UC-Davis Interviewees

[Weeble]

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Seeing as Interviewfeedback is down, does any one have comments on their interviews at Davis? Any challenging/ethical/HMO questions?
Thanks! 🙂

 

[trip]

well, as usual, what interview Qs you get depend on which interviewers you have.

My interview with a med student was very laid back, nothing interesting. He asked about my fav book, strengths, weaknesses, what challenges I have overcome...

Interview with the doc was much more difficult. He asked me if I were to write an autobiography, what would I say is my greatest achievement. And he asked many questions about med school admission policy... like what would I do to maintain diversity in med school when the applicant pool isn't that diverse.

When I can think of more, I'll add them later.

 

[sorrento]

Congrats on your Davis interview. As you were probably told, you'll have a faculty and student interviewer. The student followed more of an obvious line of questioning than the faculty. Some questions I remember:
-why medicine?
-why Davis in particular?
-why academic medicine?
-what gets you out of bed in the morning (aka, what motivates you)
-drilling down on stuff I said in the secondary about contributions to the field of medicine and the community
-the usual questions about ECs.

Faculty asked some ethics questions, eg What do you do if your patient is on life support, does not have an advance directive, you think there's a reasonable chance they might recover but family is adamant that he "wouldn't want to live like this?" He seemed to have a whole supply of ethics questions ready so I would be prepared to work through anything you're given.

I think that, like everywhere else, the mix of questions totally depends on who you get for an interviewer. PM me with any specific questions or if you know the name of your interviewer and I can tell you if it's the same one. I have lived in Davis so can tell you about the town if you're curious. Good luck!

 

[altaskier]

Like everyone else has said, my student interviewer was really laid back. He asked me the usual questions. Although he did ask me if I had 3 wishes, what would they be and why? My faculty interviewer asked me a lot regarding my research and my volunteer experiences. No ethical questions for me. One piece of advice....YOU NEED A CAR for the interview day, because you have to run back and forth from Sacramento to Davis. So RENT A CAR!

Good Luck

 

[meals]

I think I had an atypical experience at Davis. I felt that the Admissions Office was pretty unorganized and not particularly accomodating. They made us show up at 8 in Sacramento for an orientation and brief tour of the hospital. My first interview was in Davis at noon so I had a 20 minute drive and then about 3 hours of waiting. There was no opportunity to meet with students -- we were just given a coupon to eat lunch on our own at the little cafe. Then my student interviewer never showed up. They eventually found me another interviewer but she had class in 15 minutes. She was supposed to give me a tour too so we kind of walked around really quickly while she asked me questions. My faculty interview was back in Sacramento with a neurologist who had just started working there so he didn't really know anything about Davis or the med school. All in all, it was a pretty crappy day. Somehow, I got in so I will be going back to visit to see if that day was just an anomaly.

I hope you have a better day than me! I know other people who have interviewed there who had totally normal experiences. Good luck!!

 

[Ai]

Congratulations on your interview! I just interviewed there the other day. Both interviews were very, very laid back. The faculty interview went about 90 minutes but there were no difficult questions. He basically went through the EC's on my AMCAS and we talked about them. It was just a conversation. Never even a "why medicine" or "why this school" question. The student interview was even more laid back. I don't think he even opened my file and he certainly didn't write anything down. It lasted about 90 minutes too, but was basically just a conversation that two people might have if they met a party or something like that. We had some philosophical debates about a few topics, some sort of related to medicine, others just about life. Both interviews were very enjoyable conversations with absolutely no stress. Of course it depends on who your interviewers are, but I wouldn't worry too much. Good luck! Let me know if you have any more questions.

 

[Weeble]

Thanks so much to everyone who posted with comments and congrats! This is such a great board. 🙂

Just curious... did any one have an otolaryngologist named Paul Donald as their interviewer?

 

[sorrento]

Weeble, I just PM'd you.