Warwick Medical School: Overview

Warwick Medical School is a truly unique place. It's small, with an intimate atmosphere where everybody gets to know everybody else, and you become part of a large family. It's located right in the centre of Coventry – a city that's buzzing with bars, restaurants and shopping. And the campus itself is housed in a stunning Grade II listed building designed by former pupil Giles Gilbert Scott.

Unlike most other medical schools, WMS offers only an A101 medicine course for graduate students (also called Graduate Entry Medicine or GEM). This means that you can only apply to Warwick Medical School if you’ve already obtained a degree from a different subject than medicine (or are in your last year).

Selection For Medicine Interviews at Warwick Medical School (Graduate Entry Medicine):
🔢 How does Warwick select students for interviews?

Academic Qualification: Since Warwick offers solely a course for graduate applicants (those who have already completed an undergraduate degree), A-level or GCSE grades aren’t used in the selection process. Instead, all graduate applicants are required to have achieved at least upper second class (2:1) honours. All subjects will be accepted. Those who haven’t obtained a 2:1 degree or higher will only be considered if they’ve done a master's or a PhD.

Personal Statement: Warwick doesn’t use the personal statement when selecting students for interviews.

UCAT: UCAT scores form an important element of the selection process at Warwick. Depending on the number and average scores of students who have applied to Warwick in agiven year, Warwick will set a cut-off score for the cohort. However, graduate students with an above-average Verbal Reasoning score will be considered first in the selection process. You can read more about the way Warwick Medical School uses the UCAT here.

Work Experience: Work experience requirements are what differentiates the admissions process at Warwick from other medical schools. According to Warwick’s official website, all students applying to Warwick must have completed at least 70 hours of work experience in at least two different places during the last 4 years (between 16.10.18 and 15.10.22 for 2023 entry). Moreover, “your work experience must include the experience of the healthcare environment, ideally within the NHS, and of direct hands-on care of patients or people with healthcare needs (who are not friends or family members).” Before applying for GEM at Warwick make sure you meet their work experience requirements.

📊 What is the lowest required UCAT score to get an interview at Warwick Medical School?

🇬🇧 Home Graduate Students: For 2021 entry, Warwick’s UCAT cut-off for students applying from the UK was 2600.

🌍 International Graduate Students: For 2020 entry, 2620 was set as the UCAT cut off for international students. 

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📤 When does Warwick send out interview invitations?

All students who pass the first part of the selection process at Warwick (academic screening) will get invited to a medicine interview in early December 2022.

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 How many candidates get interviewed for Medicine at Warwick Medical School?

🇬🇧 Home Graduate Students: For 2022 entry, out of 1920 students who applied, 465 have been invited to a medicine interview at Warwick (24%).

🌍 International Graduate Students: For 2022 entry, out of 101 international students who applied, 12 were interviewed for GEM at Warwick (12%).

🧠 Warwick Medicine Interview Questions:

General Questions:

• How can you contribute to Warwick Medical School?
• Why should we choose you?
• What do you like most about yourself, and what would you like to improve?
• What do you enjoy doing in your spare time and what role do these activities play in your life?

Work Experience:

• What has been the most memorable aspect of your work experience?
• What steps have you taken to find out if becoming a doctor is right up your street?
• You’ve written in your personal statement about working with care home residents who had dementia: How were you able to tell if a patient had dementia? Follow-up: Would you approach a patient with dementia any different from a 30-year old with a sports injury? If yes, how?
• During your work experience, what challenges did the doctors struggle with? Did the challenges differ across different specialities?
• In your personal statement you’ve written that your hospital work experience placement taught you a lot about the role of empathy in medicine. Could you please elaborate on that?

Scenario-based Questions:

• Tell us about a recent mistake you made and how you dealt with it.
• Do you work better in a team or alone? How do you adapt when you have to work in a team?
• How do you deal with criticism? What role does criticism have in medicine?
• Tell us about a situation that developed your communication skills.

Medical Ethics:

• Recently Austria followed other European countries like Switzerland and Belgium and legalised physician-assisted suicide. Do you think the UK should embrace a similar policy and make physician-assisted suicide legal?
• Imagine you are the head of the surgical department in a hospital. There are two patients, A and B, both requiring an urgent liver transplant, but there is only one viable liver. Patient A is a 32-year old social activist, with a drug abuse history. Patient B is a 78-year old woman, who takes care of 3 children, whose parents died in a car accident. How would you allocate the liver and why?
• A 12-year old boy is rushed into A&E after a car crash. The patient is unconscious and has sustained huge blood loss due to the accident. Together with your team, you decide the boy requires an urgent blood transfusion. As you are about to take the boy into the OR, his parents arrive and forbid you to carry on with the blood transfusion on religious grounds. How would you proceed, and what factors should you consider?

Role-play:

• You were supposed to take care of your friend's cat, while they were on holiday. A few hours before your friend was meant to come back, you realised you forgot to close the front door and the cat went missing. You tried looking around the house but to no avail. Your friend, Max (the interviewer), just arrived home. Break the news to them.
• You are a fresh FY1, 2-weeks into your oncology. You are responsible for a 12-year old patient, who is suspected to have leukaemia. The patient's father, who is visibly anxious and stressed, stops you in the hospital hallway to ask you if the boy's results are available already. They say they are tired of the waiting and uncertainty. At this point, you realise you forgot to bring the blood sample to the lab and need to take the bloods again. Explain your mistake to the patient's father.

NHS & Hot Topics:

• If you could decrease the funding in one area of the NHS to give a boost in another, which two areas of healthcare would you choose and why?
• What are the most significant challenges currently facing the NHS?
• How could we tackle the challenges that come along with the ageing crisis?
• What technological advancements can you name that are revolutionising healthcare? Follow-up: What are the pros and cons of using insert name of technological advancement.
• What long-term consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic will we feel in 5 years' time?
• How do racial inequalities affect the NHS workforce coming from BAME backgrounds? Follow-up: How would you support a colleague at work that feels discriminated against due to their ethnic background?

🚀 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 Long-term Medicine Interview Prep Resource".

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

Interviews at Warwick Medical School (2023 Entry):
🗓️ Warwick Medicine Interview dates (2022):

All students who pass the first section of Warwick’s selection process (academic screening + work experience) will be invited to a medicine interview in early December 2022. Warwick usually offers the possibility to book the most convenient date across December and January of the application cycle.

🚀 TOP Tip: Reserve your seat as soon as you get the interview invite! Booking interview dates at Warwick works on a first come, first serve basis, so don’t postpone decisions to ensure the date most convenient for you is available.

💬 What’s the interview format at Warwick Medical School?

Graduate Entry Medicine interviews at Warwick are in the MMI format. They usually last around 2 hours in total, including the briefing and debriefing. Warwick medicine MMIs involve 6 stations, each lasting around 12 minutes, out of which 3 minutes are devoted to preparation (reading the instructions + thinking about your answer) and 8.5 minutes in the station with the interviewers.

The interview team at Warwick can be comprised of academics, current medical students, healthcare staff and laypeople with an interest in medicine.

Although we don’t yet know whether this year’s interviews will be held online or in-person, it’s nonetheless worth reading into the way Warwick organised their online interviews in past years: 'Important online MMI information'.

💡 How To Prepare for GEM Medicine Interviews at Warwick?

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:

🏆 How likely is it I’ll be given an offer after GEM interview at Warwick?

🇬🇧 Home Graduate Students: Last year, 465 home students were interviewed for GEM at Warwick and 255 (55%) have been offered a place.

🌍 International Graduate Students: Last year, 12 international students were interviewed for GEM at Warwick and 6 (50%) have been offered a place (source: FOI request)

👀 What are the interviewers at Warwick looking for?

During the MMI you’ll be assessed on a number of qualities and skills, including:

• Team working
• Insight
• Resilience
• Communication
• Empathy
• Probity
• Respect and dignity

⏳ How long does it take to hear back from Warwick?

After your interview, you should hear back from Warwick within a month (so around January/February 2022).

✅ Warwick Medical School Interviews (Graduate Entry Medicine): 3 Tips

Revisit and reflect on your work experience

place a lot of emphasis on work experience in the selection process. And considering you only had very limited opportunities to tell the admissions team at Warwick more about your work experience, there is a high likelihood you’ll be asked about your work experience in the Warwick medicine interview.

To prepare for potential questions about work experience, try to recall what you did. Come back to a reflective journal (if you kept one during your work experience placements) or any notes you did. Your personal statement drafts are also a great source of information!

Once you refresh your memory of what you did and felt, try to dig a little deeper and reflect on the things you learned during that journey - What did the experience teach you about medicine? What challenges did you observe? What appealed to you the most and what you didn’t really like? What was the most memorable aspect of your work experience? If you really want to internalise and remember your reflections, don’t forget to write them down and then come back to them closer to your interview day.

Have a look at Warwick’s MMI guidance:

The admissions team at Warwick Medical School was so kind as to produce a document outlining their expectations regarding medicine MMIs. In this brief pdf, you’ll find tips specific to the medicine interview at Warwick and some TED talks that could aid your interview preparation. If you are looking for more resources that could aid your medicine interview preparation, sign up for a free account at medfully.co.uk and get access to 70,000+ words of interview tips, tricks and more.

Use the reading time wisely and strategically

Before each MMI station during your Warwick medicine interview, you’ll get around 3 minutes of reading/preparation time. During that time, you should, first and foremost, read carefully the instructions and information about the upcoming station. Make sure you understand what the station will entail or that you understand the scenario presented to you.

If you still have some leftover time (which you should - 3 minutes is plenty of time!), don’t waste it staring at the ceiling. Instead, you should use it strategically.

If it’s one of your last stations and you feel like the accumulated stress and exhaustion is affecting your ability to perform well - take a break. Take a few deep breaths, tell yourself you can do this and generally take that time to relax. If not, you can also use that time to prepare points or examples to talk about during the station and treat it as a time for brainstorming. This will help you enter the station with something more than just a clean slate and hopefully reduce stress ensuing from uncertainty.

🤞 Good luck in your Warwick Medicine Interviews!