Access

Work experience ideas

• Local care homes
• Holiday camps seeking volunteers for e.g. week-long camps
• Mentoring e.g. reading programmes with younger pupils
• Pharmacy
• Occupational therapy, physiotherapy, other “allied health professionals”
• GP (don’t worry if you can’t get it!)
• CUSU Shadowing Scheme
• Sutton Trust summer schools
• Lab work

BMA advice for students
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice/career/studying-medicine/becoming-a-doctor/work-experience-for-students

How to reflect

The Gibbs cycle

Work experience: keep a diary (anonymised!) and choose a patient a day to focus on; read about their condition, think about it from their perspective and that of their family. What did you take away from what you saw? Did anything change your thinking, and if so, how and why?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5673148/

Reading ideas

• Health section of the news
• New Scientist
• Student BMJ
• Books by Atul Gawande
• Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
• Hippocratic Oaths (Raymond Tallis)
• When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi)
• With the End in Mind (Kathryn Mannix)

https://www.prospectivedoctor.com/15-books-medical-school-applicants/

What’s the course like?

Cambridge offers a traditional course, meaning that the pre-clinical (lecture-based years 1-3) and clinical (placement-based years 4-6) years are quite separated. Years 1 and 2 are based in town for university lectures and practicals and college-based supervisions. Year 3 is similar but is a year ‘out of medicine’ – you can choose what you study, with the only limitation being that the department you are joining must agree to have you. Often students join a Natural Sciences programme for a year but you can also do subjects such as Biological Anthropology and Engineering if you choose to do so. In years 1-3 terms are relatively short (normal ‘Cambridge’ terms).

Years 4-6 are based at the Clinical School, Addenbrooke’s Hospital. There is a rolling timetable where a week of ‘review and integration’ lectures is followed by a 6-8 week block of hospital or GP placement. Terms are longer but the weeks are less intense than in pre-clinical school and there are lots of extra-curriculars based at the clinical school that everybody gets involved with – including a famous/notorious charity pantomime that runs every January!

What happens at the interview?

Interviews are done on a college-by-college basis so this depends on where you apply. Usually there are 2-3 interviews with the members of college who are responsible for delivering pre-clinical supervisions and that is what they try to mimic: they want to see how you think and will push you to think harder.