A MedSoc is a weekly, student led society that prepares medicine, dentistry and veterinary applicants together. To set one up you need two student leads, a staff sponsor who does not need to be a medic, one room booked for a whole term, and a published programme of topics. This page gives you the full twelve week programme, with every session built from a free guide that already exists, a minute by minute plan for running a session in 40 minutes, how to find speakers, and how to make sure dentistry and veterinary applicants are not an afterthought.
Written by Dr Akash Gandhi, NHS GP and founder of TheUKCATPeople. Updated 28 September 2026.
For your school
One-day UCAT and interview courses for a whole cohort, in person at your school or live online, and priced per cohort.
One intensive day covering every UCAT section, taught live by a doctor, with the strategy and timing each subtest needs.
Suits the summer term of Year 12, before students sit the test.
A live MMI circuit with real station rotation, panel practice, ethics and NHS hot topics, run by doctors and dentists, with feedback on the day and a debrief for you afterwards.
Suits the autumn of Year 13, before interview season.
For a careers lead with a dozen applicants and no medical background, a society is one of the simplest ways to spread limited support evenly and leave a written record behind.
Without a society, medicine support happens in ten minute corridor conversations across a whole year, all of them initiated by the student who is already organised. A fixed weekly slot means the quiet applicant gets the same twelve hours of preparation as the confident one, and you answer the same question far less often.
Medical, dental and veterinary schools are generally more interested in reflection than in attendance. A society that ends every session with something written gives each student a running file of what they read, what they thought and what changed their mind. They can draw on it for the personal statement and interviews, and you can draw on it for the reference.
The applicant whose parent is a consultant already has a mock interview, a work placement and someone to explain what an F1 year is. A society gives some of that to the student whose family has never been to university.
Two Year 13 students running sessions for Year 12 is a real leadership role and good material for their own applications. It also means the society survives a term when you are covering for a colleague. Your part is the room, the timetable and safeguarding. The students handle the content.
There is no budget line here. Every session in the programme below runs off a free page that already exists, so the whole term needs a room, a projector, a shared folder and someone to unlock the door.
School societies often struggle for the same three reasons: one student holds it all, the room keeps moving, or the dates were never published. These five steps can help with each.
With a single president, the society can stall during their mock exam week. Many schools find that two Year 13 leads, ideally one applying to medicine and one to dentistry or veterinary medicine, is a structure that lasts the year.
The sponsor's job is the room, the register, safeguarding for visitors and a five minute check in with the leads each week. Subject knowledge is not needed, because the content comes from the linked guides.
If you can, book the same room and the same slot for twelve weeks in one go. A society that moves room each week tends to lose attendance as the term goes on.
Publishing the full term's topics in week one means applicants and their parents can see that the school has a plan, and students who cannot attend every week can pick the sessions that matter to them.
One folder with three subfolders: session plans, reflection sheets and speaker contacts.
Every week below is a complete session built from a free guide that already exists. The student leads read the guide and the society does the activity.
MedSoc year at a glance
Autumn term
Foundations and wider reading. Planned in full, one session a week.
A focus is enough, because by now the leads know what their cohort needs.
Spring term
Admissions test skills and work experience
Summer term
Personal statement drafting and interview practice for the year above
Every week
Free to use on school websites, in newsletters and in presentations, with a credit link to the page it comes from. The image carries our name and this page's address, so it stays credited wherever it goes.
<a href="https://www.theukcatpeople.co.uk/teachers/medsoc"><img src="https://www.theukcatpeople.co.uk/teachers/medsoc/medsoc-year-at-a-glance.png" alt="Poster by TheUKCATPeople: a school MedSoc year for medicine, dentistry and veterinary applicants. Autumn term, foundations and wider reading, 12 weekly sessions in order: Week 1, What the application involves; Week 2, Entry requirements and a realistic shortlist; Week 3, How the NHS is structured; Week 4, Ethics 1: the four pillars; Week 5, Ethics 2: consent, capacity and young people; Week 6, UCAT taster on the free trainer; Week 7, UCAT skills: decision making under time pressure; Week 8, Work experience: finding it and reflecting on it; Week 9, Journal club: reading a paper without panicking; Week 10, Choosing a school: teaching style and the four choices; Week 11, Personal statement workshop; Week 12, Mock interview taster: one MMI station. Spring term, admissions test skills and work experience: Hot topic rotation: one NHS issue a week, led by a student; UCAT block: verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, SJT; What the job is like: training pathway and pay. Summer term, personal statement drafting and interview practice for the year above: Free online course clinic: everyone signs up to one MOOC; Wider reading, watching and listening for the summer; Competition, EPQ and what a realistic list looks like. The weekly rhythm: same room, same slot, every week; 40 minutes, built for a lunchtime; one page of reading, sent by friday; every session ends with something written." width="1200" height="1500" style="max-width:100%;height:auto" loading="lazy"></a> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.theukcatpeople.co.uk/teachers/medsoc">How to set up and run a MedSoc at your school</a>, TheUKCATPeople</p>
The leads map the whole application on the whiteboard: grades, admissions test, personal statement, reference, interview, offer. Students then place their own current position on the map and write one sentence on the part they understand least. Collect those sentences; they tell you what the term needs.
Runs from
In pairs, students look up the entry requirements for four courses they are interested in and fill a four column table: grades, GCSE requirements, admissions test, anything unusual. Finish on one question: which of these four would consider your current profile?
Runs from
Read the structure guide before the session. In the room, each group of four is given a fictional patient journey, for example a person with chest pain at 7pm on a Sunday, and has to name every part of the system that patient touches and who pays for it. Many groups find primary care the hardest part to explain.
Runs from
Introduce autonomy, beneficence, non maleficence and justice, then run three short scenarios where two pillars conflict. The rule for the discussion is that nobody may say what they would do until they have named which pillars are pulling against each other. Students who get into this habit handle ethics questions far better at interview.
Runs from
A case based session on Gillick competence and the Fraser guidelines. Groups argue opposite sides of a case involving a 14 year old, then swap sides and argue the other. Finish by asking each student to write the strongest argument against their own instinct.
Runs from
Explain what the UCAT is and how it is scored, then put the free online trainer on the screen and work through a handful of questions as a group, with the clock visible. Nobody needs to worry about the score. Students should leave knowing that the test is mostly about timing, and where to practise for free.
Runs from
One subtest, done properly. Students attempt six decision making questions in silence against the clock on the free trainer, then spend the rest of the session marking each other's reasoning out loud. Reflection prompt: write down the one thing that cost you time.
Runs from
Half the session is practical: students search for placements and volunteering they could realistically get, and each writes the email they will send this week. The second half is the reflection drill, turning 'I shadowed a GP' into a specific observation, a question it raised and what the student now understands differently.
Runs from
Fewer schools run this one. Take one short paper or a summarised trial, and teach the students to read the abstract, find the sample size, identify the comparison and say what the result does not prove. Run once or twice a year, it gives applicants something concrete to talk about at interview.
Runs from
Students compare two schools with different teaching styles, problem based against traditional, using the school profiles. Each student then drafts a four choice list and has to defend, out loud, why each choice is on it. Students often find that one or two choices do not suit their current profile.
Runs from
Use the current structured format. Students draft an answer to one question only, in silence, for twelve minutes, then read a neighbour's draft and mark every sentence that could have been written by any applicant in the country. Those are usually the sentences to cut.
Runs from
A full mock is hard to fit into 40 minutes, so one option is to run a single station three times, with different students in the chair while everyone else marks against a simple criteria sheet. Watching three attempts at the same question teaches more than sitting one yourself, and it sets up a full mock interview day later in the year.
Runs from
Plan the autumn term in full. For spring and summer a focus is enough, because by then the student leads know what their cohort needs.
Admissions test skills and the hot topics that will still be current in the autumn. Year 12 is now the priority group; Year 13 leads are in the middle of interviews and can bring back what they were asked.
Hot topic rotation: one NHS issue a week, led by a student
UCAT block: verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, SJT
What the job is like: training pathway and pay
Year 12 turns into next year's applicants. The work now is wider reading that will still be useful in September, a first personal statement draft before the holidays, and a free course each student can finish over the summer.
Free online course clinic: everyone signs up to one MOOC
Wider reading, watching and listening for the summer
Competition, EPQ and what a realistic list looks like
A lunchtime gives you roughly 40 usable minutes once students have collected food and found the room. This is one shape that works well, and five habits that tend to keep attendance up after half term.
Arrive, register, one line recap
A lead says in one sentence what last week concluded and what today is. Start on time even if people are still arriving, or a lunchtime session loses its shape.
The lead frames the topic
Around six minutes, from the linked guide, with no more than a few slides. If this runs to fifteen minutes, the session starts to feel like a lecture and attendance can drop.
The activity, in groups of four
The case, the scenario, the timed questions or the drafting. Students should spend most of it talking to each other, not to the front.
Whole group discussion
Each group gives one point, not a summary. A useful role for the sponsor here is to ask 'what is the argument against that?' whenever the room agrees too quickly.
Write it down, then next week
Three minutes of silent writing on the reflection prompt, into each student's own running document. Then the lead names next week's topic and sends the reading before Friday.
Printing gives you the template below, with the rest of this guide left off the sheet. Give a copy to each student lead at the start of term and keep the completed ones in the shared folder.
MedSoc session plan
Reading sent to students by Friday (one page maximum)
The one thing every student should leave knowing
Running order
The activity: what students do for 15 minutes
Reflection prompt written into each student's own document
Attendance
Next week's topic and who leads it
TheUKCATPeople · theukcatpeople.co.uk/teachers
You do not need to know a consultant. The four routes below are open to any school, and the first is often the easiest.
Often the best and easiest speaker. They know your school, they are close enough in age to be believed, and they were sitting in the same chairs two years ago. The Christmas and Easter holidays, when they are home, are a good time to ask, and the head of sixth form may have a leavers' list.
Ideas for the ask: 25 minutes on what surprised them in first year, what they actually wrote about in their personal statement, and what they would do differently in Year 12.
Practice managers and GP partners are often willing, particularly if a practice already hosts your students for work experience. The primary care network education lead is a good single point of contact for several practices at once.
Ideas for the ask: A session on what a GP's day involves, including the admin and the difficult parts. Students who can describe the less glamorous side of the job tend to find interviews easier.
Most NHS trusts have a medical education department, a director of medical education or a clinical tutor whose remit explicitly includes widening participation and outreach. That is often a better first contact than emailing individual consultants.
Ideas for the ask: Whether they run school outreach, whether a foundation doctor or a registrar could come in, and whether they offer any structured work experience for your cohort.
Two emails that are easy to overlook. A practice principal or a vet is usually glad to be asked, and it may be the only dentistry or veterinary session your applicants get all year.
Ideas for the ask: The thing that most surprises applicants: for dentistry, how much of it is small business and communication; for veterinary, how much of it is farm, finance and euthanasia.
A society called MedSoc can drift into being a medicine society without anyone intending it. These adjustments can help keep it useful for all three groups.
In a shared society, dentistry applicants sit through twelve weeks of medicine content and leave with nothing specific. One risk is a personal statement that reads as though dentistry were a version of medicine, which dental schools are unlikely to find convincing.
Adjustments to consider
Sessions run from
Veterinary applicants are often the smallest group and the easiest to overlook, yet their requirements differ most. Work experience expectations are heavier and broader than for medicine, and most veterinary courses do not use the UCAT at all, so the term's admissions test weeks are less relevant to them.
Adjustments to consider
Sessions run from
No. The staff role in a MedSoc is the room, the rhythm, the register and the safeguarding, not the subject content. Every session in the programme above runs off a written guide that the student leads read in advance, so the teacher never has to be the expert in the room. Careers leads, librarians and sixth form tutors often run excellent societies, partly because they do not lecture.
Four is enough to start and eight is comfortable. A society of six students who attend every week is more useful than thirty who attend once, because the activities are built around small group discussion. If you have only two or three applicants in a year group, one option is a joint society with a neighbouring school, or combining your Year 12 and Year 13 applicants into one group.
The first half of the autumn term of Year 12 is the most common starting point. That gives applicants a full year of preparation before the 15 October deadline in Year 13, and it means work experience and wider reading begin early enough to be worth writing about. Starting in Year 13 is still worthwhile but by then the society is mostly interview practice and personal statement help, and the students who needed the most support will have had less time to prepare.
Yes, with deliberate adjustments. A single society is more sustainable and most of the content, ethics, the NHS, reflection, interview skills and the personal statement, applies to all three. What tends not to work is running a medicine society and assuming the others will adapt. It helps to give dentistry and veterinary applicants at least one dedicated session each per term, check whether the admissions test requirements differ, and set work experience targets separately, because the expectations for veterinary applicants in particular are broader than for medicine.
A society covers the year. These pages cover the individual student: what changed this cycle, how work experience is judged, how to run a mock interview day, and how to write the reference.
Ultimate Package students from our 2025/26 cycle, with their UCAT scores and offers, who trained with us for the UCAT, personal statements and interviews.
“Harry got my UCAT up to 2,590, working through the sections I kept dropping marks on week by week. Gemma then ran my interview practice so the MMI stations didn't catch me out, and Dr Akash mentored me the whole way through. I'm off to King's for Medicine.”
“The interview prep was the part that actually moved the needle. Proper mock MMIs, not just lists of questions, and feedback that was honest about what I was getting wrong. I ended up with four offers and firmed UCL.”
“The Ultimate Package kept me organised from UCAT through to interviews. They knew what dental schools actually ask and tightened up my personal statement. Four offers in the end, and I'm going to Birmingham.”
“Vet applications come down to the written SAQs as much as the interview. Dr Rebecca went through my SAQs line by line, sharpened my answers and prepped me for the panels. I came away with four offers and chose the RVC.”
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