Awkward / nervous / uncomfortable is expected. My experience was that residencies went way out of their way to make candidates feel welcome and celebrated and reassured. (Treasure that feeling, people, make it help you survive the next 3 years.)
One thing folks might not realize is that due to sheer overwhelming app volume, your app gets reviewed
pretty well to get an interview out of a pile of
thousands, but then at the interview your app gets reviewed again,
to death, by the relatively fresh eyes of a gang of strongly opinionated people, who weeks/months later might be in the room where you're compared head to head with every other interviewee, to make the rank list. In other words, app review keeps going and going until rank lists are due.
Every interviewer will forever overreact to how a bad resident got through and will bring their own biases and preferences to bear. As will you, when you're in their shoes.
Every year at least one candidate behaves so badly, their med school dean gets a WTF call.
Ways in which you might fail to "get the job done" at an interview, all of which I've seen multiple times:
- verbally or physically disrespect
anybody, from the volunteer hospital receptionist, to the spouse of another candidate at the social
- forget to learn anything about the program thus can't answer "why us?"
- forget to learn how to answer the question "why FM?"
- forget to have an answer for anomalies in your app, or not even know they're anomalies
- hit on somebody (
anybody)
- forget to smile / say thank you / use kindergarten rules
- forget to express enthusiasm for a
clearly emphasized aspect of the program
(here? show no interest in learning Spanish, or make a face at the idea of delivering lots of babies)
- don't realize it's a job interview
- opine about politics or religion
- fail to notice
and apologize after being painfully oblivious, such as when you trip somebody or you don't hold the door for the people behind you
It's pretty darned obvious when somebody is interviewing with us for literally no reason other than being close to home (major cities 1-2 hrs away).
It's obvious when somebody thinks we're a **** program and they seriously hope they don't match here. Why are you bothering to apply to programs with names that don't start with a "U" my friend.
Hope this helps.
