24th January 2025
Optimising Your Performance in HPAT: Lessons From Sports Psychology
Preparing for the HPAT is like preparing for a marathon: it requires training, persistence and strategies to optimise your performance on HPAT test day. Just as an athlete prepares for a major sporting event, you must prepare yourself to sit HPAT, which is one of the most important exams that you will face in your career. We can learn much from athletes about optimising performance in HPAT, ...
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23rd January 2025
Attention Parents: 5 Ways to Help Your Son or Daughter in the Lead Up to the HPAT
6th year is a stressful time. Add in HPAT and the pressures of getting into medicine, and stress levels can rapidly sky rocket. As a parent it is easy to succumb to feelings of powerless as you watch your son or daughter struggle to prepare for such an important and difficult exam. However, there are many things you can do to boost their performance and have a positive impact on their wellbein ...
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17th January 2025
4 Mindset Shifts to Help You Tackle the HPAT
Many students will already be starting or upping the intensity of HPAT preparation. While time spent on improving your proficiency at answering HPAT questions is certainly well spent, so is the time dedicated to reflecting on what you’re doing and renewing your confidence. After all, the HPAT, like other aptitude tests, is partially a mind game. This blog post aims to provide some new pe ...
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12th January 2025
Is HPAT Stressing You Out? Here's How to Use Stress to Your Advantage
You may have heard that stress negatively impacts on performance, particularly in an intellectually challenging test such as HPAT. You may have been told that if you are too stressed in the lead up to an important exam such as HPAT, you won’t do well. You may have been advised to look for ways to relieve your HPAT-related stress. While this may be true, in some cases trying to g ...
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9th January 2025
6 Tips for Preventing Burnout During HPAT Preparation
Burnout is something almost everyone will experience in their medicine entry journey. Burnout can significantly impact one’s ability to perform, and how an individual copes with burnout can, in some cases, make or break their chance of admission into their dream course. In this blog, I will be focussing on the burnout associated with HPAT preparation, and strategies which I used to help ...
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8th January 2025
How to Apply to the CAO and ACER for Medicine
To be eligible to study medicine in Ireland there are two key parts to the application process: Applying to the Central Applications Office (CAO) Applying separately to sit the HPAT through ACER Applying to the CAO Before you can register to sit the HPAT, you need to apply to the CAO and get your CAO number – you will need this for the HPAT registration ...
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18th December 2024
Prepare for HPAT: Prepare for a Marathon
Many students who have scored 100th percentile in the HPAT have said that preparing for HPAT is like preparing for a marathon. There are many similarities: they both require significant motivation, consistent practice over a period of time and a clear head under pressure. Not to mention that for many people both a marathon and the HPAT are the hardest challenges they have faced so far in their ...
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16th December 2024
Balancing the HPAT and Hobbies
With the HPAT around the corner, as well as school assignments and exams, it can be quite a stressful time for students. Many students will spend hours practising HPAT-style questions and completing HPAT practise exams, as well as devoting a large amount of time to HPAT preparation. However, this does not mean your hobbies and interests should be forgotten. After a long day of lessons, ...
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12th December 2024
How to Study for the HPAT When You’re Sick of Studying
Let’s set the scene – HPAT is fast approaching but you can’t stand the thought of sitting at your desk one more minute for HPAT prep. I’ve been there. The secret to igniting your motivation to study is variety – and lots of it. As someone who is change averse and largely a homebody – I always rolled my eyes at this advice, thinking that I already knew ...
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10th December 2024
4 Ways To Avoid Burnout in Your HPAT Prep
This is it. You are in that pivotal stage of your schooling known as 6th year. It is the last lap in the race to the finish line. It is time to grind… Or is it? What is burnout? It’s when you’re drowning in mountains of workload, overwhelmed with panic / exhaustion / a combination of both and it is usually caused by prolonged or excessive stress. Burnout is ...
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