University of Calgary Multiple Mini Interviews

I can't help with all of it, but we did the MMIs for VMRCVM interviews this year. I actually liked it a lot! I guess it depends on your personality, but I preferred that it was a one on one setting rather than 6 people grilling you for everything you're worth. There were some "Bwah?" questions asked, but it was a little more interesting than just the standard stuff. I would review some behavioral and regular interview questions just in case you get asked them, but so long as you relate to people fairly well you should do fine!

I know you PMed me, but I figured I'd respond here in case anyone else applying to UCVM was searching for info.

UCVM requires that you sign a confidentiality waiver preventing disclosure of the interview questions/essay topic, so I can't comment on those specifically... but here's what I can tell you:

Basically you are lined up in a hallway with 8 other people. Each door has a scenario posted outside. You have a couple minutes to read the scenario and formulate a response. A bell rings, you enter the room and two interviewers are inside. You talk for 8 minutes. If you end early, there are usually follow-up questions. The bell rings again, and you move onto the next room and do it again!

There weren't any questions that required specific knowledge about diseases, medications, etc. I think the big thing was not about the answers, but about how you presented your case. As I've mentioned in other threads, I personally preferred the MMI format to traditional interview format. I admit it was a lot more stressful, but I think it gives a better gauge of a candidate. Try to practice scenarios with the time limit beforehand to get in the right rhythm. But overall, just relax and be yourself!

As for the essay, I don't know if they've changed it this year, but watch your word count! We wrote it on this weird program where if you're over the word limit, it cuts off the end of your essay without warning. So definitely try to leave time at the end to double-check for that.

And... have fun! They provide breakfast, snacks and lunch. You get a tour of the campus and the new clinical skills building. You also get to chat with some of the current students and some of the professors. Enjoy yourself, and good luck!

there is some discussion on the vmrcvm thread but we also had to sign a confidentiality form. pg 5
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=683207&highlight=vmrcvm&page=5

When I "reviewed" the format on this thread it was before my first real interview so my opinion has slightly changed. After i finished the MMI i thought i did pretty good. i'm not socially awkward so i felt comfortable speaking to everyone in the station. some questions were weird but i had an answer for every station!

IMO, i think everything they asked me could have been asked in a normal interview setting with the same 1-2 people interviewing you. I think not only would that be able to gauge the applicants "soft skills" but the applicant can also get to know the interviewers. the whole process was really impersonal.

However, at my normal interview, I LOVED my interviewers! They were so nice and easy to talk to. I think they were able to get a feel of my soft skills without pushing me through multiple stations. Hopefully Calgary also has time aside from the interview for you to speak with faculty and students in depth.

i would prepare for the MMI as you would prepare for a normal interview.
types of questions:
personality traits
ethical
your experience
conflict situations
current events
knowledge about the school

it is really up in the air as to what they would ask, but i'm sure you'll be fine! 😀

cheeto said:

Thanks a ton guys. Your information really helped me. Thnythe when you interviewed at UCVM were the women all wearing suits. I have been told by a lot of people I should but then my prof today told me that women in a suit jacket was too bussiness formal and that I should be in dress pants and a collared button down shirt minus the jacket. Whats your advice?

Thanks again for all the information. I really appreciate it a lot!

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i know this was directed towards Thnythe, but what is the harm with bringing a jacket? That way, if you need it because you are under dressed you have it. If it is too formal you can take it off. But you really don't want to be under dressed. Those people stand out SO MUCH at interviews. vmrcvm said to dress business casual, but id say 90% of people still dressed in suits. so the few others looked really funny and I bet they didnt feel as confident

cheeto said:

Thanks a ton guys. Your information really helped me. Thnythe when you interviewed at UCVM were the women all wearing suits. I have been told by a lot of people I should but then my prof today told me that women in a suit jacket was too bussiness formal and that I should be in dress pants and a collared button down shirt minus the jacket. Whats your advice?

Thanks again for all the information. I really appreciate it a lot!

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There was a mix of women in blouses/dress pants and others in suits. I personally wore a jacket -- partly because I would rather overdress than underdress, and partly because that way if I ended up sweating profusely it would be covered by the jacket, haha.

Just go with whatever you're comfortable with, I think the mix was pretty even so it shouldn't be weird either way!

BlacKAT33 said:

i know this was directed towards Thnythe, but what is the harm with bringing a jacket? That way, if you need it because you are under dressed you have it. If it is too formal you can take it off. But you really don't want to be under dressed. Those people stand out SO MUCH at interviews. vmrcvm said to dress business casual, but id say 90% of people still dressed in suits. so the few others looked really funny and I bet they didnt feel as confident

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I wore a really nice sweater and black dress pants. For most of the interview I had my long, well tailored peacoat on top of it as well. I finally took it off for the tour...but I really didn't feel out of place. I thought there was a nice, even mix of suits and business casual

Here goes nothing... These are Calgary << Medical School >> multiple-mini-interview and on-site essay questions for year 2009

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multiple mini interview (MMI) questions:

Station 1: You are provided with a photograph: \"workers digging different areas in a basement and dumping the soil into bags\"

What are these people doing? What other information do you need to better explain the situation?
Then the interviewer will provide you with a second photo: \"workers handing bags to each other into an open area where bags are piled in a row. there is a lake in the background\"
what do you think they are doing now? How does the second photo change/support your opinion about the first photo?

Station 2: For this station, there is no \"2-minutes\" waiting. you walk into the room right away and they will play a short video clip for you: \"a patient has recently had a successful liver transplant and she is very excited about the results. However, she also has a lung tumor but she doesn\'t know about it. Her physician seems not to care about her emotions...\"

How will you deal with this situation? If the patient asks you about her x-ray results, what will you tell her?

Station 3: You are working for a fund-raising company. Your company is running short of money. How will you deal with this situation?

Station 4: You and 12 other medical students are rating different attributes of a hospital. Some of your ratings are similar and some are different from other students. How do you interpret these results?

Station 5: You are shadowing a family physician. A mother and a daughter walk into the clinic and it is obvious that they have serious problems with each other. The daughter is annoyed with her mom and ask her to leave the room. You talk to the daughter in private and she tells you that she is smoking a pack of cigarette every day. Then you also leave the room to talk to the mom, where you mistakenly reveal the daughter\'s smoking problem. After they leave, the family physician seeks your opinion about the case. What will you tell him? Will you tell him about your mistake of revealing smoking problem to the mom?

Station 6: You and your friend are in an african country. Your friend is scantily dressed and is being chased by a mob. you try to refuge to a mosque but they turn you away. You are desparate to get away, so you get a cab and return to your hotel. You still have 10 more days to stay in that country. What will you tell your friend? Do you think that the mob was doing a right thing? Why do you think they were chasing you? can such situation arise in Canada?

Station 7: you are in your last year of residency and have an apartment in a busy area of the city. Recently your neighbors informed you that a new institution for treatment of alcoholics is getting opened in the area. They are annoyed by this news as this may lower the price of the apartments. They also complain that they may have difficulty renting their rooms/apartments and there will be glass shards on every corner. They ask you, as a medical professional, to write a letter and oppose the opening of this institution in the area. How will you respond? As a professional, what do you think about the situation?

Station 8: You are working as a cook in a restaurant, but hadn\'t had enough training. Recently one of the customers had food poisoning and he believes it happened in your restaurant. The manager wants to have a meeting with every member. How would you respond to the manager? Should the meeting be in private or with every restaurant member?

Station 9: You are working in an elementary school. One of your students, Sophie, complains that her friends/classmates are teasing her a lot. She tells you that she complained to her parents but they told her to grow up and not to act like a little girl. She also doesn\'t want you to intervene in case she loses her friends and is left alone. What will you do in this situation? Will you talk to the parents? What potential impacts can this experience have on Sophie?

And here comes the essay questions. Note that the computer spell checks your essay for you. So no need to worry about spelling errors. You have a total of 1 hour to write 2 essays, spend it any way you like (i.e. 35 minutes on one essay and 25 minutes on the other one).

Essay #1: explain the following statement: \"with every civil right also comes a civil responsibility\"

Essay #2: You are provided with 2 articles. The first article was this: "Safety and efficacy of nontherapeutic male circumcision: a systematic review.by Perera CL, Bridgewater FH, Thavaneswaran P, Maddern GJ"

Then you are provided with a second article from globe and mail, discussing the article above.
Explain your opinion about these two articles. Why out of so many articles getting published every day, globe and mail chose this specific one?

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Hope this information helps you with your interview preparation... you owe me a lunch for providing you such invaluable questions 🙂

Not only is this 3 months late (so the people wondering about MMI for the 2010 cycle have already done the MMI), and not only are you not supposed to give away MMI questions due to the confidentiality agreement, but this is also completely wrong. I'm not sure if this is for the UofC med school or what, but I can guarantee they didn't ask these questions for UCVM. I only applied in the 2010 cycle, but I know the general format of the MMI, and this is not it.

For anyone wondering in the future, UCVM's MMI consists of 8 stations at 10 minutes each. Historically there has been a rest station, but for 2010, there was not. You will always get 2 minutes at the beginning of each rotation to read the paper on the door. They are almost all scenarios involving situations in veterinary medicine. One is a hands-on station. There is one essay that you get an hour to write. The entire interview/essay process has a large animal bias to it, in order to attract people who are interested in large animal medicine (although who knows if that's working).

1) This was the medical school interview questions
2) med-students do not sign any confidential agreement
3) I don't like your attitude.

Having known people who have applied and gotten into medical schools that use the MMI format (the UofC and UofA), I am pretty certain that they do sign a confidentiality agreement. You can even see it if you go to the interview feedback page, as some of the recent responses for the UofC med school will mention that there are scenarios and they can't say what they are.

I apologize if I came across as rude in my response, but I am honestly confused as to why you would post med school MMI scenarios in the pre-vet forum when the two styles are completely different. Posting these and claiming that they were the stations UCVM used for 2009 will only confuse people. Although both faculties use MMI, the formatting varies greatly. What is used in the med school MMI is completely irrelevant to what may appear in the vet school MMI.

I couldn't find the post for med-students. In any case, I am sure those med-students who are persistent will be able to find these questions...

As for vet-students, I still believe these questions will help them with their practice. After all, these are standard questions made by u-of-c.

Finally, I thank Braki for correcting my post. Good luck to all future med/vet-applicants.

Station 10: In between moose hunting and shadowing a neurosurgeon, you come across a website that has a number of subforums for very different pre-health related fields. You have information relevant to pre-allopathic students. What do you do with this information, and why?



PS: I think you failed this one.

nyanko said:

Station 10: In between moose hunting and shadowing a neurosurgeon, you come across a website that has a number of subforums for very different pre-health related fields. You have information relevant to pre-allopathic students. What do you do with this information, and why?



PS: I think you failed this one.

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Awesome.

so funny

Hey if I had to start preparing for them... I would think lalook's information would be helpful even if it wasn't for vet school. All they were doing was trying to help and I don't think it is right for people to attack or make fun of them

I understand and appreciate that lalook was only trying to help people who were confused about the MMI, but that first post lalook made in this thread, as it currently exists, hinders pre-vet students more than it helps them. The questions were posted with no context, saying only that it was used for 2009. Considering this is a pre-vet forum, in a thread concerning UCVM, any hopeful applicant who sees those questions would have assumed that they were the stations UCVM used for the MMI interviews held in 2009. This is a dangerous notion for many reasons:

1. The questions are under a confidentiality agreement, and posting these in the first place is unethical
2. The formatting is so different between med school and vet school that preparing for the UCVM MMI using these questions, thinking that similar ones would be used for next year, would greatly hurt you once you actually started the interview. The formatting is seriously completely different:
   • The number of stations (8 vs. 9)
   • The type of situations presented (vet med related vs. allopathy and general situations)
   • The type of "other" stations (hands-on vs. photo and video)
   • The structure of the stations (always getting 2 min at the start vs. not getting 2 min for one station)
   • The essay (1 in an hour vs. 2 in an hour)
   • The material covered as a whole (vet med with a large animal bias vs. allopathy)
3. It's not the same people making the questions, since they're two completely different faculties who just happen to share part of the campus.
4. People might start worrying that during the interview, they'll have stations that are completely unrelated to vet med, which is not the case.

Although I admit that I was more abrasive than was necessary, having seen these questions and having gone through the MMI process at UCVM, I know that seeing those questions posted above will not help pre-vet students because the subject matter is just so completely different. It's like night and day; the similarities between the two MMI processes ends at "it's MMI".

ethical, unethical, confidentiality, different questions/stations/essays, day and night, blah blah blah...

You talk too much and keep repeating yourself, which makes me believe law-school is a better fit for you!

Edit: Actually, nevermind. I'll take initiative and stop fanning the flames.

Actually, I liked your reply... So I'll post it instead!

Braki: " I repeated myself because it seemed you didn't understand the first time 🙂 "

It's always entertaining when the pre-meds come visit.

it is no longer a pre-med 🙂

Well, good for it!

I took out that reply because frankly, I thought you'd been made fun of enough for one thread. But hey, whatever floats your boat!

You're jealous!

P.S.Braki. I am having fun, so let the game continue! 😉

Wow my comment was to stop the bickering because I felt bad for you but I guess lalook enjoys it. I take back my previous post