UCAS is over...

...and my future has been decided. After 6 long months of waiting, that feeling of uncertainty has finally been lifted. I am now certain that I will be spending my university years up in Aberdeen. I didn't have to make this choice myself, seeing as Aberdeen was my only offer, but I'm still incredibly pleased.

There are a number of reasons why I'm happy with this outcome. Firstly, when I visited Aberdeen Medical school to attend my interview,  I felt very welcome. All the staff and students that I met were really friendly and I thought the tour of the medical facilities was a nice added touch. Even during my interview, I felt as though the interviewers genuinely wanted to learn more about my personality and attributes, as opposed to the "checklist" method used at Glasgow, where they simply tick off boxes when you say the right thing. Although I appreciate that selecting medical students is a very difficult task, I don't really agree with the way certain medical schools decide who to accept. Using Glasgow again as an example, they do not invite applicants to be interviewed unless they achieve a UKCAT score over a certain cut-off (around 650 in past years). I think this is unfair as there will be many excellent applicants who would probably become great doctors, but are not given the chance to show their strengths because they under-performed in a silly IQ-style test. 


Anyway, that's enough slagging Glasgow off for now. Maybe I'm just a little bit bitter that they rejected me after interview. I don't know. What point I really tried to make was that Aberdeen treated me like a person, and not just another applicant they felt obliged to question, and that means something to me. I have a feeling that I'm going to really enjoy my time up there; September can't come quick enough!