Getting into medical school is certainly not easy but at the same time, it is not impossible either. Although the chances of receiving an offer from the university may seem remote, many students fail to do the basics and hence get rejected. This means that as long as you carry out the basic tasks really well, you will be dramatically increasing your chance of getting into university to study medicine and then become a doctor.
There are lots of figures being bandied around on the internet about how competitive it is to get into medical school. As a general rule, think of it like this. When a cohort of students applies for one place at medical school, half of all the students will be discarded fairly early on. Of the remaining half of students left over, half of those will also be eventually rejected by the medical school. So does that mean that it is impossible to get into medical school? To answer this question, there are two sides of the coin. The first side of the coin is that, yes it is difficult because all of the students who will be applying will already have achieved high GCSE grades and will have been predicted the three necessary grades for their 3A level subjects. In other words, you are already being pitted against the “best of the best.” The other side of the equation is that despite the large number of able students applying for medical school, many will make unnecessary errors which will lead to them being rejected. These errors include inadequate UCAT preparation, wasting time on forums trying to get “free” courses, not preparing early enough and not being willing to invest now for later gains. Sure enough, there will be some medical students saying that they never went on any application courses such as UCAT or interview preparation courses and they were accepted, but these will be in the minority and there will be hundreds more who wish they had had expert advice from the outset.