sanjtheman
Junior Member

hey - just realised i prob met you on wed at brum right? Thought your backgound sounded familiar. How did your interview go in the end?

Hi Sanj.

Just about to post a reply on the birmingham forum, which will have interview stuff in it. Hope it helps, if not just ask.

Ive applied to Bham, Warwick and Swansea (all 4 yr) and have recieved an interview for Bham in Jan. Youve mentioned that they asked questions on the GMC and the NHS, were these questions about the institutions themselves or things like 'what makes a good doctor' - which is littered throughout the GMC website.

LOL, in the few minutes ive been speaking to you this page has more than doubled in the amount of hits its recieved. I see what you mean about accepting any place you get - its the horrible nature of this whole process and enjoy the fact that your a realist! a lot of the other people i speak seem to talk about their applications as if the decision is theirs, when in actual fact to be given a place for 1/4 of the places you apply to is an achievment in itself.

my email address is sanjay_khanna@hotmail.co.uk - if you prefer contacting me on that.

I'm not sure which uni is my 1st choice. I really did like bsms though. I've aso applied for grad entry so financially that would be better but is OUTRAGEOUSLY competitive. Frankly, if i get an offer from anywhere i'll take it as i like all the places i've applied!

No other interviews as yet but i haven't heard that any1 else has either so i'm trying to be patient and not neurotically chasing the postman!

There were a couple of questions about the nhs and the gmc that i dont think any1 in my position would have known and if they did then they should really get out more! But the science questions were relevant to a biomed course so when i blanked i probably gave a bad bad impression :s

Have you applied to all 5 yr courses? or a mixture?

oh also, they definitely make the graduate interviews harder than the undergrad ones - i was hoping they'd be similar. One undergradgot asked what a stem cell was - i would have gven a limb to have that question!!

Hi!

My interview went ok...well....it was pretty tough to be honest. They will ask you a few general questions (work exp, hobbies) about yourself from your personal statement (which they have infront of them) and then they ask a few scientific questions. I suggest if you have mentioned something scientific in your p.s. that you read up on it. I wrote about musular dystrophy and they asked me about polygenic and monogenic diseases and selective pressure...i panicked and gave a TERRIBLE ANSWER!

Everyone is really friendly and you get a presentation about the school at the start.

Most of the people there were 17-18yr olds and i think i only met 2 other graduates and there was about 40 people there. I spoke to the admissions tutor and he said most graduates are invited in february unless you are COMFORTABLY above the "threshold". Which is a good sign for us i suppose! One of the stuents said that if you are there in november they basically WANT to give you a place and are just checking that you arent a complete weirdo!

Also, they said they would get back to us in about 3 weeks (mid december). I'm already replaing it in my head and thinking "why the hell did i say that!"

If there is anything else you want to know let me know and i'll try my best to help.

Hope it all goes well. Just stay calm (unlike me) and u'll be fine.
What are you graduating in exactly?

Hey there,

Well, I stumbled on the way to improve DA by mistake. Last year when I did the UKCAT, my big problem with the DA was that I couldn't remember precisely what the codes meant after glancing at them. I had to continuously refer back to them, and I probably wasted a whole 2 minutes (or more) just going back, re-reading the data, and then processing it. Even though my memory's fine, processing information simultaneously is another matter entirely.

I stumbled upon this game on Facebook called "Who's Got The Biggest Brain?". It's an application that supposedly "tests" different abilities with a series of mini-games. I found that, after playing it enough times recently, the DA section became easier, for some odd reason...

So, I tried out some other things to achieve the same result. Dealing with numbers or words (i.e. Sudoku and crosswords) really helps out, as does reading a lot of text.

So, as you can see, there's no way to actually revise for the DA test. Instead, you can only improve your own attributes; preparatory work, really.

And, DMX... You met the guy? That's pretty cool; I heard he said some pretty off-the-wall things about Obama, so... XD

I hope that was useful for you, good luck.