@Ella Funt , can you please comment on the tone of the interviewer(s) and your overall impression of each of your two interviews? Additionally, what types of questions should interviewees expect for the faculty/staff interview and for the medical students interview? And do you suggest any different demeanor for either interview?
I know there are already some great previous posts but having your thoughts will be just as valuable. Thank you!
Sure!
Tone of the interviews: (feel free to skim over details you already know) - Each non-WARM candidate had two interviews; a one-on-one with a physician/faculty member, and a group interview with two medical students and multiple interviewees.
For my one-on-one I was interviewed by a radiologist. The tone of the interview was "friendly interview" - the radiologist was very kind and welcoming (he at no point made me feel intimidated), yet it started off feeling more like an interview than a conversation. I say this because I'd heard from my friend (she's an M2 at UW Madison) that she basically talked it up with her interviewer for 30 minutes, and it was much more a conversation than an interview for her.
Anyway, here were the questions I remember the radiologist asking:
1. What made you decide to go into medicine? (I started off by mentioning the experience that got me thinking of medicine as a career, which was helping out in an ICU during a trip for my job. The interviewer asked where this particular job trip was, and I was really embarrassed when I realized I didn't remember the hospital's name. I recommend knowing these basic details for your formative experience(s), so you don't get distracted by forgetting those details the way I did!)
2. What do you do when you're stressed?
3. Why Madison? (I wasn't sure if he meant why Madison the city, or why UW Madison's medical school, so I answered for both, and I got the impression that was okay.)
4. In ten years from now, what do you think will be the biggest problem in medicine? (You probably already have great ideas in mind for this question. Previously I had gone onto NPR.org and found some stories that are relevant to this question and were rather interesting in general. I put together my answer based on what I'd read and based on my own experiences with patients).
5. After you submitted your AMCAS application, have you had any additional experiences you'd like to share with us now?
6. What questions do you have for me? (UW will present about their school and changing curriculum before your interviews, which is great material for questions. However, my interviewer wasn't as familiar with UW's courses since he isn't a faculty member, so I wasn't really able to ask him those questions. Instead I asked him what brought him to the UW Health system/what did he like best about UW, and what made him to deicide to interview prospective students. It was really cool hearing his own path to medicine, to his specialty, and to UW. I appreciated being able to have one-on-one time with a physician in this way, just because I got to hear his story)
I'm sorry that I'm so wordy!
For my group interview, there were two M2 medical students interviewing me, and there were three interviewees including me. The tone of this group interview was very much "relaxed getting to know you". It was less formal than the one-on-one interview was, we were asked funny or feel-good questions, and there was a lot of laughing.
Interestingly, my M2 friend said some applicants actually drop the f-bomb during the group interviews, and she recommended AGAINST being that informal. Anyway, please don't let that scare you if you happen to curse like I do around people I'm comfortable with - there's a difference between being informal (which is fine in the group interview) and being unprofessional (bad in any interview), and I'm sure you already know that.
Here were the questions the two M2 students asked that I remember:
1. What is the story behind your most interesting scar?
2. What was your proudest moment?
3. Why Madison? (again, didn't know if they meant the city or the school, so I briefly answered for both, and no one seemed to think I was talking for too long).
4. During my friend's interview, she had been asked If she could have any superpower, what would it be?
The questions the M2's ask are pretty cool and can be answered by any applicant, regardless of her/his personality.
During lunch I had met one of the applicants that ended up being in my group interview. That was pretty cool, it helped make me feel more relaxed. In fact having lunch before the small group discussion was fantastic, because I really enjoyed meeting the applicants at UW while eating my lunch. Compared to interviewees at my other prospective schools, the applicants at UW were the most friendly and down-to-earth. Just knowing you can start up a conversation with any of the UW applicants made for a much less uptight interview day for me.
The M2 students gave us plenty of opportunities to ask them questions, which is exactly what we applicants did. It was great to be able to ask student life/course-specific questions. The applicants in my group asked good questions too. No one made me feel like I had to compete for the best question or the best answer, it was just as laid back as people said it would be. I was a ball of nerves that day because I wanted so much to go to UW, and even I felt relaxed during the group interview.
