I was fortunate enough to have jumped through the hurdles that lie on the way to medical school, and there are quite a few benefits on the other side. One of these is being able to talk to doctors, health professionals or community members that have had previous experience as interviewers. The following is an excerpt from a conversation I had with a past interviewer to understand what they are looking for in medical interviews.    1. As a community member are you concerned about the medical/dental focus of some of the scenarios? “The scenarios in the MMI (multiple mini interview)...

Many of the personal qualities that the UMAT aims to assess in prospective medical students are the same qualities that are required to be a good doctor. Whilst the UMAT can only assess what you put on a paper in multiple choice format; the medical interview that will follow, can look for these qualities in person.    Your choice of words, body language, attitude and way of thinking will all be up for examination in the medical interview. Without some internal self-reflection, you will not be able to paint a detailed enough picture of yourself. A lot of these qualities we...

Year 12 is a juggling act between all-important tests and exams with your other commitments, be it sport, music or a part-time job. On top of this, you have to squeeze in quality time for your family, friends and personal relationships. Well, once you leave Year 12, you may find the added pressures of medical school can be overwhelming at times! Here are my trialled-and-tested tips for reining in the chaos that University can be at times. Honestly, if someone had given me these three pointers in my first few weeks at UNSW, it would have made the transition immeasurably easier!...

Preparation is key for any exam, and UMAT preparation is no different. But we’ve all had that horrible experience when the nerves hit, and all that preparation is thrown out the window because your brain is more interested in stressing itself out than answering the exam questions. But you can, of course, prepare for that too. 1.    Practice Since I’m supposed to be telling you what to do when it feels like preparation isn’t working, you might not expect a synonym for “preparation” to be the top tip. But it is, so hear me out. Nothing is as reassuring as...

The University of Newcastle (UoN) has taken a unique teamwork approach within their Bachelor of Medicine course, collaborating with the University of New England to create the Joint Medical Program. Although this joint effort represents a new modelling of the course, UoN has offered an undergraduate Medicine course for almost forty years, and has gained an unofficial reputation for creating doctors with superior clinical skills. Their use of ‘Problem-Based Learning’ to train students to think critically and integrate concepts has been extensively harnessed by other medical schools. In this article, 4th year medical student Emma gives us further insight into the...

So you’ve decided to spend x hours per week preparing for the UMAT. Well done on making a commitment! But it doesn’t end there. The next step is to squeeze as much as you can get out of those UMAT preparation hours. One way of doing this and making the questions work for you is to carefully review solutions. When going through UMAT practice questions, it’s very tempting to avoid reading the solutions for one reason or another. As someone who achieved 100th percentile in the UMAT, I’ll try to make a case for reading the solutions all the time.  ...

Delivering coherent answers in a medical interview is no easy feat, but unfortunately, that is only half the battle. The interviewer is trying to see if you have the qualities that would make a good medical student and more importantly, a good doctor. These qualities can include being resilient, motivated and self-aware. And thus, the questions and/or activities they ask of you are all trying to assess if you possess these qualities. The first step in you presenting desirable qualities to your interviewer is you being aware that they are looking for them instead of blindly answering each question. A good...

There are many different approaches to problem-solving that have been established in psychology. Firstly, there’s the Thorndike paradigm, which involves blind trial and error 1 . More purposeful approaches are the Gestalt approach, and the cognitive approach.  The Gestalt approach involves solving problems as a whole 2 . You see the problem, you see what you have, and then you try to see how everything fits together. If the question is routine, it’s very easy to figure it out. If it isn’t, well, sometimes you gain insight, but sometimes you come up with an idea based on what you’ve encountered before...

The Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) course at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) is the newest addition to NSW's undergraduate medical courses, opening its doors for the first time in 2007. UWS has a particular commitment towards providing health care and education for the Western Sydney region, including a focus on the area of Indigenous health. To find out more about the UWS medical course, I caught up with Jess, a third year medical student at Western Sydney.   Evie: So Jess, you're now more than half-way towards graduating from UWS! Could you share with us what the Medicine...

Have I prepared enough for UMAT? As school assessments begin to pile up and the date of the UMAT exam looms closer, this one question can create great anxiety. As a MedEntry workshop helper, questions like, “when did you start preparing for the UMAT?” and “how much practice did you do every night?” are amongst the most frequent that I receive. With such a high-stakes exam like the UMAT, it can often feel like no amount of preparation is enough. This feeling can become increasingly dominant as the exam approaches, and you may find yourself ‘hitting a wall’ with your UMAT-related...

For many students, UMAT preparation begins with enrolling in a UMAT tuition program such as MedEntry. But boy, there sure is a lot of stuff on here, isn’t there? How exactly should you use all of the resources, such as Practice Exams, Drills and Eureka? In this post, I’ll share how I navigated the MedEntry LMS to ultimately achieve 100th percentile in the UMAT.   The UMAT is important. It is worth approximately one third of your application to most medical schools. Obviously it is unfeasible to spend as much time on the UMAT as you do on schoolwork, so I...

Amidst the stress of preparing for the UMAT and studying for your other exams, it may be tempting to not spend time on extra-curricular activities, so that you can focus on getting the marks you need to get into medicine. After all, they won’t contribute directly to your score, right?    However, participating in extra-curricular activities, whether it be joining your local cricket team, volunteering for a soup kitchen or being captain of the chess club, will help you not only be a better person, but be a better candidate for medical entry. Don’t believe me? Here are three reasons to...

The new LMS provides even easier access to your UMAT video guides. Simply click on the blue ‘Video Guides’ icon under the ‘Learn’ category to access all of your UMAT preparation video guides. On the LMS you will find video guides that cover all three UMAT constructs: Logical Reasoning and Problem Solving, Understanding People and Non-Verbal Reasoning. You will also find specific guides covering particular types of question, for example, Pick the Middle, Missing Segment, and the new Transformation type of question in the Non-Verbal Reasoning construct. Challenging concepts in UMAT will be tackled and explained in detail. These UMAT preparation...

Are you all aboard the express train to Procrastination station? Are you experiencing a motivation crisis? Are you just about ready to give up?       Well you’re not going to give in to the internet, not this time. I am here to remind you WHY you should be studying for the UMAT right now.   The UMAT is one test. If you do well in the UMAT, you will have significant leeway with your high school results, which is not one test but a result based on a series of assessments and a number of different subjects over an...

So you’re going into your final year of schooling, and you’re super duper set on being a doctor. There are lots of ways you can keep hold of medicine as a big picture throughout this long and sometimes arduous year. By putting some of these points into action now, you will increase your chances of getting straight into med, pump up your motivation over the year, and be an awesome doctor in the future!   ·          People – get amongst them! Medicine is all about the people. In your career you will interact with others from diverse backgrounds, and it...

In last year's UMAT, there were some changes to non-verbal reasoning questions in the UMAT. Although the structure, number of questions and broad types of questions were the same (pick the middle, missing segment, next in the sequence etc) there were three main differences: A few completely new question types that had not previously appeared in the UMAT A different approach to pick the middle questions required compared to previous years' UMAT A shift towards more positional type questions In this blog, we will briefly go through these changes and explain how MedEntry is updating our materials to ensure our students are well prepared...

  Preparing for the UCAT is similar to preparing for a marathon: it requires training, preparation and strategies to optimise your performance on the test day. Just as an athlete prepares for a major sporting event, so you must prepare yourself to sit UCAT, which is one of the most important exams that you will face in your career. We can learn much from athletes about optimising performance in UCAT, as outlined in this TED talk by Martin Hagger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG7v4y_xwzQ This talk discusses how highly successful athletes prepare themselves before a competition. The main points are summarised below, with an emphasis...

The LMS has a fresh new look and it is even more user-friendly than before! When you log in you will see that we have made it even easier to access all those awesome UMAT resources on the LMS. Put simply, you can select to either Learn, Practice, Check or Get Help .   Learn..............instant access to the MedEntry guides, forums and extra skills development module      Practice..........instant access to the many thousands of UMAT practice questions in their various forms       Check............instant access to see how you are progressing       Get Help.........instant access to help...

Receiving an interview offer brings you one step closer to gaining a spot in medical school. The hard work, however, is not yet over! Interview preparation will maximise your opportunity to secure a place as a medical student. Some applicants believe that there is no point in doing preparation for the Multiple Mini Interview (MMI), as they believe that performance in the interview is solely based upon your personality. Although your personality will affect your interview to some degree, practice can improve your ability to express yourself and your thoughts. Practice will allow you to showcase to the interviewer those characteristics...

The Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) is now used by several universities, alongside the UMAT and ATAR, to determine entry into medicine courses. Unlike traditional panel interviews, the MMI features multiple stations, in which you are marked by different assessors. Therefore, the ideal approach to the MMI is different to the approach for a panel interview. Each station in the MMI has a strict time limit. Many applicants may find the process rather rushed, as you are spending a short time in each station, before being quickly moved on to the next. There are a set of questions which are designated for...