Hi all!
I am a freshman undergraduate currently at a university in the United States. After undergrad I wish to study at Oxford or Cambridge for their equivalent of our graduate school and I am struggling to figure out their system. Do they ave an equivalent of our med school or our law school that would allow me to practice medicine or law in the US? Also what should I be doing to increase my chances of studying post grad at one of the two of these universities?
Any addition info about going to/ applying for grad school here after going to an American university would be helpful!
Thank you!!
I am distracted by the two grad schools that you mention- you aren’t sure whether you want to go medicine or law?! But in both cases the short answer is ‘not really’ and the longer answer is that there are ways through it but they are much harder than going the usual route, and are not what I think you are imagining.
Law and medicine in the UK are undergraduate courses. Oxford and Cambridge have graduate entry schemes for medicine, but 1) they are intensely competitive even for local students and 2) they have a hard cap on international students (NHS rules, not theirs)- and they rarely even take the maximum they are allowed to take. You would want to be truly world-class to be looking at getting in the regular way, much less for graduate entry.
Neither Oxford nor Cambridge have a US-style law school- you can do a masters, but you have to already have a law degree or qualification.
Getting licensed to practice either law or medicine after being certified in the UK is not impossible, but it is an order of magnitude harder.
For other graduate programs it is actually somewhat easier (relatively speaking!) for an American to get in to a post-grad program at Oxford or Cambridge than to get into undergrad. You will find that they make their expectations quite clear on the course pages.