Alternate title: "Ways to screw yourself over as a medical school applicant that you didn't know about"
Hi everyone,
As I suspect my activity on the site is likely to decrease a whole lot starting next year, I thought I would put together a whole lot of what I believe are a lot of important responses to questions frequently asked on this site.
As you know, finishing your high school education is an achievement, but for those who want to get into medicine, it often comes with a lot of uncertainty in regards to your future. If you happen to be successful in getting into medicine - well done - (I hope you know what you are getting yourself into.)
For most people every year though, after year 12, the overwhelming oversupply of applicants for medical school will leave the vast majority disappointed.
This is covered in many other threads but by virtue of the fact that undergraduate medicine entry tends to require ATARs in the 98-99 range, as well as usually requiring a UMAT score in the top 5-10% of the population - at least 90% of the population taking UMAT are removed from the pool this way as well. This makes for one hell of a lot of people who applied for medicine and don't get in. Using the student numbers from the Medical Deans website www.medicaldeans.org.au/statistics/annualtables/ , there are, as of 2016, fewer than 1000 places for Australian year 12 leavers in Australia, and just over 500 in New Zealand (not accessible to year 12's, only accessible after one year of university study). A few extra are accounted for through provisional pathways.
Given that nearly 20000 people take the UMAT every year a rough estimate of your chances of entry if you sit the UMAT is around 5%. This means that if you want to do undergraduate medicine, you're in a pool of applicants whereby around 95% of you will fail to get in.
Now what happens every year on MSO is we have a lot of people asking about other pathways into medicine, or degrees to do prior to medicine. This is where I see a lot of people make decisions that end up being very costly in terms of time and/or money as well as opportunity cost. I will cover each in an individual post to make it easy for people to link to this; in order of worst things to do first.
Disclaimer: There is not a lot of academic evidence surrounding some of these statements (I suspect no university would ever let people collect data about how ridiculously high their rate is of not getting their medical science graduates into medicine, ha) so many of these statements are based on my observations during my time at MSO and my experiences at two separate medical schools, as well as the experiences of a large number of students from many different backgrounds (especially medical science) from MSO. If further evidence comes up regarding this, feel free to send me a private message or simply to reply to this thread.
Hi everyone,
As I suspect my activity on the site is likely to decrease a whole lot starting next year, I thought I would put together a whole lot of what I believe are a lot of important responses to questions frequently asked on this site.
As you know, finishing your high school education is an achievement, but for those who want to get into medicine, it often comes with a lot of uncertainty in regards to your future. If you happen to be successful in getting into medicine - well done - (I hope you know what you are getting yourself into.)
For most people every year though, after year 12, the overwhelming oversupply of applicants for medical school will leave the vast majority disappointed.
This is covered in many other threads but by virtue of the fact that undergraduate medicine entry tends to require ATARs in the 98-99 range, as well as usually requiring a UMAT score in the top 5-10% of the population - at least 90% of the population taking UMAT are removed from the pool this way as well. This makes for one hell of a lot of people who applied for medicine and don't get in. Using the student numbers from the Medical Deans website www.medicaldeans.org.au/statistics/annualtables/ , there are, as of 2016, fewer than 1000 places for Australian year 12 leavers in Australia, and just over 500 in New Zealand (not accessible to year 12's, only accessible after one year of university study). A few extra are accounted for through provisional pathways.
Given that nearly 20000 people take the UMAT every year a rough estimate of your chances of entry if you sit the UMAT is around 5%. This means that if you want to do undergraduate medicine, you're in a pool of applicants whereby around 95% of you will fail to get in.
Now what happens every year on MSO is we have a lot of people asking about other pathways into medicine, or degrees to do prior to medicine. This is where I see a lot of people make decisions that end up being very costly in terms of time and/or money as well as opportunity cost. I will cover each in an individual post to make it easy for people to link to this; in order of worst things to do first.
Disclaimer: There is not a lot of academic evidence surrounding some of these statements (I suspect no university would ever let people collect data about how ridiculously high their rate is of not getting their medical science graduates into medicine, ha) so many of these statements are based on my observations during my time at MSO and my experiences at two separate medical schools, as well as the experiences of a large number of students from many different backgrounds (especially medical science) from MSO. If further evidence comes up regarding this, feel free to send me a private message or simply to reply to this thread.
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