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Irish Times
20-05-2025
- General
- Irish Times
CAO 2025 calendar: Important dates for college applications
May 6th: The CAO change-of- mind facility opened, enabling applicants to amend, or list for the first time, their course choices. Candidates get a statement of application record online in the correspondence section of their CAO account, before the end of May, listing all details supplied by applicants to date. Applicants must inform the CAO immediately if they do not receive this record, or if there are any errors. June 4th: Leaving Certificate written examinations begin and will continue until late June. On the day of the final Leaving Cert written paper, applicants aged under 23 who sat the Hpat test in February receive their results to enable them to factor these marks into their final consideration of course choices before the July 1st CAO deadline. July 1st (5pm): Change of Mind closes. This is the final date for any amendments to course choices and order of preference on all CAO applications for entry to college. July 4th: The CAO makes about 6,000 offers to mature (over-23) applicants, and to applicants who accepted and then deferred college offers of places in 2024. These offers are made online only at and remain open for about a week. Mature and deferred applicants who may be away from home should ensure any offer in early July is dealt with, as offers lapse if not accepted within the specified time. READ MORE August 7th: Round 0 offers will be issued to graduate entry medicine applicants, additional mature applicants, deferred and Access applicants, and applicants presenting QQI FET/FETAC qualifications for consideration for entry to courses with a quota for applicants. August 22nd: T he State Examinations Commission (SEC) delivers 2025 Leaving Cert results to more than 730 second-level schools, and makes them available on from noon. A full analysis of the results will be provided in the supplement in The Irish Times. Immediately following the release of Leaving Cert results an application to view scripts can be made online only on the SEC Student Portal. August 27th: The CAO releases round one offers online at 2pm. Minimum points required for entry to each course will be available on the CAO website. The Irish Times will provide extensive online and print coverage for the following number of days. Leaving Cert students who are unhappy with a grade they received and wish to view their marked exam scripts may do so online shortly afterwards. There is no charge for viewing your marked exam scripts. Students wishing to appeal the result in one or more Leaving Cert subjects can apply online through the SEC Student Portal between these dates. September 2nd: Closing date for receipt of acceptance of CAO round one offers. Acceptances must be submitted by 3pm. September 8th: The CAO makes round two offers available to applicants online. The minimum points required for entry to each course are released on the CAO website on that date. September 10th: Closing date for receipt of acceptance of CAO round two offers. Shortly afterwards, results of Leaving Cert appeals released by the SEC. Final offers of places by the CAO will be made in the days following. NOTE: The arrival of a physical letter from the CAO in May outlining all details held by them relating to the applicant or an offer notice by post in July or August are now things of the past. All notices are sent directly to the applicant's account within the CAO website * The dates for entries marked with an asterisk have not yet been announced. Leaving Certificate students and all other CAO applicants are advised to check both the State Examinations Commission ( and websites for further updates.
Irish Times
20-05-2025
- Health
- Irish Times
How rewarding is a degree in medicine?
Secondary school students who have their hearts set on studying medicine have to perform exceptionally well in the Leaving Cert, as well as score highly in the Health Professions Admission Test (Hpat) – requiring about 730 points in total to earn a place. To that end, you might assume that by the time a 17- or 18-year-old makes it to medicine at third level, they are well prepared for the exhausting workload and academic demands of their course. Colin Doherty, head of the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, explains that there are plenty of new challenges to negotiate, but that no course is rewarding in quite the same way as medicine. New students, he says, tend to see themselves as future practitioners delivering care. While that is a positive pursuit, the school hammers home the idea of doctors as scientists as well – custodians of medicine who will be responsible for producing new therapies and treatments down the line, and for bringing about fairer and more effective medical systems. 'I believe there's a culture of application for the students that get those 625 points,' Dr Doherty says. 'They are students that have applied themselves, but have they done anything really creative with their intelligence? Probably not yet. When we bring them in, we say look – all that rote learning, there is a bit of that here but we're trying steadily to chip away at it and do away with it. We want people who can think. READ MORE 'When I was walking around the wards in the '90s, I had to remember stuff. I couldn't look it up. I had to remember the dose of the drug or whether it was given intravenously or orally. I didn't have a reference … Nowadays, you can just look this up. So, we tell them, knowledge is no longer the issue. The question of how you access knowledge and deploy it, where you find it and how trustworthy it is – these are the important things now.' Medical students of today have different concerns about the world than those Dr Doherty and his classmates faced in the 1980s. He references climate sustainability, artificial intelligence and political instability as particularly relevant megatrends, and argues that medicine empowers graduates to tackle these broad, contemporary problems in ways other degrees cannot. 'You can become a doctor and treat patients in any environment you like,' Dr Doherty says. 'You can go to Africa and deliver care to thousands of people in vaccination clinics. Or you can come in and work in an academic medical centre where you're the only person in the world who can remove this type of tumour from the brainstem. That's what's brilliant about medicine – you can go any direction you want.' Medicine is often described as a calling. The pressure of the job and the high standards it demands are reason to imagine you would need to be extremely passionate about the work to pursue it. It is not always essential for a doctor to feel that draw, and it can be necessary to approach medicine as a job with its own demands and expectations. Dr Doherty believes, though, that there are fewer students entering the field based on traditional notions of societal prestige. Ultimately, it is appropriate to view the role as something loftier and more important, given its extraordinary capacity for good. 'You can have a good doctor either way and you can have a bad doctor either way,' he says. 'I would say nowadays, because of the availability of other roles in society in business, you can get that social cachet in a whole range of roles. In remuneration terms, being a doctor is not the pathway to being one of the richest people in society any more. You're certainly well paid and in the upper echelons, but there's a certain point at which it cuts off, whereas in business, you can obviously become very wealthy. 'I would say there's more of a move towards the calling side of medicine now. I may be wrong, but looking around at our students, most of them come in and they have a very clear vision that they want to be a doctor. They want to practise medicine. They want to deliver care.'
