This week's reflections
UCAS applications for medicine close at 6pm on Thursday 15th October. If you’re applying, or if your child is applying, you’ll have gone over the application many times.
Before you press send, I want you to ask yourself a harder question. Forget whether your statement sounds impressive. Do you actually want to be a doctor?
On my mind this week
One day my Grandma will need a doctor. When that happens I want the person at her bedside to be someone who chose to be there. I do not want someone who is there because their parents decided at fourteen that medicine was the plan.
I have taught a lot of students who wanted to be doctors. Some lit up when they talked about it. Others told me about medicine the way you might describe a dentist appointment. When I asked why, the answer usually came back to their parents.
The numbers tell you why this matters.
Competition is fierce. By the October deadline last year, 25,770 students had applied to study medicine for 2026 entry. England had a cap of 8,126 places. You will spend years of your life just getting through the door.
The job itself is hard. In the General Medical Council’s 2025 workplace survey of almost 4,700 doctors, 19% said they were considering leaving UK practice. Around 18% of doctors were at high risk of burnout, rising to 23% of doctors in training. The most common reason doctors gave for wanting to leave, other than retirement, was the effect of the work on their wellbeing.
If you get through all of that for someone else’s dream, I worry about how you will feel at 3am on a night shift in your second year as a doctor.
I also love that a medical degree can take you somewhere completely different. Of the doctors who finished the Foundation Programme in 2025, 57.6% applied for core or specialty training straight away. Many of the others took a year out first and 12.8% went abroad. Doctors go into research, public health, medical technology, policy and writing. That is a brilliant thing about the degree.
Whatever you end up doing with it, choose it because you want it. A fascination with how the body works and a pull towards caring for people when they are frightened, are good reasons. Making your parents proud is a lovely thing to want, but this feeling won’t get you through six years of training on its own.
Application Tip
Before 15th October, test your reasons the way an interviewer will.
Close your personal statement. On a blank page, write why you want to be a doctor without using the phrases “help people” or “I love science”. Plenty of careers let you do both. Now write what you will do on the days you do not enjoy it.
If you struggle to fill the page, take that seriously. Medical school interviews are designed to find students whose reasons are borrowed. An interviewer will spot it faster than you think.
If you are unsure, you still have options. You can only put four medicine choices on UCAS, so your fifth can be a course like biomedical science. You can also take a gap year, get more experience and apply in the next cycle. Graduate entry medicine is there for people who come to it later. Applying when you are certain is better than applying because the deadline is here.
For parents
Wanting a secure, respected career for your child comes from love. Medicine can appear to be the safest route there is.
A medical degree takes five or six years and the training afterwards takes many more. Your child needs their own reason to get through it.
Ask them one question this week and then stay quiet while they answer: “If I had no opinion at all, what would you apply for?”
If the answer is medicine, wonderful. If it is something else, it is far better to hear it now than in their third year of medical school.
Quote of the week
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
– Steve Jobs
Sources
- The Medic Portal: UCAS medicine applicants for 2026 entry (themedicportal.com)
- The UKCAT People: OfS cap of 8,126 places in England (theukcatpeople.co.uk)
- Irish News: GMC survey, 19% considering leaving UK practice (irishnews.com)
- Doctors.net.uk: GMC burnout figures (doctors.net.uk)
- UK Foundation Programme: 2025 F2 Career Destinations Survey (foundationprogramme.nhs.uk)
