Education in Scotland: Some pupils face real obstacles in their pursuit of a medical career – Muz Ahmad

I’m in my final year of medical school, but it wasn’t easy for me to get here.

Muz Ahmad went to a school where not many pupils were expected to go to university, let alone study medicine

I had decided at 13 I wanted to be a doctor but at the time I had no clue how difficult it would be to apply. After a couple of years, I was the only person among my peers at school who wanted to pursue a career as a doctor.

I went to a school where not many pupils were expected to go to university, let alone study medicine, and as a result my guidance teachers – supportive as they were – had no insight into the steps I needed to take to apply to medical school.

Had I attended a school in a more affluent area I may not have come up against so many barriers and limitations to applying – and that is very often one of the issues that stops students from less affluent areas taking the plunge.

That is why initiatives like the newly launched Widening Participation booklet from BMA Scotland, which specifically sets out to provide advice to students from schools like mine on how they can go about applying for medical school, are so beneficial.

I joined Reach Glasgow, which provided mentorship and assistance in my application. Through the programme I learned about interviews, work experience and University Clinical Aptitude Test. Taking part in the programme helped me recognise that other students were – and still are – in the same boat, and we could support each other.

I’m not from a family of doctors, nor did I have friends who came from a family of doctors, so the pursuit of work experience – which I needed to understand the reality of working as a doctor before applying to medical school – was in no way easy.

Waiting lists for experience were months long, and I applied to everything I possibly could. It was only through word of mouth and networking that I finally secured myself a week’s work experience in a hospital in Ayr.

It provided me with a mixture of days in theatres, clinics and wards, and I was amazed by how much work was undertaken in such little time. The pressure placed on clinicians is immense and it encouraged me more than ever that I wanted to be part of that workforce.

I’ll be honest, I have felt some imposter syndrome from time to time – but I know how hard I worked to get into medical school and, when I feel I have made a difference to a patient’s experience, I know this is the right path for me. And I know there are people like me out there who want to pursue a career in medicine but don’t know where to start.

I urge you to look into Widening Participation programmes: we need medics from more diverse backgrounds to represent different groups and understand our future patients on a deeper level. I look forward to taking all these experiences I have learned during my formative years at school and university, and utilising them in my everyday practice as a junior doctor.

Muz Ahmad is a final-year medical student at the University of Edinburgh

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