The Interview For Medical School

This is in relation to the post I made just slightly earlier titled Communication.

There has been some debate going on in Monash Medical Student’s blog about the med school interview and I intend to discuss that for both future candidates and disgruntled individuals.

Most medical schools will require a personal interview with students before considering them for entry, in some cases, a telephone interview would be held. I am not a big fan of these interviews because I personally find them extremely nerve wrecking.

To speak the truth, I have never PREPARED for an interview. I’m not trying to blow my own trumpet here, it’s just that I never bothered to sit down for hours in preparation of one. Frankly, I did not fancy my own chances of entering med school upon comparison with my peers who prepared extensively for the interview. My idea of the interview was for the administration to find out who they might be admitting to their medical curriculum: not a quiz of knowledge and a test of eloquence.

Sadly, many times, this IS the case. The better prepared you are for an interview, the success rates would be better. If you’re considering a future in medicine and still have no gained admission, I would strongly suggest that you prepare for this elusive interview.

I sat 2 med school interviews out of the 3 schools that I applied for, one not requiring an interview. One of the interviews was conducted over telephone, the other was a face-to-face interview in front of a panel of interviewers.

I shall walk you through what the face-to-face interview was like: As with every other interview, they ask about your academic qualifications, motivation to be a doctor and co-curricular activites. I have had prior experience with ‘medicine’ in the form of being exposed to surgerys by virtue of my father’s job, as well as having paramedic training. All these came in handy; so I advise you to have some exposure to medicine. They also asked me to read an article. According to my peers, everyone got different articles. Mine was related to high cholesterol levels and IQ; following which, an question pertaining to medical ethics was asked. The last part of the interview was to get the interviewee to ‘detechnicalise’ a familiar chemistry term; ‘isotope’. I was dumbfounded and I just said that I would use the aid of a diagram to help me explain this term.

These components all have a purpose. The self-advertisement would show the interviewers your confidence and ability to initiate conversation in an unfamiliar setting. The ethical question was to test if you can appraise an article quickly and give your fair thoughts about it: this is an issue doctors face all the time; a patient enters with inaccurate information over the internet or needs ethical advice over it. The last part tests you ability to make jargon understandable: another problem faced by doctors everywhere. After 1.5 years in medical school, I find myself speaking in jargon alot more now but I still practise detechnicalising them to my friends who are not medical students.

This is unrelated to the debate going on in the abovementioned blog but has relations to my post on communication. Getting through the med school interview does not mean you are a good communicator, it just means you’re slightly better than the odd other candidate. This is definitely an area I must improve on.

For starters, I shall stop blogging and start talking to real people.