Graduate Entrants Research Articles

Graduate and mature entrants to medicine: changes in career intentions.

Fifty-nine students who had previously taken degrees or commenced careers in subjects other than medicine entered the Cambridge Clinical Course in its first 5 years of operation, commencing in 1976. A questionnaire was used to ascertain their original career plans when entering medical education, their career plans in 1981, and the reasons for any changes. Graduates originally planning careers in general practice and teaching or research maintained their intentions, but some of those who had favoured hospital clinical work changed their minds in favour of general practice. General practice was also the most common choice amongst those students who were earlier unsure as to what branch of medicine they would enter. Of students changing their career intentions, half indicated that disenchantment with hospital medicine was a prime reason for the change.

Some notes on the admission of graduate applicants to the medical schools

A survey of the admissions policy adopted by the medical schools towards older applicants, and in particular graduate applicants, has been carried out. Some 1000 graduates applied for places in 1976, of whom about one in six was successful (compared with one in four for all applicants). The academic requirements for this category of student are normally at least an upper second class degree, age maxima vary from 25 to around 30 years and, increasingly, schools require a financial guarantee from students not in receipt of a Local Education Authority grant. A minority of medical schools reserve a proportion of places for older applicants, but only a very small minority of schools will consider reducing the length of their course for graduate entrants. These factors are tabulated for each of thirty-one of the medical schools in the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic.

Introduction to decision‐making for graduate entrants

I want in this article to show that a training officer can build a variety of different models and can achieve different purposes by their use. I want to diversify, as the marketing men might say. Driftwood Tools was a comparatively rigid structure which lay squarely in the field of industrial engineering and directed the student's attention to a single ‘right’ answer. Much of its value depends on that answer being reached: without it there is insufficient motivation to get valuable discussion of the related issues. A model does not necessarily have to be concerned with industrial engineering nor does it need a ‘right’ answer. I want to demonstrate these points with two more examples. Before doing so I want to make a distinction between a MODEL and a CASE STUDY. The two media have a lot in common but I believe that the differences are quite important and ought to be appreciated if you are going to get maximum value from your training sessions. The chief characteristic of a model is that it is intended to encourage experiment and to facilitate the comparison of alternative solutions. This means that whatever data is used to compile it has to be fairly specific and must be interrelated in a definite way. It must be possible to deduce with some accuracy how the alteration of one piece of data would affect the whole.

Introduction to decision‐making for graduate entrants

There is a lot of talk about participation and the discovery method of learning, but I have not found many people who actually put it into practice. I got on to my present line just by sitting through lectures and being bored: lectures which I had arranged myself and to which I was pretty sensitive. I used to hear the decibel count of coughs and shuffles mounting as the lecture went on, and I saw the glazed eyes and absent expressions multiplying. Yet I knew that much of what was being said was valuable. I got to thinking that there just had to be a better way of putting over the information. Then I noticed that the best parts of the lecture coincided with the illustrations, when the speaker used some practical example to explain his meaning in terms that everybody could understand. It came to me that perhaps I could take similar illustrations and build them up with realistic data so that course members could work their own way through them and discover their lessons for themselves. I did it, and it worked, and the exercises I build I now call models.

USING CLASSIFICATION IN TEACHING INDEXING

The status of cataloguing and classification, Siamese twins if ever there were such, has undergone some sharp ups and downs in Britain and America in the past generation. Until the beginning of the post‐war period, for example, we had in Great Britain the extraordinary situation whereby an exhaustive examination in the pair was the sole content of the basic chartering examination for librarians. By successive revisions of their examination syllabus, the Library Association reduced the emphasis on the subject until a point was reached when, by the operation of exemptions, a graduate entrant could become a chartered librarian without having had any sustained instruction in the fundamentals of cataloguing and classification as such.