Do you remember your medical school interview?
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Do you remember your medical school interview?
Discuss training, careers, and education
I stumbled across an interesting website called Life of a Dundee Medical Student: http://lifeofadundeemedstudent.wordpress.com/applying-to-medicine/interviews/ It gives quite a good overview of what t
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Do you remember your medical school interview?
posted at 13/4/2012 2:15 PM BST
on bmj.com
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*Moderator*
Posts: 1449
First: 7/4/2011 Last: 23/5/2013 |
I stumbled across an interesting website called Life of a Dundee Medical Student: http://lifeofadundeemedstudent.wordpress.com/applying-to-medicine/interviews/ It gives quite a good overview of what to expect from a medical school interview, as well as examples of the bloggers own experience of interviews. Do you remember your medical school interview? What questions were you asked? How did it go? What advice would you give to students going to an interview? Any key things you should say that you wish you had said? |
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Re: Do you remember your medical school interview?
posted at 13/4/2012 3:20 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 2059
First: 12/3/2010 Last: 23/5/2013 |
Interesting! |
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Re: Do you remember your medical school interview?
posted at 13/4/2012 11:11 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 1181
First: 19/4/2010 Last: 23/5/2013 |
Great stuff. Embarassingly, I didn't know about this blog, from within my own medical school! I do the MMIs for prospective medical students here in Dundee. The process is particularly good at predicting OSCE results in 1st, 2nd and 3rd year. We are able to analyse the interviewers, so determine who is a dove and who is a hawk (I'm about 0.8 marks soft this year) and therefore normalise the marks to erradicate the hawk/dove effect, and ensure that the interviews are of similar "difficulty" across the different days with different interviewers. My station this year was particularly interesting.... But I can't tell you about it, obviously. My interview at Cambridge was somewhat different - we talked about why the chemical structure of water means ice floats; how to design a study to determine how homing pigeons get home; why chaos theory means there are epidemics of flu at various intervals; what does billiards have to do with seizures.... that sort of thing.
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Re: Do you remember your medical school interview?
posted at 14/4/2012 3:26 AM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 324
First: 23/12/2011 Last: 3/5/2013 |
Oh I remember my interview's alright. :( |
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Re: Do you remember your medical school interview?
posted at 14/4/2012 7:33 AM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 3
First: 14/4/2012 Last: 23/4/2012 |
My medical school interview goes back almost 50 years to 1963. It was in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon.There were "stock questions"that were asked which we knew about.How? We accosted the students who had their interviews before us and all the 20 boys from the private school I went to had this list.We prepared hard to give suitable answers to simple questions.We had already been made to understand that our fate had been sealed on the basis of the "A"level marks!If so why was this charade?The questions usually were 1Why do you want to do medicine?(stock answer "i want to serve my fellow human beings" 2"So you went to a private school? (most of the university staff had been to private schools and had some bias in favour of students from private schools) 3So you played cricket /rugby/ badminton/ swam for your school? 4So you were a Queens Scout? Apart from testing our English, and assessing our level of nervousness in the presence of an august body of acedemics , I felt that the interview was a waste of their time and our adrenaline. However, quite a few of my prospective classmates from the rural areas (probably much cleverer than me!) did not speak English well and were eliminated.. So the "Viva" was a test of English and to make sure that we had two hands and two feet!! Dr Asoka Thenabadu Entered The Faculty Of Medicine, University of Ceylon in 1963 |
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Re: Do you remember your medical school interview?
posted at 15/4/2012 11:34 AM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 320
First: 27/10/2011 Last: 22/5/2013 |
My 1996 Cambridge interview at Christ's was scary, but fun more than anything. I have already posted a little on this in another thread, so apologies to regulars. I had three separate interviews that lasted about 1 hour each... The interview with the Admissions Tutor was quite pastoral and generalised, with questions such as: 'What will you do to take time out in a busy working life?", "What experiences have you had in medicine outside of the classroom?", "What have you read about medicine in the press recently?", and "What role do you think that alcohol has in health?". Rundown: why do you want to study medicine and what have you done to prepare for it? The interview with a Pharmacology Fellow was based on my approach to medical sciences, especially what I would be studying over the next few years, and focused heavily on a project that I was asked to submit in advance (of my own choice) that was on Cancer Statistics. This was quite a personalised interview. Rundown: will you cope with the content of the course? The most enjoyable (but probably also most daunting) interview was with my future Director of Studies. I think in retrospect that this one was meant to push me hard on how I approach the unknown, problem-solve and how my mind worked. I seem to remember breaking what I was told was a taboo for interviewees - asking questions of the interviewer. Sometimes there didn't seem to be any other way to approach them other than to treat them as part of a normal dialogue rather than a 'hot seat' scenario, and passing questions around is a normal part of my interaction in conversation. My favourite question? "So, why does the earth have a magnetic field?" On asking whether he concurred with my response, the reply simply came back "I don't know - you are the one doing physics!" Over the years I haven't managed to get much out of my DoS on how it actually went! Rundown: will you be interesting to have as a student? Do you have 'what it takes' to excel? In fact, 16 years later, I find myself a student again back at the same College studying for an MPhil and then a PhD. I'm not sure if the PhD interview was better or worse, but that is for another thread... My best advice: prepare sensibly for what can be expected, but embrace the unexpected. Be yourself.
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Re: Do you remember your medical school interview?
posted at 15/4/2012 4:32 PM BST
on bmj.com
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*Moderator*
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First: 17/11/2008 Last: 19/5/2013 |
Yes. I had a couple- I applied after my A levels as prior to that I had applied for a Psychology degree.I remember I didn't have a good answer for that rather obvious question, "Why do you want to be a doctor?". At Bristol they asked me, " Will you cope" because I had Arts A levels and hadn't got what was then an O level in Chemistry. No one asked me if I played rugby. I think back then a lot depended if you could make eye contact and string a few sentences together. |
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Re: Do you remember your medical school interview?
posted at 16/4/2012 6:27 AM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 2948
First: 10/3/2009 Last: 23/5/2013 |
I don't think we had one. We just had to do fifty push ups in your sleep with a full bladder and a blood glucose of zero while reciting the cranial nerves backwards in Latin. If you passed you'd be tough enough to be a doctor. |
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Re: Do you remember your medical school interview?
posted at 16/4/2012 11:31 AM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 16
First: 14/8/2009 Last: 19/9/2012 |
I think I can remember my one and only interview (Aberdeen) quite well, but maybe I'm filling in a lot of the blanks with stuff I've made up. It was only in 2008. What I do remember very clearly was being asked about the novel Trainspotting. I hadn't read it at the time, in fact I still haven't! I managed to wiggle my way out with a general statement likw "I'm familiar with the general plot", which was itself a bit of a stretch. Thankfully, all they really wanted to talk about was the issues of drug addiction. I know it's a scary prospect, but I was quite chilled about the whole process. The interviewers at Aberdeen were really nice, I wish I could remember who they were so I could thank them for letting me in 
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