Hi everyone, I'm a first year medical student at JCU and as applications are opening soon for JCU medicine and dentistry, I thought that I would make an extensive guide on everything you need to know about how to get into one of the "easier" universities for you med/dent-aspiring students in year 12.
General information
Applications will open for both courses August 5th 2025 and close on the 20th of September of 30th of September for dentistry and medicine respectively. For these applications, you will need to complete them both via QTAC as well as the JCU official portal, which is where you will be answering pretty basic and straight-forward questions such as your schooling history from primary school all the way up to high school.
Written applications - Dentistry
As of 2024, which is the year I applied to JCU, they have removed the written application component for medicine, but this still remains a key component of entry for dentistry, so please keep that in mind.
In this section, they ask 4 questions which are:
- Their personal motivation for pursuing a career in their preferred discipline
- Any paid employment, work experience or volunteer activities completed in health industries
- What interests them about professional health practice in regional, rural and Indigenous communities
- Anything else that is relevant to their application and important for us to know.
You have 300 words to answer each question.
Letters of recommendation - Dentistry
Letters of support give applicants the opportunity to provide a reference for their character, academic goals and suitability for a career in their preferred discipline. They are required to be included in applications submitted online through the JCU Portal.
Applicants for Dentistry and Veterinary Science may source and submit up to three letters of support for their application. Letters are essential for Dentistry and Veterinary Science applications. If you are applying for both Dentistry and Veterinary Science, you can use the same three letters or three different ones for each course.
**Medicine Entry + Interview**
Generally 4000-5000 people apply to JCU each year with around 700-800 interview invites being sent out. From here, 170 students are picked as final medicine students, making it a very grueling and still very competitive course to get into.
First round interview invites are sent out on the 7th of November, and here they are based completely on your predicted atar as well as your rurality/in-state or interstate. Generally, JCU favours students which are from QLD and are rural, but this doesn't mean that its not possible to get a spot as I myself am metro and from Victoria.
My tips for how to get this first round interview invite? Get the highest possible predicted atar that you possibly can. I ended up getting a predicted atar of 99+, which is generally what you want as an interstate applicant, especially if you are not rural. To be safe you definitely want at least a 98+ predicted atar at the very minimum. Even if your real atar does not fall into your predicted atar, it is considered to generally be okay as long as there isn't a ginormous disparity between your real and predicted atar. Other than this, there isn't much that you can do here unfortunately and the interview invite process can seem to be quite random at times too.
Second round interview invites are sent out 22nd of December in which they are again dependent on your rurality/in-state or interstate, but this time combined with your real and achieved atar. Predicted atar does not play a part at all in your chances of getting an interview thankfully.
Tips? Achieve the highest atar you can, especially if you weren't invited to a first round interview, put your head down and grind out your studies to get the highest atar you can and hopefully you get sent an interview.
Interview + what it entails
Dentistry does not have an interview, whereas medicine does. It is a 30-35 minute panel interview which differs from most universities that do MMI interviews and allows for the 3-person panel of interviewers to get a better grasp of your personality and get to you know you better as a person rather than an MMI which tests how you respond in different situations.
Section 1 - Ice-breaker questions
This entails of mostly questions that are first of all trying to get to know you better. Questions may include, but are not limited to for example:
How are you?
How would you describe yourself?
Tell us about yourself?
What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
What are your hobbies?
Tell us about a challenge you've face in your life and how you dealt with it?
Do you enjoy working in a team or individually better and why?
Section 2 - Includes scenario based questions where the interviewers get you to read a prompt and you need to respond to how you would act in that situation. Some examples:
You go to a party at the end of your placement in a remote area and your friend wakes you up during the night, wanting to go home. Both of you are still intoxicated. How would you deal with this situation? What are the issues involved?
You are on rural placement & go to a party with another medical student 50km away. He drives you & at the party you both have a fair few drinks & decide to sleep it off before placement the next day. In the middle of the night the other medical student wakes you up and tells you he is going to drive home & wants to go now - what are the issues involved in this & what would you do?
You are the chair of a school board and have recently been given money to erect a flag pole by a local community group. On announcing this to the school there is some disagreement about what kind of flag should be flown - Australian / Aboriginal / Torres Strait Islanders. Some people are stating there needs to be an Aboriginal flag for equal representation but others are saying there aren't enough people at the school to justify a Torres Strait flag. How would you approach this situation?
Section 3 - Debating section
This is where the interviewers will prompt you on the screen with 3 different semi-controversial topics and you need to give your opinions and reason with responses from the interviewers. They will essentially try and test your logic.
Examples of topics include:
- Growing depression / suicide in teenagers
- Importance of Aboriginal language preservation
- Abuse in children causes higher crime rates
- Refugee crisis in Australia and overseas
- Should the role of pharmacists be extended to reduce workload on doctors?
- Is gambling an issue in Australia?
- Should transgender athletes compete in their biological sex categories or no?
I hope that's helpful for all of you aspiring med/dentistry students, if you have any questions please feel free to ask below here
