Tips & Tricks by Rio

I made a quick portal with a bunch of applicant group chats for various unis. There are generally more groups for unis in the North-West, as this is where I am based. Please visit to find fellow applicants!

• Uni group chats portal

This is just a bunch of accommodation options for Manchester and Keele (and Liverpool if I get the time to add it!). May not be useful, may be useful.

• Uni accommodation page

You can actually restore a streak for free, but only one at a time. This doesn't always work, but it will work the vast majority of times. Snapchat doesn't check details, so provided your username and the person you're restore it with is correct, it should work. Visit the link below!

• 🔗Webpage

• Driving lessons: I would highly recommend Altrincham Driving School if you're local. The owner of the company is Dan. He's very patient and (unlike a lot of instructors!!) very punctual. He'll also adapt around your schedule and do pick-up/drop-off wherever, provided it is reasonably local to Altrincham. I passed first time, and it was completely thanks to Dan.
  Resources
  • 📞+44 7883 029181
  • 🔗Website
• Practising: Crash courses are fine, and I've seen some of my friends pass after crash courses. Personally, I would advise organic practice in lessons and with your parents. It means spending more time behind the wheel and gradually building confidence.
• Theory: Get as much practice done as you can. Hazard perception was more difficult for me, as it wasn't like learning for an academic test. I would advise using official clips on the DVLA site to practise for this, as they are most like the real thing. There is a method called the 3-click method which works really well. See below for an example.
  Resources
  • ▶️3-Click method

• Artificial Intelligence: Some schools and colleges ban it, some endorse it, but I use ChatGPT every single day. I find that the best way to use it to learn is by feeding it content and asking it to quiz you. You can just reference the content and ask it to quiz you on a certain unit of a certain specification, but it isn't always correct, so uploading a PDF or word document is usually better. Using past paper questions work for revision, but that means you're only learning how to answer those specific questions, where as using AI means that you can be quizzed on very specific details. The initial set up of a chat is more difficult as you need to teach it how you learn and which content to reference, but keep building on a chat and it adapts. ChatGPT got me through my GCSEs, since no question is too small (and it won't judge you for asking questions about things you should already know!), so it can be your biggest resource across all learning situations if you use it well.

• A-Levels: You don't need to study bio, chem, maths. I know that many people do, but only % of med schools require bio, and % require maths. I study Chemistry, Physics, and French because they are subjects I enjoy and can do well in. Just pick the subjects you love, and will achieve in.
• UCAT: Revise well. The guides don't lie and I would recommend starting hard-core revision around 2 months before your exam. Websites such as MedEntry and Medify are definitely useful. I preferred Medify's interface, but most people will tell you that they give you equal results. There is a sort of stigma about having tutoring, but it does work well (I'd recommend Medic Mind). Given that the Abstract Reasoning section was taken out of the exam for 2025, average scores did go up, and there is no guarantee of how they will look in future years, so beware of anything read online.
  Resources
  • 🔗Medic mind
  • 🔗Medify
  • 🔗MedEntry

I host this website for fun. It's a cool novelty. It is hosted by Ionos (based in Montabaur, Germany). On top of rioholmes.com, I also manage thom.one for my friend Thom, a musical artist (and previously managed riodha.com and sjario.com, but I shut these down at the end of 2025 to consolidate everything here on rioholmes.com). The total price actually only comes to approx £5 per month for these two, with an initial domain registration fee of about £15-20. When launched in 2022, these sites and subsections just redirected to Linktree pages, but that site really limited what I could put on pages and how they looked, so I actually switched to creating pages from scratch using ChatGPT in 2025. I was already paying for ChatGPT because I use it a lot in education, so using it for these sites actually saved me money as I was no longer using Linktree's paid service. Using ChatGPT meant everything was much more customisable, but it does take hours and hours to perfect things and get them to look exactly to my wish. Since then, I've trialled a couple of mini-projects just for fun, such as a chatroom and a file storage drive. They were pretty cool but nothing serious (I recently retired them so only people who know the URL for them can access them). In late 2025, I actually moved most of my development to be localised. This was because ChatGPT notoriously uses a lot of water. I now do the vast majority of my development using models which do not use the internet and only use what is stored on my device, which does mean that my PCs get very hot, but I guess it helps the planet! I hope the time I have spent developing these sites can be useful, either as a useful tool for you, or just as being a fun project for me.