
Living at home while at uni is something quite looked down upon in nowadays, but I think there are many benefits to it. I'm not a party kind of person, so I don't feel like I will be missing out on the 'uni experience' (aka spending every night in a bar). On the other hand, I am really looking forward to moving out and having the independence that will come with any of my other choices.
Another thing I like about Plymouth is that, as it is very close, I volunteer at the hospital associated with the medical school and I did work experience at the medical school, so it is all rather familiar to me.

Returning to Cambridge, I got my BMAT results yesterday, which is the entrance exam to do medicine there. I'm rather pleased with my two main results as I scored above average. However, although I wasn't expecting my essay to be very good, I am still awfully disappointed by my result for it. I hope the rest of my application makes up for it so I still get an interview!

Saturday, 21 November 2015

Cardiff Medicine Interview

On Wednesday, I headed up to Cardiff (luckily not too far from home) for my first medicine interview!
I have wanted to do medicine for as long as I can remember, and now that I'm in my final year of sixth form, with this year came the difficult decision to decide which university's to apply to. For those of you who don't know, you can only apply to 4 medical courses in the UK. Cambridge has been my goal for even longer than wanting to do medicine, so that was an automatic choice (although picking a college is a whole different story...). After a round trip to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Swansea with a couple friends, Edinburgh became my second choice after I absolutely fell in love with the city. For the final two choices, I had no idea so ended up just randomly choosing Cardiff and Plymouth.
With good GCSEs, personal statement and UKCAT result, along with top AS results and impossibly high predicted grades for A2, the medicine interview wasn't much of a surprise, although I will admit that the short notice of only one week was a bit of a pain! I was a little nervous about it, with no practice at all, but it actually went okay. It was really relaxed, and having a chance to talk to other applicants and medical students beforehand really helped with that. The questions were mostly the typical ones, with a few harder topics such as social health, but I am fairly confident about how it went. It seems like I impressed the two doctors more than the medical student though, which I'm not sure is a good or bad thing really.
Now to Cardiff itself. As I never visited the uni, I think it's fair to natter on about the city itself. I quite like the city, having been there on numerous occasions for concerts such as All Time Low and Fall Out Boy. Although not a shopping fan, even I have to admit that the multiple shopping centres, especially St. David's, are rather magnificent. Of course, my favourite shop would have to be the Lego Store! After many hard decisions, I ended up buying Poe's X-Wing Fighter as I am a huge Star Wars fan (trust me, words can't even explain how unbelievably excited I am for the new film). As this was above £50, they were kind enough to throw in a free Lego Christmas train and even an extra Star Wars figurine, for which I am really grateful. Because of the unexpected freebies, I have decided to put the X-Wing back for Christmas as a present from my beloved dog Merlin.

Overall, it was a really good, relaxed day in Cardiff and now all I have to do is sit tight and wait to see if I get an offer. Oh, and prepare for my interview on Plymouth next Friday...