What your Awards Mentor will do for you:

• Your Awards Mentor will conduct your first appointment with you and a parent via telephone or zoom (ideally) to go through your CV, identify criteria that you have completed, where there are gaps and construct a plan to fill those gaps over the next few months.
• You will be able to email them on a regular basis to update them on your progress or with any questions that you may have.
• You can arrange follow-up appointments via telephone or Skype with your Mentor independently.
• Your mentor can give you advice and guidance, research opportunities that you are interested in and you can have a discussion about the best way forward.
• Your Mentor will help to tailor the Awards Programme to you as an individual.

A good mentoring relationship works both ways and you must put the time and effort into building the relationship with your Mentor. This will help you to get the most out of your Mentor and harness their expertise, which will then help you to get the most out of the Awards Programme and achieve the highest levels of success. The times at which you will receive the most input from your mentor will be at the start of your Awards Programme, when they are getting to know you, and at the point where you are ready to attain an Award. It is up to you to keep in touch with you Mentor. You will be expected to do this by emailing your Mentor and booking telephone or zoom consultations.

What your Awards Mentor cannot do for you:

1. They cannot organise your work experience or volunteering for you.  This goes against what medical schools want.  They are very keen for students to organise their own placements and students should not have to pay for work experience.  Please review the infomation sheet produced by the Medical Schools Council here for more details.

2. They cannot review your personal statement.  Again, personal statement review services are frowned upon by medical schools.  A review service does not make an effort to get to know the student and encourages someone else (often unkown to you) to edit the personal statement, which paramounts to cheating and can end up disqualifying the candidate.

We can however, provide support with personal statements using a proper tutoring process, where students write their own personal statements and is kept individual and personal to the student.  Mentors can advise on what to include within the limited space and they can provide feedback on several drafts until ther statement is completed to a high standard. They will not write the personal statement for the student.  This approach is in keeping with the Medical Schools’ Council guidance on personal statements (watch their video) and is offered as part of the Medic Mentor Summer School.

3. They cannot teach or prepare you for UCAT or BMAT exams.  This is not the correct platform in which to di this and in itself is very time-consuming.  

4. They cannot provide you with interview preparation.  The best way to prepare is with teaching and lots of mock interview practice.  We run 2 full mock interview days for Year 13 and S6 students as part of the Medical Leadership Programme.

5. They cannot review your reflections before you submit them for marking to your Awards Supervisors.  For this reason, we encourage you to submit reflections as you go along so that you can improve upon them with each submission.

6. They cannot help you to select which universities to apply to.  Again, this is a highly time-consuming process and would require multiple conversations and research.  In order to do this well, our Mentors would have to review your entire application to highlight strengths and weaknesses; matching them to the way individual universities weight things.  This goes far beyong the remit of the Awards Programme.