Post-UCAT Discussion 2022

[jasmine.p]

This is a great chunk of info, thanks so much for this. Would it be frowned upon to use extracurriculars from past years by the way? E.g. last year I had some great extracurriculars for rural leadership - ministerial state advisory council, volunteering in my community visitor centre, working in rural aged care for quite some time. As well as this, I referred to a lot of my experiences in rugby league and volleyball for my JCU interview and I did get an offer for 2023 entry, but I wasn't sure if that was in spite of or because of using older extracurricular experiences to answer questions. I plan on volunteering and working full-time this year since I'm on a gap year as well, but some of my past extracurriculars seem very valuable in terms of what they taught me about various aspects of life relevant to medicine. This might be hard to answer, since of course, nobody has a ruberick or marking criteria, or even the same mindset as the interviewers, but I was just wondering if you, or anyone else, had a general idea of what's appropriate to mention and what isn't, or if there even is such a thing as something inappropriate to mention if you can explain what you learnt from said thing. Sorry if this seems like a silly question.

MMIs are completely different to panel interviews (like I think JCU has). In MMIs, chances are you won’t be asked and may not be given the opportunity at all to talk about extracurriculars and past experience. Do NOT try to work your experience into your questions, instead focus on answering the question directly. Only talk about your experience if asked about it directly, or asked about your motivation. MMIs are much more focused on whether you possess the necessary traits for medicine (e.g., empathy, integrity, communication, collaboration etc.) rather than your past experience. If you talk about your experience rather than answering the question directly, you are likely to get very little or no marks.