Two Cambridge University offers for Medicine
Maya Shah and Isobel Thornton, both in Year 13, have recently received offers to study medicine at The University of Cambridge. We asked Maya about her experience while applying for the university and why she applied in the first place…. Maya writes: "I think the main
reason I applied to Cambridge was the impression it gave & the friendly students I met when visiting my sister there; though it's reputation as one of the world's top unis definitely helped! For medicine, you have to take the BMAT
(BioMedical
Admissions
Test) and then be interviewed before you can receive an offer from Cambridge. After already dedicating my summer to the UCAT (UK Clinical Aptitude Test), I wasn't thrilled at the prospect of another admissions test but I knew I had to work hard if I wanted a chance of an interview, which paid off. The interview for Oxbridge is different from most medical schools as it is more science-based, rather than more skills/personality-based. So I made sure I had read around certain topics I had written about in my personal statement & and things that had been in the news: Alzheimer's Disease, medical inequalities, the Covid-19 vaccines. You also need to know your A-level subjects well as they may ask you questions on this or need this knowledge to answer certain questions. I also did a mock interview with my sister's friend who is a Cambridge medic which was extremely helpful as it got me used to the style of questions asked & when I didn't know the answer she gave me hints to help me get there. My actual interview was quite different to what I expected, and this threw me off a bit and afterwards I actually thought it had gone very badly & I really thought I had little chance of an offer, so I was very pleasantly surprised come the 25th of January."
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