Access Into Medical School: Guide - Your community for widening participation in medicine: UCAT training, BMAT training, mock interviews and mentorship.
Access Into Medical School: Guide
A group of friendly medical students, committed to making the process of getting into medicine fair for all.
It is our passion to support all young people into medicine, especially those from underrepresented groups. As a team, we have written numerous, online resources to help you get into medical school. We also offer a free mentorship scheme that encourages gifted students to consider medicine whilst improving the quality of their application.
Helping improve applications to medical school
We believe in a medical school admission process that is more equal. Our main priority is ensuring that support for medicine applicants is freely available to those that need it.
Mentoring for students, by medical students
We're a team of medical students that are keen to offer mentorship and advice to help improve your chances of getting into medical school. How to get into medical school
A calculator to discover your medical school
Your free calculator that highlights the medical schools you might be eligible for, including which schools offer reduced criteria for underrepresented groups. Admissions calculator
Improve your chances of getting into medical school
We know the hurdles you must jump over to study medicine because we're all medical students. We are passionate about "widening participation" and we want to fight the socioeconomic factors that make it more difficult to get where we are.
Meet our team
How competitive are medicine courses in the UK?
~75572
Applications to study medicine in 2020.
~5%
Increase in applications for medicine from 2019 to 2020.
~ 33298
Invitations to interview in 2020.
~ 9340
Places offered in 2020.
Source: UCAS Data and FOIs.
How do I become a doctor?
You'll need to get into medical school first. As the statistics above show, it's competitive and demanding. But we also think it's very interesting and so much fun! We want to help all students with their application to medical school. AIMS.Guide offer help for the entire application process, from selecting the right medical school to writing your application and sitting interviews. It's all completely free too, thanks to our volunteers!
Featured Blog Posts
How Healthcare Experiences Made Me Grow
Imposter Syndrome in Medical School
Applying to medicine from South Shields – This will be fun…
Recognition of medical applicants' contextual data is key
Approximately 75% of applicants to
medicine have a parent in the
highest occupational
socio-economic group.
Just 4% of UK doctors come from
working class backgrounds.
Widening access may positively affect
service delivery in addition to any social
justice rationale.
Medicine has made far too little progress and shown
far too little interest in the issues of their access.
It needs a step change in approach.
Get in touch
Ask us a question
At AIMS.Guide, we have a dedicated team to provide a holistic package to help you get into medicine. The services we currently run are:
- - Admissions calculator: This will produce a report of medical schools in the UK that you meet the eligibility criteria for. It will also tell you if you're eligible for any adjustments to your application due to contextual information, such as attending a poorly performing school.
- - Blog posts and our Medicine 101 Guide: Our blog posts discuss the real life experiences of students at medical schools all over the UK. Meanwhile, our Medicine 101 Guide is a series of factual articles that are designed to arm you with the knowledge you need to get into medicine.
- - Mentoring scheme: Our mentorship scheme connects medicine applicants (mentees) with medical students (mentors). We make every effort to connect like-minded individuals of similar backgrounds in the hope that young learners are inspired. This programme is offered to provide a point-of-contact for admission advice and tips and to help maximise the potential of your application.
That is a very hard question to answer as there are a lot of things to consider. Nonetheless, medicine is one of the most competitive courses to study in the UK. For the best chance to succeed, students should not only meet the academic requirements but also demonstrate that they are well-rounded individuals with skills, hobbies and interests that make them stand out from the competition.
Here at AIMS.Guide, we want to empower young people to recognise their stories and differences, and nuture those who have a passion for medicine. Underrepresented groups also have the ability to succeed in medical school and we want to do everything we can to help them prove this. More and more people from disadvantaged backgrounds are accepted into medicine thanks to increased national "widening participation" and diversity efforts.
We will help as many people as possible who share our goal - to help disadvantaged students get into medical school.
We strongly believe that all opportunities should be accessible to everyone and that their personal context should be given proper weighting. This means applicants with a relative disadvantage (eg. poor school performance or socioeconomic factors) should have their background considered when determining their capability. Because of this belief, we give priority to widening participation applicants when filling the spaces of our programmes.
However, we are here to improve everybody's chances of getting into medicine, offering our services to all. If you'd like to benefit from these services, or if you want to help us deliver them, don't hesitate to get in touch!
Our organisation was founded by Robbie Bain and Reece Hill, 4th year medical students at Newcastle University. We continue to be a voluntary organisation that is supported and delivered by medical students who offer their own time to develop resources, content and help applicants. We are a North-East based group but we provide services to anyone who wants to study medicine in the UK. We hope to expand our team nationally in the coming years.