I met with a very smart IB student in Mumbai today. She is determined to study medicine and is only considering applying to schools in the UK. She has a stellar academic record and is pretty confident about her UKCAT and BMAT prep. Given her solid profile I was certain that she would wish to apply to the most selectives schools like Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, and Imperial. However as we discussed college choices I noticed that she was hesitant to add her 'dream' schools to the list because of the 5 college application limitation set by UCAS. She wanted to play it safe and pick 'less selective schools' in her list.
She is obviously being cautious with her list. One part of me wishes to push her to take up the challenge of adding back her dream schools to the list. But I've heard that med schools in the UK have limited space for international students and that justifies her caution. More on this later. I'll keep adding comments to this post.