Good questions to ask during interview

[estradiol9]

What are some good questions to ask about the school during an interview?

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[Praefectus]

Which field do most students match into? It might be a big problem if you want to do surgery and 75% of students at that school end up in peds.

 

[tima]

It's better to ask about the surgery department and the residency program instead of asking about match rates.

The match is determined by the students and his/her interests. This year my school had a lot of anest matches, and last year had more surg matches.

Also, schools known for primary care are about 55% or less going into primary care.

Which field do most students match into? It might be a big problem if you want to do surgery and 75% of students at that school end up in peds.

 

[mechengmed]

This is from another thread that I favorited.

Things that are important

1) What is the 3rd year like and how is it structured?:

I almost never hear any real questions or comment from applicants regarding this topic. In the end this is the only real difference between schools, and probably could be the only real question to ask? more specific questions?

a) How are the rotations structured? What is your role on the wards? Do you have a clear role Do you get your "hands dirty" alot, or is it alot of shadowing? This is very important. You really don't learn much by watching people do stuff and if they work you down to a minimal role you will not gain much experience and will suck for several months into internship.

Now I'm not saying you demand the right to cross clamp the aorta during a CABG, but medicine is not a spectator sport and if the school doesn't have a culture of teaching (i.e. alot of patients are private patients, medical students aren't allowed to do anything) it will be a long, boring 3rd year.


2) Where do 3rd year evaluations come from?

Alot of people go in with this attitude "I am here to learn not to get grades." I agree with this attitude 85%. However, using that attitude indiscriminantly is impractical and can lead to some evaulations that you are not too happy with, it happens

You probably can't please everyone equally. This is especially true on surgery and medicine where there is not enough hours in the day.

Thus, the recommendation I make to everyone is to figure out roughly who writes the evaluation and what they expect and make sure you do a really good job on that. I do not recommend kissing up....However, it is really easy at times to get caught up in "which 5 minute presentation do I spend preparing for tomorrow. " This is why if you know who is grading you you can prioritize which person you pull the NEJM articles out for, and who gets the 15 minute before cram session off up-to-date.

Understand however while this happens at all schools (its how the beast works) not all schools do a reasonable job at making this fair or letting you know who is grading you or what you are supposed to do. Thus you should really make an effort to ask questions such as for every rotation do you have an attending directly responsible for evaluating you, or a preceptor (someone not taking care of patients that you are caring for who evaluates your academic abilities and analytic abilities? ideally your grade should come roughly equally from both.

3) Where do the students end up? If you dont want to do primary care, and 75% of school X does. Guess what, you are signing up for 15 weeks of primary care rotations at that school. Conversely, if you want to do general internal medicine or family medicine....and you come to a school that puts out 25 orthopods and 10 neurosurgeons a year.....you will spend alot of time learning about surgeries that you will never perform in your life.


4) How are medical students protected from scut?

If they cannot give you a real answer to this question expect to learn alot about running bloods to the lab and wheeling patients to the CT scanner and very little about managing an MI.

Some schools do a good job of setting up systems to prevent this, however I have also met interns who told me that they failed the surgery shelf because their school was rampant with scut and they didn't learn anything. I think my school did a very good job at scut control, however I have wheeled my share of patients to CT at 2 am.

5) How receptive is the administation to fixing problems and/or disciplining out of line behavior, espcially from residents?

trust me when you have an ID class where the course director is terrible, you will really appreciate it when a new course director is hired the next year.

6) how is the research opportunities at this school?

If you want to end up at an academic program, there will come a time when you will seek papers and if they are not there to be written then you will understand the meaning of this question. If not then forget I mentioned this.

7) how good is this school at focusing on the bread and butter?

This is especially relevant if you are looking at an academic powerhouse type place. Typically alot of times you will find that big tertiary centers tend to be filled with people who A) study esoteric diseases, B) specialize in highly uncommon or speciallized surgeries or diagnostic tests, or C) only doing big commando surgeries on cases people in the community looked at and said no way im touching that.

This is something you may be interested in as an attending or at the end of your residency. However in medical school most of these areas will not be your field and learning the literature on steroid tapers for patients with the CREST syndrome, the signs and symptoms of spinocerebellar ataxia 8 or how to resect a pseudomyxoma peritonei is probably not the best use of time in your only exposure to the area. Its easy to get caught up in that stuff, however good schools recognize the nature of the academic beast and try to make sure that you leave knowing the stages of active labor, how to read an EKG and how to manage childhood asthma.

 

[Disinence2]

Make sure u ask about how grades are structured during 3rd year.

 

[MedPR]

Ask about research and service opportunities during pre-clinicals. Tons of schools (every school?) says they are committed to those things and tons of applicants (every applicant?) claims they are interested in them as well, but I doubt many actually ask about it. Perhaps I've said to much and should've saved this for myself.

 

[Insanity4]

This is from another thread that I favorited.

This was some good stuff. Definitely keeping these questions in mind

 

[kpcrew]

medicalmatins says

Ask the first- and second-years (not the people who present the curriculum) what the curriculum is like:

• what is the grading system?
• what's the class average on a test?
• (how) are you ranked?
• what classes are required; what aren't?
• how often do you have tests?
• do you learn by system, by region, by clinical presentation...?
• when do you get clinical skills?
• do you have problem-based learning or clinical correlations?
• are you required to shadow or volunteer?
• when do you see standardized patients or use the simulation center?
• are the students competitive?
• what percentage of the class attends lectures?

Ask third- and fourth-years what their rotations are like:

• what is a typical day?
• do you do a lot of scut? (see below for definition of "scut")
• do you know what specialty you want to enter?
• how much time is given to study for Step 1? was that enough?

Good luck!

 

[La Presse]

If you are interviewed by a researcher, ask them about their research. People love talking about their research!! You can also branch out and talk about research opportunities and such.