Admission procedure changes

many students who wanna apply to hku medicine may have read the blog "studying medicine in hong kong" (http://hkmed.blogspot.com). it may be a good source for applying to cuhk. but it is not very helpful for those applying to hku. afterall, the blogger is a cu guy and the only passage on hku was copy and pasted from a passage originially on another forum written by a hku medicine classmate of mine.

anyhow... that passage is quite old (2008) already and i wanna highlight some changes of the admission procedures in recent years.

the student pool of first year has expanded since 2009- now each  first year comprises of 160 students (yes! the wards are getting crowded!) and the university is planning to increase the number of places further to 200 in the future under the request of the government (seriously, i just can't imagine how the already packed wards can cope....)

As mentioned in the previous blog, hku wants to admit more graduate students in the future (like US unis). In the past, most grad students are usually fresh grads from undergrad. Now, we also have students who have worked in banking or finance after graduation for 1-2 years or even graduated phds!

However, the qualification of the grad students admitted has not changed- we still have oxbridge and ivy league grads. some are even overseas medics who are just 1-2 years short of finishing their medical degree but they apply to hku because they wanna practice in hk and they don't wanna take the liscensing exam in the future after graduating from overseas med school. and guess what- hku won't let them transfer to the last few years of mbbs, they have to start all over again in year 1.

when i was applying to hku a few years back then, the process was relatively "easy". just send the form by the deadline with CV,transcript and reference etc. and they will let you know that you have an interview (very short notice!). i was interviewed by two profs, one clinical and one pre-clinical, and they asked me some standard questions and several not-so-standard questions (which i had some hard time guessing what they are expecting). then a few days later, they called me and told me i had an unconditional offer.

but recently, we heard that the faculty wants to place more emphasis on the humanity side of medicne and they want to radically change the structure of the interview. afterall, doctoring is both a science and an art. so future interviews are not gonna be just a brief 20 min chat with the profs. they would want candidates to demonstrate care and passion in patient care.