Siddharth Mohan Roy | Admissions Consultant
As an admissions consultant at Prep Zone, I had the privilege of working closely with over 100 students applying to medical school in the past cycle. Based on the 2026 cycle, I am sharing a ground-level view of what actually moves the needle: the strategies that opened doors, the misconceptions that cost students opportunities, and how the most resilient applicants adapted when things didn’t go according to plan. In this article, I attempt to expand those observations into practical guidance for the next cycle of aspiring applicants.
The Local-First Mindset
One pattern I noticed consistently: almost every student walked in with the same plan. Try for NUS first. If that doesn’t work out, pivot to NTU. Very few arrived with a genuinely open mind about both institutions from the start.
The desire to study locally is understandable. Tuition fees at overseas programmes are significantly higher, often by a substantial margin. But the pull of local medical school goes beyond finances. It’s also about continuity: staying close to family, building networks within the healthcare system you’ll eventually work in, and training in the hospitals and communities where you’ll one day serve. For many students, studying medicine in Singapore is the goal they’ve been working towards for years.
That said, anchoring too rigidly to one institution over the other can quietly limit your strategic options in ways that aren’t obvious until it’s too late. I’ll come back to that.
Academics: The Non-Negotiable Foundation
Let me start with what many students wish someone had told them earlier: your academic record is an absolute gatekeeper! There is no workaround! When applying to NUS or NTU Medicine, you have two pathways available: (1) Standard Scheme: the primary route, based on meeting direct academic entry requirements; (2) EBAS (NUS) / ABA (NTU): alternative pathways for students who may not fully meet standard criteria but demonstrate exceptional qualities in other areas.
Here’s what I observed this cycle:
Two Types of Applicants, Two Different Challenges
Once a student has the grades, I found myself placing them into one of two broad brackets: those who gravitated towards medicine after seeing their results, and those who had wanted medicine for a long time and built their profile with that goal in mind. Both groups struggled in their own ways.
For those who came to medicine after their grades
There is nothing wrong with this. No university expects a 16-year-old to have a fixed career path. Medical schools want students who are curious, academically strong, and genuinely open to learning. What they are not looking for is a rehearsed narrative that doesn’t feel lived in.
For students in this bracket, the priority is articulation. You may not have years of shadowing or a list of healthcare-related volunteering. What you do have is a rich set of varied experiences, and the task is to translate those into qualities that medicine values: intellectual curiosity, analytical thinking, empathy, and resilience. Be specific. Talk about the science that genuinely excites you, a paper or article that made you think differently, an aspect of human biology you find endlessly fascinating. Show them that your love of learning is real, even if the destination of medicine came to you later.
At NUS, only the personal station in the interview tests directly on motivation and personal experiences. The remaining stations assess soft skills through roleplays, scenarios, group tasks, and an individual task station. This is actually good news for students with less clinical exposure, because those elements can be trained. What you still need to demonstrate, across the application and interview, is leadership, intellectual curiosity, a grounded understanding of what medicine actually involves, and an honest reckoning with its demands. Interviewers can spot the romanticised version of medicine from a mile away.
For NTU, the strategy shifts. Their interview process includes more direct healthcare-related questions, which means you need to be a stronger translator of your non-clinical experiences into clinical values. Reading current affairs in medicine, staying updated on healthcare policy and public health issues in Singapore, and understanding the day-to-day realities of the profession become even more important preparation.
For those with strong clinical exposure
Students in this bracket face a different trap: the urge to include everything. It’s tempting, especially when you’ve put years into building your profile, but more is not always better on paper. NUS roughly gives you 1500 words to make your case. The essays reward different things, and the interview rewards something different again. Students who understand this tend to use their written application in a more considered way, and arrive at the interview with a different strategy.
The other pattern I see in this bracket is what I’d call interview syndrome. Students with strong clinical exposure often have the substance, but freeze when an interviewer pushes back. In part 2, I’ll get into why that happens, and what separates the candidates who handle pressure well from those who don’t.
Don’t Neglect the UCAT
A surprisingly common mistake this cycle was students who worked hard on everything except the UCAT. This ties directly back to the local-first mindset I mentioned earlier. When NUS becomes the primary focus, NTU quietly becomes an afterthought, and the UCAT, which is central to NTU’s admissions process, gets deprioritised accordingly.
This is a strategic error. Based on this past cycle, I would recommend aiming for a UCAT score of at least 2200, with 2100 being borderline. And I expect that threshold to rise. Test-takers are getting better every year, preparation resources are more widely available, and score distributions are shifting upward. Don’t treat the UCAT as something you can manage with minimal preparation.
If Your UCAT Score is Strong, Consider Looking Abroad
This brings me to a point I make often: if you have a competitive UCAT score and can manage the finances, apply to UK or overseas medical schools as well. The numbers tell the story clearly. NUS admits roughly 250 students per year, NTU around 150. That is approximately 400 local medical school places annually, against demand that is many times higher, with interview offer rates sometimes running at three times the number of available spots. The odds are genuinely difficult, and having a backup that you’ve actually worked towards is far better than discovering too late that you needed one.
On Reapplying: One Shot in Practice
Yes, NUS and NTU do accept reapplicants through the EBAS and ABA schemes. And yes, I had students receive interview offers through those pathways this cycle.
But I want to be honest about what that experience looked like. The number of EBAS/ABA applicants who successfully proceed each year is very small. What distinguishes the ones who do is difficult to pin down precisely, and frankly, some of it falls outside what any coach or consultant can engineer. It often comes down to a combination of newer and more substantive experiences, genuine evidence of growth since the previous application, and factors that are, to some degree, beyond anyone’s control.
The lesson I draw from this is simple: treat your first application as your only shot. Prepare as if there is no second chance, because statistically, relying on one is a risky plan. If you do reapply, make sure you have something genuinely new to show: not just more time, but real growth, deeper exposure, and a clearer sense of why medicine and why now.
Looking Ahead
In Part 2, I will explore a pattern I saw repeatedly this cycle: students with strong applications on paper whose performance did not translate at the interview stage, and what that reveals about how to prepare effectively.
