 What is up guys, Karma Medic here and welcome back to another dose. We're continuing the MMI series today. You guys have been really enjoying the videos and finding them useful. So I'm covering more questions. If you don't know who I am, my name is Nasser. I'm a second year medical student at King's College London and I make these YouTube videos to help you guys through the application process. If you guys want to follow me on Instagram, you can get a deeper look into my day to day life and what it is that I do at medical school. If not, that's cool. Just watch the video and let's just jump straight into it. So the question that I want to tackle today is what is your biggest strength and what is your biggest weakness? Again, a common MMI question that comes up over and over again in these interviews. It might be phrased something along the lines of what is something that will make you a good doctor and what is something that might hold you back? So that is something saying, you know, what is one of your biggest strengths and what is one of your biggest weaknesses? How you want to tackle this question, I guess. Let's split this video up into two parts. Let's talk about the strength question and then the weakness question. And we can tackle them both individually. So let's start with what is your biggest strength? This is maybe the easier one. You want to be able to choose something and talk about something that doesn't really have to be specifically related to medicine. It can be about what makes you unique, what makes you a good person, what makes you good at what you do, something that would make you a value to the community at their university and a valuable doctor in society. What you actually choose doesn't really, really matter. Anything that you talk about, about you is going to be fine, but you want to make sure that you back it up with scenarios, you back it up with examples so that you can show why it is that you're saying you're good at whatever it is you're saying you're good at. So when you're answering this question, you want to really quickly, shortly summarize what is it that you're good at? For example, you want to say one of my biggest strengths is that I'm very good at teaching. I'm very good at teaching other people. That needs to be the shortest part of your answer. You don't want to go on long about that. You just want to say what it is that you're good at and then spend the rest of the time talking about your experiences and your value and how you did those things that you said. So that should be the shortest part of your answer. You want to spend the rest of the time talking about examples of how you showed you were a good teacher. For example, this is something that I talked about and I talked about in my previous uni, organizing little tutorial like sessions with students from the lectures so that we could go over different material each week. And I would learn the material, prepare some PowerPoint slides and teach that material to other students at university. And that was a great way for me to learn the material myself, but also a way to teach others. So like I said, whatever the strength that you choose is, it doesn't really matter. It's all about the story that you tell how you back it up. And remember, that's what's going to make you unique to the interviewer. If you tell them an experience or an activity that you did that's really interesting, they're going to remember you. They're going to remember your face. They're going to remember your story and it's going to make them more likely to give you a higher score or remember you when they're discussing you as a potential candidate. I've talked about this many times on the channel, but you want to be using the star technique or the star method, which talks about describing the situation first. This should be really a small part of your answer. Then you move on to talk about the task, what it is that you were doing, how it went, blah, blah, blah. And then the biggest part of your answer, the juiciest, most meaty part should be about the action. What actions did you take? What did you actually do? How did you do it? How did you get through it? And then you want to talk about the R in star for result. So what happened? How did this improve something? How did this make something better? Where did you go from there? How are you going to change moving forward? Things like that. So some of the common things that students will say is their biggest strength is something like communication, leadership or management. And I mean, those are fine. They are going to be some of the more common answers. Given and they are fine. Like I said, again, if you have something to back it up with examples, activities, et cetera, but you might want to be giving something a little bit more unique, a little bit more personal if you can. And I'm sure you guys have a lot of experiences, a lot of extracurricular activities where you've demonstrated skills that are necessary for becoming a doctor. And you can talk about those. They might be a little bit more interesting. For example, you can talk about your ability to empathize. And that will have come across in your work experiences, whatever you did, whether it was working at a volunteer home or a shadowing a doctor in a hospital, anything like that, you'll be able to talk about your empathy skills. You can also talk about your ability to listen. Of course, something else extremely important in medicine. You can talk about your ability to be very meticulous, very detail oriented, picking up on facts and things that are changing in your environment very well. Anything really just try and find something unique that you can talk about. It's going to go really, really, really long way. If you say something unique in an interview and back it up with examples. Now, the more tricky part of this question is if you're asked to talk about a weakness. Nobody likes talking about a weakness. No one finds this question easy and it definitely takes some preparing to get used to talking about and knowing what it is that you want to say. And in fact, when you're answering the question, I think that's something important to say. You can say, I acknowledge that I definitely have some weaknesses and I've been trying to work on them in the past and I'm currently working on them to improve who I am as a person. One of those weaknesses is bubblah or my biggest weakness is bubblah. So you want to acknowledge the difficulty of having a weakness, acknowledging that you have a weakness and talking about how you're improving and what you're doing to change how you're moving forward. These are all really important things. It all falls under the umbrella of reflection, which is something super important in medicine. And yeah, make sure you can acknowledge that you have weaknesses, you're not a perfect person and you're working on them to improve. Now, when it comes to choosing the weakness that you're going to talk about, it obviously can't be something that's central to the role of a doctor. For example, you can say my biggest weakness is communicating. My biggest weakness is talking to people who I don't know. My biggest weakness is being able to remember a lot of facts. Definitely not weaknesses that you want to have if you're entering the field of medicine. You want to choose a weakness that is a true and legitimate weakness, not something like I work way too hard or I'm way too focused and way too driven, motivated, trying to make this money. You want to make sure that you say a true weakness, not something that's like a fake weakness twisted as a strength. So yeah, find something that isn't central to the role of a doctor, for example, socialization skills and personal skills. You know, being really detail oriented. These are things that doctors need to have. So if you say that is my biggest weakness, it's probably not going to come across well. So I think I have a really good way to tackle this question. Once you've chosen what your weakness is, I'll give you guys the example that I used and the example that I used was public speaking. And in fact, till this day, I still find public speaking kind of difficult. It still gets me really nervous. Public speaking is definitely not my strongest point, but it's something that I have been working on a lot in the past and something I'm continuing to work on to improve. So, so how do you answer this question? Once you've chosen this weakness, let's say for my example, it's public speaking. You can say that, okay, my biggest weakness is public speaking. And how I go about this is saying something like, I realized that I wasn't so great at public speaking when, for example, let's say I had to make an announcement in front of my lecture hall to promote a society or when I had to present my poster in front of hundreds of students at a summer fair, whatever, something like that. When did I realize that I had this weakness? And then I'll go on to say something about how I thought about my weakness, realized how important it is to not have that weakness and what I'm doing to change it. So for example, I realized I had this weakness in public speaking. I started thinking about, you know, in my future, I'm going to be doing lots of public speaking at conferences, at poster fairs, as a doctor in the community, promoting health and things like that. And so I definitely wanted to be able to do public speaking confidently. So what did I do from there? How did I improve my public speaking? What I talked about is putting myself in positions on purpose that would force me to improve public speaking. It would force me to do public speaking. So for example, in my societies, I would volunteer to go in front of the classroom and talk to lecture halls about the society and promote it to force myself to speak in front of large groups of people and slowly, slowly that kind of breaks down the barriers and gets you more and more used to it. Last year, I also taught second year medical students some immunology because my previous degree at the University of Toronto was in immunology. So I had, like I prepared a PowerPoint slide for like a 14 minute lecture on arthritis and rheumatoid diseases and I gave that lecture in front of a group of people. And that's another way for me to practice my public speaking to get involved in it and just do it over and over again to eventually eliminate the fears and anxieties that I have. So that's when you talk about what it is that you're doing to improve. After that, you can reflect on it. How has it gone? Have you improved at all? And of course, I would say something like my public speaking has improved drastically since that in original time when I noticed that I had this problem. And through my repeated exposure and putting myself in these situations, I have become a lot better at public speaking. For example, when I went to university in KCL Medical School and I taught that immunology lecture, I was way less nervous, way less shy, not as shaky. And that showed me that I had really improved focus on how I brought in an example. There's no point in saying, I'm way better at public speaking now, if you don't say how, if you don't show what you've done to prove it, you have to show examples and giving examples is the best way for an interviewer to remember you as a person, to remember who you are. So yeah, towards the end of this question, I would talk about how it is that I improved and also reflecting back. So, you know, like, I've seen this change going forward. I've seen this change over the time. Then you want to talk about the future. So what am I going to do to continue working on this? What am I going to do to continue improving? And you can talk about, you know, continuing to work with societies, continue to doing these community outreach things to try and promote your public speaking skills. So yeah, guys, I think that's all I have for you for the strengths and weaknesses. MMI medicine question. If you guys enjoyed this video, please do leave a like on this video, subscribe to the channel, share this channel with all of your friends. If other friends are taking the MMI interview as well, show this channel to them. You guys can all help each other out and hopefully learn something together. I hope you've enjoyed this video. I hope you've learned something useful and you can use this when you're preparing by yourself for your own medicine MMI questions. If you guys have anything you want to know specifically, anything you want me to do a video on, let me know in a comment down below and I will see you guys in the next one. Peace.