Brighton & Sussex Medical School

Interviewers are consistently described as trying to put candidates at ease rather than catch them out, and on in-person interview days current students and staff are around beforehand specifically to calm nerves.

The interview day format has shifted over time: older cycles describe a long in-person day with built-in social time with staff and current students, while since 2020 it runs as a roughly one-hour, five-station MMI circuit with a short break between stations, and since 2025 candidates can choose in-person or Zoom without disadvantage.

BSMS runs a Guaranteed Interview Scheme for University of Brighton biomedical science undergraduates wanting to transfer into medicine after year 1: it guarantees an interview slot but not a place, since transfer candidates are then ranked purely on interview performance alongside standard applicants.

Reserve/waiting-list odds after interview vary a lot by year: recent cycles describe it as very unlikely the reserve list gets called at all, while older threads describe applicants hearing good news as late as mid-August, so a post-interview reserve placement should not be read as a de facto rejection.

Beyond generic motivation and ethics stations, one of the five roughly-10-minute MMI rooms is typically a roleplay/actor scenario, and questions can probe knowledge of health issues and diseases specific to the Brighton and Hove area rather than generic NHS topics, which catches applicants who only prep nationally.

Applicants informally track a UCAT interview-invite threshold around 2000 for recent cycles, with roughly 850 candidates interviewed per cycle; this is a crowd-sourced observation, not a published cutoff, and moves year to year.