I don't think though that people would benefit from the specific questions & info but rather from the process of having to answer random, some unforeseen questions quickly and eloquently, which comes from practice. It's just not the same if you practice it by yourself or with someone with whom you are already familiar. None of us will expect that the other SDNer will be an accurate representation of a real interviewer but having the opportunity to be grilled on at least somewhat relevant questions will be helpful, especially for those less experienced in public speaking & interviewing in general.
Also I would love to see this forum take a turn for the dramatic when people find out what horrid monsters some of us really are 🙂
This is an important point that should not be taken lightly.
Being interviewed by someone on the internet that
A) Does not know you,
B) Does not actually care if you do well
C) Does not really know anything about interviewing applicants except what they've learned as an applicant, or worse, through stories
D) Is not affiliated with any school, does not have inside knowledge on what each school looks for in their applicants
E) Gives you no reason to actually feel nervous
F) Is only available to observe your reactions online, while no school allows online interviews
G) Will have no one to validate their responses, allowing any potential interviewer to say
completely wrong advice while
no one will have any clue what was said...Seriously, this is a big point. How many times do you see someone give advice on SDN that is just plain wrong? How many times are people mostly wrong, or partially wrong, or not really helpful?
There's some benefits available from this, I'm not disagreeing. What I don't think we should overlook is the real potential we have for this to cause unnecessary distress to applicants by trying to "play doctor" with no supervision, no training, and no "skin" in the game at all. There's simply a very easy potential for damage to be done when there is so little that can be gleaned from these experiences since the interviewer will 90% of the time have absolutely no training in interviewing (let alone interviewing for medical schools) and has close to no inside information that will be useful. Many undergraduate schools offer mock interviews. Applicants have access to questions in the Interview Feedback just like the rest of us and can "prepare" for those kinds of questions.
SDN is a great resource but there we should stay mindful of our limits and not ignore the potential for us to do a lot of harm in exchange for doing a nominal amount of good.
It doesn't seem like it would be altogether difficult to put together a rather realistic (if slightly simple) mock-interview using the following guides for question asking:
Ask a real question from the Interview Feedback section of this site.
-If anything is unclear in the interviewee's answer, ask for clarification.
-If anything is particularly interesting about the interviewee's answer, ask to expand on that point.
-If the response is fine, move on to the next question.
Seems pretty simple, and would serve the important purpose of giving the mock-interviewee a chance to answer questions extemporaneously to a stranger, even if the conditions do not mimic the real interview identically. +1 to Ponyo's response.
Just some thoughts....
What's extemporaneous about these questions? Any applicant can look up the interview feedback and know all the questions that our "interviewers" have access too. If the interviewer is going to add a bunch of random stuff into an interview..why even bother if they're going to make up questions that the school wouldn't ask? What training does the interviewer have to evaluate if an applicant has answered an ethical question satisfactorily? What experience does our interviewers have to evaluate legitimate extemporaneous questions to know what is an above average response vs. a mediocre one?
Anything "unexpected" we can ask--even if it was somehow a question that a school might answer--we don't have the training to evaluate.
