Applying To Medicine As A Nurse
My name is Flo and I’m a first year graduate-entry medical student at Barts. My previous degree was in Adult Nursing at King’ College London and I graduated in the middle of the COVID pandemic!
I was a second year student nurse when I decided I wanted to become a doctor. I didn’t go into nursing as a pathway to medicine - I was looking for a career where I could spend a lot of time chatting to people and helping them feel better! I had previously thought about going into medicine, but I didn’t feel cut out for the hours, stress and responsibilities and it was only through nursing that I found the confidence to apply.
I was nervous about telling the university and nurses on my placements that I wanted to be a doctor as I worried that they would think I wasn’t taking nursing seriously or that I felt I was too good for nursing. While I did get this reaction from a rare few nurses, they were never the ones who knew me well or whose opinions I genuinely valued. All of my mentors, assessors and tutors were supportive and encouraging, whether it’s writing references, allowing me time off for interviews or introducing me to doctors on the ward who could impart some wisdom.
As much as I loved nursing, I wanted to do something that would challenge me further and enable me to understand more about the conditions and treatments I was seeing every day. I was able to use a lot of my clinical experience both in my personal statement and throughout my interviews and the MMIs were a very similar style to nursing admissions which made the whole process a little bit easier!
While applying, I struggled to find anyone on social media who had followed the same pathway as me. There was no one like me that I could turn to for advice which is why I decided to set up my Instagram - The Nurse Medic. I wanted to show people that there were more routes into medicine than straight from school or from a bioscience degree.
There is no one route into medicine nor is there a right or wrong time to apply. Take as long as you need to decide that medicine is the career for you because your desire to become a doctor is one of the key things that will get you through the long hours of medical school!