Hey pre-meds, Dr. Prufer, here. I'm just going to be doing a quick video tonight about ten common types of
med school interview questions that you should all be prepared for going into your interviews. Preparing
for these guys is a really great use of your time, these are really commonly asked questions. So our first
three questions are tell me about yourself, why medicine, and why our school? So tell me about
yourself and why medicine I just did two videos pretty in-depth on how to answer these questions.
You can find them on our YouTube channel. I've included the link off to the side there so follow
that link, you'll get some great in-depth insight on how to answer those questions and really what
admissions committees are looking for you to say. In terms of the why our school question, really
what you need to be doing is going to the school website, looking at their values and their mission
statement. You also want to be looking for any parts of their program that you're particularly
interested in so say if you did a global health experience in Cuba during undergrad and really
enjoyed it and this school is offering global health experiences in China to their students
you might enjoy that so you talk about that as a reason that inspired you to go to the school.
You could also look at their curriculum and any projects their students do that you might be
interested in as well whether that's research or community outreach or whatever it may be. But just
do your research, look into the program, and figure out they do and relate that back to your residency
and talk about it when they ask you why our school. It's not rocket science but a lot of schools or a
lot of students seem to miss doing that they don't actually research the school. So by the way if any
of you watching right now have questions about anything that I'm saying feel free to comment, I'll
try and answer them when I see them I don't get to them as I can. So our fourth question here is kind
of our policy type questions so what is the most pressing problem faced by healthcare today. So you
should basically prepare answers related to what you perceive to be the most pressing issues based
on your own personal experience and then back that up with facts in terms of things that you've
learned from reading the news or recent government policies as long as your answer is reasonable and
rational and that you can back up your opinion with facts that are relevant and well-informed,
then you'll get a good mark on this answer. The other thing that you should be considering
preparing for is just generally reading the news in your country in terms of the health
care system and hot-button topics. So things like medical marijuana, legalization of marijuana, the
opioid crisis, issues surrounding end-of-life care, are all good things to be reading up on. You should
also be informed about kind of local marginalized populations so whether that's Aboriginal
populations or whatever applicable wherever you are you should know about them and know what
efforts the school is making in that direction as well as you know medical people in
general. All right so what our fifth question type is scenario questions. So these are your typical
MMI type questions, I've posted a list of MMI questions in the post and you can also check out
our YouTube channel and watch some of the videos they're really informative on how to preoperly
answer an MMI question. There are just certain steps you should be taking and certain points you
should be hitting for mostly every MMI question you watch or that you're answering so make sure
you're checking out those videos and that you know what you're doing. Next is our leadership style
question. So going into your interview make sure you have a narrative prepared about a time you
act as a leader. You get bonus points if you use your leadership skills to actually help someone
else. On top of that you should talk about what you've learned from that leadership experience
and how you're going to apply that lesson to your future career. So basically what you're going to be
doing is you're going to be telling this story, this narrative, you're gonna summarize what's the most
important takeaway, what you've learned from it, and then you're going to talk about how you're going
to apply that to your future career in medicine. Alright the next one we have is the teamwork and
collaboration question. So that's something like tell me about a time you use teamwork to solve a
problem, or tell me about a time you worked as part of a team. So again you're going be addressing this
the same way that you address the leadership question, you're going to come up with a good story
about a time you use teamwork to solve a problem, you're going to summarize the main lessons that
you learned from that experience, and then you're going to apply it to your future practice of medicine.
It's pretty simple. Then along those lines we also have our eighth question which is the
advocacy question. So advocacy is actually a large part of being a physician and it's not as large
it's not as big as most students often envision. So you don't have to be starting political campaigns
or arguing with people on social media or writing newspaper articles, advocacy can be something small
just something small that's going to improve the life of your patients or even the people you're
volunteering with or whatever it is. So an example for advocacy that would work for a pre-med student
could be helping the people in the long term care home that you're volunteering at maybe you
notice a problem with the home or the setup or the way that care is being administered and you went and
talked to management and the outcome was improved care or quality of life for the long-term care
patients. So as a med student or as a pre-med when you're thinking advocacy it doesn't have
to be huge just think of something little that you did to improve the lives of those around you
and as long as you saw a measurable benefit, that answer will be good enough. Next is our mistake or
unprofessional behavior question. So this questions typically phrase something along the lines of tell
me about a time you made a mistake or tell me about a time you acted unprofessionally. And it's
okay to make a mistake and it's okay to divulge this information obviously making sure that it's
not something that's completely unprofessional but talk about a mistake that you made and then
what you did to rectify the situation, what you learned from the situation, and how you're going to
apply that learning to your future. Essentially in medicine we do learn a lot through making mistakes,
mistakes happen but the important thing is that you make it right and that you learn from it and
then you try and make sure that it never happens again. So you're addressing that mistake question
really focus on what you learned and what the key takeaways are and how are you're going to apply that
in the future. Because basically they want to see that you're going to learn from any mistakes you
make and that's going to make you a better person. Finally our tenth question, so this is our quirky
type question. So these questions they're either meant to relax students they might be asked early
in the interview, they might be kind of silly, or they could be used to put like put students off
their game because they're just so far out in left field. So some of my favorites are if you
were a type of desert what type would you be or if you were a utensil what type of utensil
would you be. There's not a lot of choices with utensils but, or even you know if you could have
dinner with anyone from history who would you choose and why. So the key to answering quirky
questions is just coming up with the response and then being able to explain it in the logical way
that makes sense and that applies to you so it's like a personal type question. So one of the best
answers I saw for a quirky question, I asked a student if you were desert what type would
you be. And this was during an MMI practice and it threw him off and he sat there and he thought for
maybe a good minute and a half and then he decided. He said I'd be vanilla yogurt and I'm sitting there
going that's not a dessert but he explained it really well he said you know I'm sweet but I go
well with anything because I get a lot of people a lot different situations and I also and, he
basically just said that his sweetness allows him to relate to a bunch of different people
and be very versatile. So we just talked about the versatility of his personality and also related it
to kind of being healthy and health conscious. So it ended up being a good answer though initially
I was like you know as the interviewer I was like vanilla is not vanilla yogurt is not a dessert. So
those are basically my ten interview questions that you should be preparing for. Like I said
before you can check out our YouTube channel for more information on tell me about yourself, why
medicine, and those types of questions. We'll also have some great MMI prep videos up there
for you. I've also included the hundred MMI prep practice questions so that's a great resource for
you go practice, time yourself, whatever you need to do. And there's a final link there too that's just a
general interview preparation from one of our past admissions experts. So have a good night everyone!