Blog Archives

How to Handle the Toughest Medical School and Residency Interview Questions

With medical school interviews in full gear and the start of the residency admissions cycle merely a few weeks away, it’s past time to start practicing for your interviews. Personal experience and situational questions can be tough, but what happens when you have a serious gap in your candidacy or are faced with an awkward or even illegal question? Check out my two Student Doctor pieces:

Redemption Awaits: Let Your Medical School Interview Transform Liabilities into Assets 

and

Difficult Interview Questions: Learning To Hit A Curveball Out Of The Park
for clear and detailed guidance. 

You don’t want to be caught with your pants down: As always, planning and robust practice are your friends.  

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No, I Can’t Fix Your Computer

My husband spotted a man wearing a t-shirt with that saying on it, and we have ever since jokingly referred to it when someone in the house is having a tech problem. 

As we all probably know, there is usually someone in the extended family who is the “computer person.” 

Well, we could use that individual now. While I am a big fan of the virtual interview for medical school and residency (see my upcoming Doximity article on the topic), I do worry about technical glitches. A client recently wrote me that her asynchronous, recorded virtual medical school interview had a problem, leaving her with one question unanswerable. (I counseled her to inform the school.) I’m crossing my fingers that this is an anomaly and not a reflection of what’s to come this cycle.

As always, make sure to practice for your interviews; you wouldn’t go into a standardized test without a lot of preparation, and the same should be true for interviews. 

Contact me here for help. 

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The Virtual Medical School Interview: What to Expect when You’re Expecting… An Unconventional Format

In the late spring, to its credit, the Association of American Medical Colleges® (AAMC) recommended that all medical school, residency, and fellowship interviews be done virtually this cycle. Formats may vary, but interviews should not be in-person.

One configuration that seems to be emerging for medical schools (at least) is a two-part model: asynchronous and synchronous. The former involves a recorded session in which a computer platform – without a live interviewer present – provides questions to applicants who then have a set time to record their answers. The synchronous session is a live, remote interview.

The advantage of virtual interviews – beyond obvious health benefits and cost containment – is a standardization of the process, but mastering the new, remote processes may be difficult and anxiety-producing. 

To get help with this new world of virtual interviews, contact me

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Residency and Medical School Interview Questions: How to Answer that Icky Decade One

“Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” the interviewer asks you, and you squirm…

An influential physician-administrator once complained to me that whenever he asked potential new faculty hires where they saw themselves in a decade they always said they were interested in global health or teaching. “It sounds sexy,” he remarked. “But many of them have nothing in their C.V.s to bolster their interest in either pursuit.”

When asked where you see yourself in ten years, consider how your accomplishments thus far might demonstrate an evolution. The idea is to have a trajectory that you can back up, defend, and easily justify. This doesn’t mean you’re stuck with what you’ve done even if you didn’t like it, though. You could point out that having tried myocardial bench research, you realize that your real interest is in clinical investigations of new cardiac markers.

Many medical school applicants say they don’t know what field they want to go into. That’s okay! And many residency applicants don’t know if they want to do a fellowship. That’s also to be expected. The point is to focus on your previous strengths and achievements and leverage them to demonstrate a logical path, going forward.

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Specificity is Golden

I’ve been editing and mock interviewing up a storm recently, and I want to offer a tip: Avoid words like “various,” “numerous,” and “several.”

“I’ve been involved in various community service projects” can imply a lack of true substance or even an attempt at obfuscation. (Is it just two afternoon health fairs you’re talking about?) Worse still, your strong accomplishments are overlooked when you lack specificity. It may feel redundant to showcase an activity you highlighted in your application materials, but – as you’ve heard me say before – your reader/interviewer is likely reviewing scores of candidacies. Yours won’t stand out if you don’t make it.

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About Dr. Michelle Finkel

Dr. Michelle Finkel

Dr. Finkel is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School. On completing her residency at Harvard, she was asked to
stay on as faculty at Harvard Medical School and spent five years teaching at the world-renowned Massachusetts General Hospital.
She was appointed to the Assistant Residency Director position for the Harvard Affiliated
Emergency Medicine Residency where she reviewed countless applications, personal statements and resumes. Read more

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Listen to Dr. Finkel’s interview on the White Coat Investor podcast:

Listen to Dr. Finkel’s interview on the FeminEm podcast: