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You’ve already taken the first step: you’ve decided you want to study medicine. So why do you need a mentor? Do the other 20,000 applicants who apply each year use a consultant? It’s well known that there is a large disparity in access to medical school in the UK. 80% of medical students come from roughly 20% of the sixth forms. What does that tell us? Accurate, up-to-date information with trained coaching makes a wealth of difference in a student’s outcome. So no, not all applicants use a consultant, but those who do have a great advantage.
There are 3 key things you can expect to gain for the medicine consulting sessions:
Accurate: The information given to you is always current and up-to-date. She updates the guidebook on an on-going basis with the help of a dedicated team. See what career advisers think of the advice in our Get into Medical School Application the Guidebook here.
Straightforward: about what she can and cannot do for you. With just a 1 hour session, she will give you a clear understanding of your chances and the plan you can follow to strengthen your application.
Personal: Dibah is passionate about helping applicants. Once she meets you, you can continuously stay in touch with her for additional advice and updates via texts, Whatsapp and email. If it takes less than 15 minutes of work to answer your query, there is no cost.
Once you’ve registered for a consultation session, Dr. Jiva will send you a detailed questionnaire to fill in about their profile and will prepare your session accordingly so it’s personalized to you.
She will then run a session via video conference. She usually recommends that in the session the student is accompanied by close relatives that support them in their application – this is often parents for undergraduate applicants, or a significant other or a friend for graduate applicants.
The ideal time to have a consulting session is 1 to 2 years before applying. So if your application deadline is the 15th October 2019, we wish we met you by 2017. Why so early? Well, when you meet Dr Jiva early, there is a lot more that she can do with respect to helping you strengthen your medicine application. Also the earlier you understand how “the system” works, the better you can prepare yourself to jump through hoops.
Despite the above being true, most students do get in touch within the year of their application and her success rate is still 100% getting her students in so she must be able to help you, even late! With dedication, there is always time to improve an application. The medical schools in the UK are so different from one another on how they select students for interviews that focusing on helping you choose where to apply with your profile is for most students the most crucial game changer in their application.
Did you know that some medical schools give you a guaranteed interview with a certain UCAT score and don’t look at the GCSEs at all while other programmes use almost solely the GCSEs to decide who they interview?. There are also those interesting programmes that require the UCAT to apply but then do not use the UCAT in choosing their applicants, yet it remains a requirement to have done it. There are over 30 programmes to navigate, soon to be over 40 with the new medical schools being built in the country so keeping track of all the subtle differences that affect your chances in each programme is no easy task to do one your own.
Dr Jiva has experience helping students get in who have the IB, various european baccalaureates, US and Canadian high school grades, Indian grades, as well as more than 10 other educational marking systems. She can help you understand the strength of your results compared with the medical school’s requirements. If you have a French Baccalaureate out of 20, you may think that there is an equivalent to your grade in British System. But unfortunately, it is not that simple. If you apply to UK medical schools with the French Baccalaureate, some medical schools will not accept it even if you are the top of your class, while some may require you to have an average of 16 and others an average of 14. This is true for grades from all educational systems where you cannot simply think about what is the equivalent British grade, but instead you need to find out for each programme how your achievements would be considered. Dr Jiva can speed this up for you 10 fold.
Another consideration which is specific to international applicants is how to decide where to apply, as beyond the selection process, the competition ratio for internationals may be the most significant factor affecting your chances. On the medical schools website you will find how many international students they accept, as well as how many total applicants apply. But sadly, that does not tell you much about the competition within the international applicants pool. It is easy to get fooled and apply to a school that accepts 14 international students rather than one that accepts 4, but maybe the one that accepts 14 received 100 international applicants, while the one that accepts 4 only got 8 applications. These numbers are not correct but they illustrate a very real point which occur every year. Dr Jiva will help you understand where you have the best chances taking into account your fee status and the international competition ratios.
My experience was excellent. Dr Dibah explained whole process very nicely and cleared all doubts. Session was very helpful and will strongly recommend to others.
It was very good as I was given the correct information to make my decision if which unis to use. It was a confidence boost and the advice was very useful.
Dr. Jiva Dibah, who is trained as a medical doctor, gave us clear, informed personal advice that allowed us to change our preliminary list of schools to which we could confidently apply. We discussed 10-15 schools within a short time span, receiving information that was not easily available on the internet, or that we had simply completely overlooked, and insights about how attractive studying and working in different parts of the UK might be. Finding a medical school where you have a decent chance of being accepted is low even with outstanding grades and non-academics and decent UCATs, and Dr. Jiva will help you match your strengths to the school's application process and requirements. We will have a second meeting when the UCAT final scores are out. Thank you for the inspiration and guidance!
It was very informative and much needed explanation of next steps in my planning. Thank you so much Dibah.
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