Advice for phone interviews for PGY1

[jmcmans1]

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Does anyone have advice about phone interviews for residencies? From my understanding in some situations (like this one) these are held prior to onsite interviews in hopes to weed out some applicants, and that you should have your CV on hand and should be prepared to tell them about yourself, your strengths & weaknesses.

If anyone else has anything to add I would greatly appreciate it! My telephone interview got changed to a sooner than expected date so I'm quite nervous yet excited!

Thank you!

 

[TX_TX]

Just be yourself, practice your interview responses beforehand and calm down. I had video and phone interviews, both of which were fine but incredibly different from one another. One asked all situational questions (nothing about strengths etc. or why I want to do a residency) whereas the other one was all about why residency? why us? and your usual questions. Several large programs are doing preliminary phone interviews to see if you can put two words together appropriately and are not just looking good on a piece of paper. It is their way of trying to see if you are worth inviting for an on site and it is also really nice of them to do this because traveling is expensive and if they already can tell that you would not be an ideal fit from such an interview, well, that saves you some money and time as well and not just for the program.

Like I said -calm down, practice and be yourself. Practice out loud.

 

[M-PharmD]

I had about 40 minutes phone interview. The director talked for some time telling me about herself then the program then she asked me to talk about myself, what are my strengths, weaknesses, and asked me to talk in details about some of the projects that were listed on my CV. I admit I was nervous during the call, but at least I managed to answer her questions on point. 3 days later, I received an on-site interview from them.

 

[sde780]

Be prepared to answer "Why should we bring you in for an on-site interview?"