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 16 September 2026.
A society is not an enrichment nicety. For a careers lead with a dozen applicants and no medical background, it is the only structure that spreads scarce support evenly and leaves 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 stop answering the same question eleven times.
Medical, dental and veterinary schools want reflection, not 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. That file becomes their personal statement, their interview answers and the concrete detail in your 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 is the cheapest way to give the same things to the student whose family has never been to university. It is the most equitable hour in the week.
Two Year 13 students running sessions for Year 12 is a genuine leadership role, is excellent evidence of teamwork and communication in their own applications, and means the society survives a term when you are covering for a colleague. Your job is the room, the rhythm and the safeguarding, not the content.
There is no budget line here. Every session in the programme below runs off a free page that already exists, so the entire term needs a room, a projector, a shared folder and someone to unlock the door. Nothing on this page asks you to buy anything.
Most school societies fail for the same three reasons: one student holds it all, the room keeps moving, and nobody published the dates. These five steps deal with each.
A single president means the society dies when they have a mock exam week. Two Year 13 leads, ideally one applying to medicine and one to dentistry or veterinary medicine, is the structure that survives 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 explicitly not the requirement, because the content comes from the linked guides.
Book the same room and the same slot for twelve weeks in one go. A society that moves room each week loses half its attendance by week four.
Publish the full term's topics in week one. Applicants and their parents can then see that the school has a plan, and students who cannot attend every week can pick the sessions that matter to them.
One folder, three subfolders: session plans, reflection sheets, speaker contacts. It is the difference between a society and a memory.
Every week below is a complete session built from a guide that already exists and is free to read. The student leads read the guide, the society does the activity. Nothing here needs writing from scratch and nothing here needs buying.
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.
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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. The discussion point at the end is the one that matters: which of these four would actually consider your current profile.
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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. Almost every group discovers they cannot explain primary care.
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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. This single habit changes how students answer at interview.
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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.
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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. The point is not the score. It is that every student leaves knowing the test is a timing problem before it is a knowledge problem, and knowing where to practise for free.
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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. The reflection prompt is the useful part: write the one thing that cost you time.
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Half the session is practical: students search for placements and volunteering they could realistically get, and each writes the actual 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.
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The session that most impresses admissions tutors and that almost no school runs. 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 it twice a year and your applicants can talk about evidence rather than opinions.
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Students compare two schools with genuinely 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. Expect at least one student to discover that three of their four choices reject their profile outright.
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Run this on the current structured format, not the old single essay. 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. The generic sentences are the ones to cut.
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Do not attempt a full mock in 40 minutes. Run one 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.
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The autumn term is the one worth planning in full. Spring and summer need a focus rather than a script, because by then the student leads know what their own cohort is short of.
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 actually asked.
Hot topic rotation: one NHS issue a week, led by a student
UCAT block: verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, SJT
What the job is really 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 the shape that works, and the five rules that 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. Nobody waits for latecomers; starting on time is what makes a lunchtime society work.
The lead frames the topic
Six minutes maximum, from the linked guide, no slides beyond three. If this runs to fifteen minutes the session has become a lecture and attendance will fall.
The activity, in groups of four
The case, the scenario, the timed questions or the drafting. This is the session. Students should be talking to each other for most of it, not to the front.
Whole group discussion
Each group gives one point, not a summary. The sponsor's only job 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 actually 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 doors below are open to any school that asks properly, and the first one is the best.
By far 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. Reach them in the Christmas or Easter holidays, when they are home and free, and ask the head of sixth form for the leavers' list.
What to ask for: Ask for 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.
What to ask for: Ask for a session on what a GP's day actually contains, including the administrative and the difficult parts. Students who can describe the unglamorous side of the job interview far better.
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 the door to knock on rather than emailing individual consultants.
What to ask for: 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 most schools never send. A practice principal or a veterinary surgeon is usually delighted to be asked, and the session is often the only dedicated dentistry or veterinary content your applicants get all year.
What to ask for: Ask them to bring 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 will drift into being a medicine society unless someone stops it. These are the specific adjustments that 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. The commonest consequence is a personal statement that reads as though dentistry were a version of medicine, which is exactly what dental schools reject.
What to change
Sessions run from
Veterinary applicants are usually the smallest group and the most neglected, 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 half the term's test preparation is irrelevant to them.
What to change
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 run some of the best societies precisely because they do not lecture.
Four is enough to start and eight is comfortable. A society of six students who attend every week is far 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, run it as a joint society with a neighbouring school or combine your Year 12 and Year 13 applicants into one group.
Start in the first half of the autumn term of Year 12. 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 have already lost a year.
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 fails is running a medicine society and assuming the others will adapt. Give dentistry and veterinary applicants at least one dedicated session each per term, check whether the admissions test requirements differ, and make sure work experience targets are set 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 really 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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