Trying to be the person I wish I'd had before med school!

When I was in Year 12, the advice I could find about getting into medicine came in two flavours. There were companies charging a lot of money for material I had no way of checking, and there were forums full of anonymous people who were as anxious as I was and no better informed. What I actually wanted was one person who'd done it recently and would sit down and answer my questions honestly, including the ones that made me look like I knew nothing.

I didn't have that person. I got in anyway, and I moved from Melbourne to Townsville to do it, which is not a small thing at seventeen. But I got there through a lot of guesswork I've since learned was unnecessary, and a lot of worry about things that turned out not to matter at all.

Most of what makes this process frightening isn't how hard it is. It's not knowing what you're being assessed on.

That's the gap I'm trying to close. Five years into the degree, I know what the JCU process looks like from inside the course, and I know how much of the panic around it is misplaced. Students grind for a test JCU doesn't use. They write personal statements Medicine doesn't ask for. They miss the second application portal completely. Meanwhile the thing that will actually decide it, the interview, gets a week of scrambling in November.

So I coach interviews, for JCU and for medical schools across Australia, and I review dental applications, which run on completely different rules again. I'll also just answer questions. Any question, however small or however obvious you think it is. If the honest answer is that you don't need to pay me for anything, I'll tell you that too, because I'd rather be useful than booked out.

The part I'd underline is that this is current. I'm in the degree now, on clinical placement, next to people who went through selection in the last couple of years. When JCU dropped the written application for Medicine in 2024, I knew because it happened around me. These processes shift constantly, tests get added and removed, portals change, weightings move, and a lot of what's circulating online is someone confidently describing a system that no longer exists.

One thing I want to be clear about. I have no involvement in selection at JCU or anywhere else, and no access to how those decisions get made. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. What I have is recent experience, five years of context, and the willingness to be straight with you about it.

If you're somewhere in this process right now and it all feels opaque, that's the normal experience of it, not a sign you're behind. Send me the question.