5 Reasons You Should be A Graduate Entry Medic

In the UK it is much more common to go straight into medical school after completing A levels, however, recently more graduates are applying for medicine. Below are a few advantages of being a graduate entry medic and why we think you should enter medicine as a graduate.

1. More experience

Remember that first week of freshers when everyone thought it would be a great idea to get white boy wasted? Yeah, now remember the day after, how sickly and awful you felt. Now, I'm not saying every fresher is like this but quite a few are. When one first goes to university it feels like there is a mounting pressure to look good, make friends, the right friends, have people that like you, get good grades, eat, meal prep, exercise, get a boyfriend/girlfriend, get a part-time job, manage your finances well, get into as many societies as possible, sleep, etc. After completing that first degree you realised quickly that this is impossible. You learn to focus on the things that you love rather than what other people expect of you. Realise this quickly and you're as good as gold. 

2. Medicine is a little easier

Okay, so we all know that medical school is hard regardless of who you are. However, I found that some (a bit) of the content in medical school was more revision than anything. I remember revisiting the heart and lung anatomy and it felt as though I had already looked at the material beforehand.

It is important to remember that this depends on the degree you did beforehand. Because I did bio-medical sciences this helped. Some of my friends did pharmacology, chemistry etc, and most degrees had some form of a benefit. In cases where the degree does not directly relate to medicine, the experience of being in university and the learned action of studying helps.

3. Knowing you're taking the right steps

There is nothing more annoying than pursuing the wrong goal and realising it's not the way we dreamed it. Medical school is HARD and you will spend a lot of time alone studying. It's nothing like Grey's anatomy. So don't go in hoping to find McDreamy. One of the benefits of doing my biomedical degree was that I wasn't caught off guard. In the first two years I've only been in the hospital a handful of times, and most days I spent learning the anatomy of some part of the body, which I will assure you will get boring a tedious. What helped me was knowing that this wasn't it but it was okay for now. As a graduate, I learnt not to glamorise medicine and take it as a learning step rather than something to display for people to think of you as some kind of great being with the brain of Einstein. 

4. You get to know your learning style beforehand

I have always struggled with my learning style, especially during medical. However, having completed a degree beforehand meant that I have established a lot of learning techniques allowing room for trial and error. So far these are the techniques I use which have been very helpful:

- Lectures: I reprint with my style then annotate

- Anatomy: I use flashcards and spider diagrams

- History taking and patient examinations: I watch videos, repeat techniques on my friends and my pillow (LOL) and rewrite the steps to make sure I remember everything.

5. You get to be a doctor

A lot of people get scared about applying to medical school after a degree because of age. The fact is six, five or four years will pass whether you're a doctor or not. When those years have passed will you regret not pursuing your goals? GO FOR THE DREAM. Age means nothing when you're the best. Several studies have also shown that pursuing medicine as a postgraduate degree might make you a better doctor.