UK undergraduate student for med school

Student Lounge International Students
1

Hi there,

I would really appreciate any unbiased input regarding the following as I am trying to find out the best way to do this:

I am an undergraduate student in the UK currently doing an honours degree in the life sciences and hoping to get into medical school after that. As it is obviously competitive I am wondering what to do in case I don’t get an offer. For those who don’t know there is two admissions tests used for med school and each school selects which test they want individually. Then, cut offs are determined and interview invitiations/direct offers are sent out. The only way to guarantee entry before applying is to score highly on the admissions test.

My alternative is to go to graduate school and do a PhD/master’s degree, preferably in the US as postgraduate funding is much better than in the UK. Having thought about that, I do not feel I can commit to a grad school degree knowing I could possibly get into med school as it takes some time (and I am pretty sure I would want to reapply to med school) and as starting another degree would affect payment of my student loan, basically leaving me with expensive private loans to finance med school.

Working and then reapplying would be the other option but this could possibly mean wasting time.

Maybe I oversaw something but to me both options don’t seem very favourable to me. I would generally love to do a PhD/master’s but in addition to med school, not instead of it. This might seem like a lot of ifs but I would rather be prepared knowing what to do. Thanks to everyone taking time to read this and help :).

2

You would not be “wasting time” by taking a job while you wait to reapply to med school. That time off from academic life would give you a chance to think carefully about alternative careers before committing to a grad program that is not in medicine.

3

Look into MDPHD programs open to non us citizens?

4

Thanks. That’s actually right, it’s probably not a waste of time. UK grad programs are only 12 month courses with PhD programmes being 3 years. Thanks just actually needed an unbiased view on that :).
@MYOS1634
Thanks. These are great programmes and some of these programmes offer full funding which is great (while I am not put off taking student loans) but the acceptance rate at e.g. Dartmouth is 2.5%. Not sure if it’s worth taking the MCAT given the small acceptance rate as it would require a lot of studying. British degrees don’t have general education requirements so I would need to invest some time to brush up my school humanities skills.

5

You also need to make sure your core classes will be accepted as pre-med prerequisites for US medical schools at all. My understanding was that they usually only approved classes taken at US institutions.

6

Most US medical schools will have an even lower % of acceptance for internationals with US credentials.

7

*pre-reqs are accepted from US and Canadian universities

8

Thanks to everyone!! I do not think I will apply as the likelihood of being accepted to these programmes is not very high.