Pathways to Medicine

Pathways to Medicine is a widening participation programme run at Imperial College in partnership with the Sutton Trust, which aims to improve opportunities in Medicine for state-school students from underrepresented backgrounds. I am the academic lead for the project, but it is supported by Outreach, colleagues in the College and Trust, and by many current undergraduate students including Imperial’s student society for widening participation in medicine, ICSM Vision.

Throughout Year 12 and 13 we provide students with experience of university, advice on applications, work experience, and admission test and interview training, aiming to help them make strong and informed applications to study medicine at university. Because of COVID restrictions, we’ve designed new virtual work experience events to try and give them a taste of what medicine is like. Our summer school and taster events are also running remotely, but we hope to begin in person events at the College later in the year.

The programme continues to attract more and more applicants. For the most recent cohort, we received 975 applications for the programme, with many of those from highly eligible applicants. While we only had spaces for 64 participants on the programme, we ran an extra online event for 300 of the unsuccessful applicants to introduce them to Imperial and provide advice on applying to study medicine. Recruitment for the next intake begins later this year.