St George’s Medical School: Overview

Funded in 1733, St George’s Medical School is the second oldest medical school in the UK with a long tradition and many notable alumni, including Henry Marsh or Edward Jenner. It’s also one of the few UK medical schools that offer a 4-year MBBS programme for graduate students.

Since SGUL medical school is located, quite literally, within a renowned South London hospital, medical students at SGUL will experience a lot of clinical exposure, from as early as year 1. Moreover, St George’s is a healthcare-focused university, so everyone you will meet on campus will have a common interest with you and something to do with medicine!

💡 How To Prepare for Medicine Interviews at St George’s?

Preparing for medical school interviews requires more than just reading an article or doing a mock interview. It requires intentionality, structure and commitment. Luckily, with Medfully it is simpler and more efficient than ever:

Pre-interview Selection:
🔢 How does St George’s select for interviews?

GCSEs/A-levels: Both GCSE grades and predicted grades aren’t used by SGUL beyond checking if you’ve met the minimum entry requirements

Personal Statement: The personal statement is not given much weight when selecting students for an interview at St George’s medical school.

UCAT: 750-950 students who have scored the highest in the cognitive skills section of the UCAT will be invited to the interview at SGUL (provided they meet minimum entry requirements). Until now, the SJT has not been considered by SGUL when shortlisting candidates for interviews but will be from now on (2024 entry).

📊 What is the lowest required UCAT score to get an interview at SGUL?

🇬🇧 Home Students: Lowest = 2710, cut off, Average 2783

🌍 International Students: Lowest - 2710, cutoff, changes each year.

🧑‍🎓 Graduate Students: For both home and overseas graduate students applying for medicine at St. George’s the UCAT cut off was 2810 for 2022 entry.

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📤 When does St. George’s University of London send out interview invitations?

Typically, SGUL starts sending interview invitations in November and continues on a rolling basis until March. In the last years, it was possible to book a specific date on which you wanted your interview to happen.

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 How many candidates get interviewed for Medicine at St George’s?

🇬🇧 Home Students: Out of 1358 home students who applied for 2022 entry, 712 got interviewed for medicine at SGUL (52%)

🌍 International Students: 260 international students applied for medicine at SGUL for 2022 entry, and 120 have received an interview invitation (45%).

Interviews at St George’s University of London:
🗓️ St George’s Medicine Interview dates (2024 Entry):

Historically, SGUL conducted all medicine interviews between early December and late March.

💬 What’s the interview format at SGUL?

We don’t yet know what format will SGUL medicine interviews take this year and this section will be updated as soon as that data becomes available. We’d also recommend you to follow SGUL’s official medicine website for the latest updates. However, in the past years that’s how medicine interviews at St George’s looked like:

Pre-Covid:

• MMI, 5-8 stations, each lasting around 5 minutes (45 minutes in total)
• stations have involved everything - a question, a task, a role play
• like in all MMIs, each station was evaluated separately, by a different interviewer

For 2021 and 2022 entry:

• remote MMIs (RMMIs)
• on the interview day, students received a link to a list of interview questions
• then, they were meant to record their responses to the questions and upload them online
• each question was assessed by a different interviewer to ensure a fair assessment

🏆 How likely is it I’ll be given an offer after an interview at St George’s?

🇬🇧 Home Students: For 2022 entry, 712 interviews at SGUL have eventually resulted in 445 offers (63% chance of getting an offer once you are invited to an interview).

🌍 International Students: For 2022 entry 120 international students have been interviewed, and 44 of those (36%) have been offered to study medicine at SGUL.

💅 What to do before the interview at St George’s Medical School?

• read St. George’s guidelines on how to prepare for their MMIs here
• prepare a formal interview outfit in advance, try it on and see if you feel confident and comfortable in it
• plan your journey - if you are invited for an in-person interview and have to travel from far away, make sure to arrive in London a day or two in advance, so that you can be fresh on the day of your St George’s medicine interview
• increase your confidence and interview knowledge by preparing using Medfully
• read up on the latest events in medicine
• read carefully the invitation email - it will contain important information on what to bring on the interview day and what to prepare for
• dedicate some time to prepare for a role play station (rumours have it that SGUL was keen on conducting role plays in the past!)

⏳ How long does it take to hear back from St George’s?

You should hear back from SGUL within a few weeks of your interview.

🧠 SGUL Medicine Interview Questions (2024 Entry):

On their website, SGUL has been so kind as to outline a detailed list of topics that can come up in your interview, with example questions that were asked in the past. Below you can find a mix of questions adopted from SGUL’s website and our own adjusted for the interview style at St Georges:

Motivations For Medicine:

• Why would you make a good medical student?
• What are the three most important qualities of a doctor? Are you nourishing them? How?
• What made you apply for the medical course at St George’s?

Suitability For Medicine:

• “Travelling on the underground in London, one of your friends becomes separated from the group and it is their first time in London. Explain your plan of action.”
• You were cat-sitting for your neighbour while they were on holiday and the cat ran away. Explain how you would break the news to your neighbour and how you would comfort them.

Medicine ‘Hot Topics’:

• “Explain to us how is the NHS funded.”
• What has been the largest advancement in medicine in the last 20 years?
• How do you imagine the NHS in 10 years' time?
• If you could choose to allocate an additional £20 million to either of the following areas of healthcare, which one would you choose and why? Cancer research, mental health, Covid-19 research, palliative care, prolonging life research.

Teamwork:

• “Explain, without gesture or mime, how to tie a shoelace.”
• “Explain to someone with a learning disability how to tell the time using an analogue clock”

Work Experience:

• What has been the most memorable part of your work experience?
• What challenges to working in a healthcare setting have you observed during your work experience?
• What did your work experience show you about the nature of teamwork in medicine?

🚀 TOP Tip: Have a hard time answering any of the above questions? You’ll find insider tactics to tackle all of the above questions and formulate convincing and structured answers at Medfully - The Best Medicine Interview Preparation Resource.

Please note that these aren’t questions that have been asked at SGUL in past years. Publishing such information would be against SGUL’s policy. The above questions are adjusted for the interview style at SGUL and are meant to give you a broad sense of the questions you may face.

✅ St George’s Medical School Interviews: 3 Tips

Follow Medical News & Take Notes

If SGUL states distinctly on their website that questions about the latest events in the NHS and the rest of the medical world can come up, you are almost guaranteed that they will. Therefore, make sure to follow regularly latest medical news (BBC Health is a great starting point) and catch up on what has been happening in medicine and science for 3-6 months before your interview date at SGUL.

But don’t end on that. Understanding and being able to discuss these, sometimes complex topics, requires more than just passive reading. Create a list of those topics in your Notion or a word document, make notes in there every time you stumble across a worthwhile article and review the cheatsheet regularly to wrap your head around it.

Learn About The NHS

St George’s Medical School is in fact located in a renowned NHS hospital and the course structure at St George’s is skewed towards clinical contact. This is why during the interviews, the interviewers at SGUL have been known to ask about hospital life and the NHS.

Make sure you understand the basics of the NHS (i.e. how it is funded, what are the different bodies responsible for, what’s the structure of the NHS, what are the values underlying the NHS etc.) and can fluently talk about them. You can find all the information about the NHS that you need to know for your interviews in our comprehensive interview knowledge bank.

Role Play and Scenario-based Questions

To evaluate your suitability for the clinically heavy course at St George’s, the interviewers will want to see how you’d react and if you have the predispositions to act responsibly and maturely on the wards.

This is why you can expect role-play (stations where you have to play a scene with an actor) and scenario-based (”What would you do in that situation”?) stations in your SGUL interview. Once you sign up with a free account at Medfully, you can find loads of tips on how to prepare for all kinds of role-play and medical-scenario questions.