 So recently I've been on various rotations with fourth year medical students where they're stressed out of their mind thinking of interviews for residency. So in today's video, I'm going to help you learn how to calm yourself down, but still crush it on your residency interview trial. Let's get into it. Hey friends, welcome to the MD journey. We're here. I try to help you succeed on your medical journey, but doing it with less stress. Now, one of the most stressful parts of medical school is thinking about applying residency, interviewing for residency, and obviously the match process. So in today's video, I'm going to really get into the nitty gritty of how to make the residency interview process so much easier and how to go into it with confidence and feel free to jump around based off the chapters, which will be linked down below if you're watching this on YouTube. And also I'll put all the free resources that I recommend in this video down below in the description. Now, tip number one is to create a list of your experiences and takeaways. One of the most stressful parts of interviewing is feeling like you have to come up with the answer to impress the person on the other side. And what this often leads to is a student who either looks boring or scripted and it's really hard for somebody on the other side of the table to say, is this person putting on a facade or is this really somebody who is genuine? Well, so one of the most common examples of a question that people will tend to script is basically tell me about yourself. And so you'll have students who'll do something like, so my name is Laksh Trivedi. I am a fourth year medical student at ABC University. I really want to go to your program. My journey started when I did a major in neuroscience. And then I did some research and so and so is lab and I absolutely love internal medicine. And I just can't wait to be a part of your program. Now hopefully if you are scripting your answers, it sounds better than that because otherwise like we need to talk. But the main problem with scripting is that even if you have a genuine way of presenting your answer, often I can see students when I do interviews myself, although I don't do it for residency, but if I do it for like a mock interview or something, I can start seeing them almost start to look at the words and sentences that they need to start thinking of next versus paying attention to the reception that they're getting from the person on the other side of the table. And if you're watching this, you're like, Oh God, that's going to be me. And this is exactly how you get past it. One of my favorite strategies for interviewing from both medical school and residency happened to be creating a list of experiences that were super impactful for me. And typically I will do a list of 10. So my list of 10 includes four experiences that were just super impactful on a positive level, at least for medicine, this can include things like a great patient experience, experiences with your colleagues, experience with things like research, or personal experiences like health issues yourself for health issues, and somebody you loved that really impacted your journey into medicine. And finally, I'll add three to four experiences that truly are going to represent the growth that I've taken. So maybe you had something that was really challenging or I thought that was going to be hard medicine or not, maybe I'll talk about me doing a 10k for the first time in my life, and the challenges that went through it and then how I overcame it. Having this list of experiences going to be super valuable because it doesn't matter what question you're throwing at, you can essentially say, okay, like what from my list is a good segue that I can add for my own personal experience. If they ask you about, okay, tell me about a challenging time in residency or in medical school. Then you can say, okay, like what are those three experiences that I've listed down? Tell me about experience that really helped you grow or something that's super impactful. You can look at any of those, tell me a time that you worked as a team. Do any of your experiences reflect that you can always kind of adjust things and alter things in a slight way to answer it, but now you don't have to feel scripted. And again, you never feel like you're thrown off because you have a list of 10 experiences that even if you talked about one during one of the interviews, you can then have nine others to your disposal. And I find the students that I give this tip to that actually incorporated in their interviews really come out saying, okay, like that was not that bad. I feel like I was just talking about myself, which is again, what an interview should feel like. So if you walk out feeling stress free, then that tip works. So if you do try the experience list out and actually does help you, then come back to this video and let me know in the comments down below. Now tip number two is to use your setbacks as an opportunity and not a blemish. A lot of times I'll get questions from students that I coach as well as students that I've just interacted with throughout in their medical school journey of like, okay, I have a red flag. That's the biggest thing I had a bad grade had to leave of absence. My step score is not great. My rotation grades are not great. Do I feel I feel like I need to explain myself during my interviews. And honestly, that's not always the case. If you instead look at this didn't go well, what did you do after that setback that obstacle to help you grow? That is more important than actual experience itself. So if you had to take a leave of absence for mental health issues, or if you had a family member or something of that sort, you can simply say, okay, during this experience, I learned this about myself. And I was able to use that lesson throughout the rest of medical school. And here's how it impacted me. And here's how I plan on using in residency. There's a difference between the student who is going to try to explain an excuse and the student who will go out of their way to say, this is what I've learned. And this is how I'll continue to use it as a possible resident in your program. So instead, don't focus too much on explaining a red flag, instead focus on the opportunities and the lessons that came from that experience and use them as appropriate as they come on your interviews. Now tip number three is to have a set of questions for both your residents as well as interviewers throughout your process. One of the most important parts of an interview besides the start is the ending where they ask you, do you have any questions? The last thing you want to say is like, no, I'm okay, bro. And there's two purposes to this question. One, the interviewer wants to serve themselves to help you decide is this program for you. And two, they also want to assess like, how interested are you in their program? What specific questions regarding their program do you have? How much research have you done? Because then maybe you're not a good fit if you're just kind of asking very generic questions. Now, one of the things I'll be including in the link in the description will be a list about 40 to 50 questions that you can consider asking on the interview trail to really help hone in on whether a program is a good fit for you or not. And this is included in our crash and clinicals program as well as our meta lead program. So if you're one of our students in those programs, you'll have access as soon as this goes live. But some of my favorite questions to ask are things like, what do you enjoy about this program? Like, what are your favorite parts? And then one of my favorite kind of ways to shift like, what are you not like about the program is to actually say, what are a few things that you would like to see continue to improve? That is a nice little subtle way of saying, okay, like, where are room for improvements that I wanted to know about without making me sound like I'm accusing you of the program having some bad qualities. So again, you can ask, like, what are some areas that you'd like to see continue to improve in the program that really will help them focus on things that are saying growth, but maybe not quite there. Other questions that may be appropriate based on your interest and field would include things like I'm interested in X field, what opportunities would I have here to continue to explore that? Or what patient population do you deal with? Or what are the hours like? Or how is feedback taken from the residents? Those are common questions that I love to ask. And that really gives me a nice answer of like, what is this program focused on? And is it going to be a good fit for me or not? But again, if you want that full list of questions you can ask on the residency trial that I've included in both the question clinical program as well as the meta lead program. If you're interested in any of those, those will be linked down below. Now this is something that I mentioned in an old video which I'll link in the corner, which is basically how to choose the residency for you. But essentially you want to have a very nice system of being able to say, okay, these are things that are important to me. This is how much they're important to me. And then here are how the various programs that are interviewed out rank. So if you can do some research over time, then you can say, oh, like I can already see their salaries, I can see how the rotation structure that can see like where it's located, obviously, and you can start giving it scores. Because then if there is something that's important to you like, okay, what is the community aspect of how the relationship between the residents and the faculty and the attendings go? That is a question that you can ask on your residency interview and really say like, this is important to me. Tell me about how residents and attendings get along together. But having this database kind of already pre made will help you structure the questions and research that you do beforehand. That way when you go on your interviews, it really seems like, okay, this person is coming here prepared and asking me appropriate questions to things that are important to them to assess if this program is truly for them or not. If you guys are interested in getting access to this spreadsheet, it's actually completely free on the med vault. So they'll be linked down below as well as all of our other free resources that we've made over the past few years. Now to close off, I have two more important tip. Number five is to really focus on sharing and not impressing. One of the biggest mistakes that I see students make, especially on mock interviews, is that they feel like they have to essentially regurgitate their application to really convince somebody on the other side. I am meant to be in your program. Instead, really what an interview is is one, we want to make sure you're human and not just somebody who has like worked their tail off in residency or excuse me in medical school, but really hasn't developed those people skills. So be you, be genuinely you. If you can have that list of experiences like we talked about earlier in the episode, then then you or answers will sound less scripted. You will be more interested and you'll be having a much more gentle and natural conversation with a person on the other side. And when your experiences and the questions allow you to highlight your experiences, do it. But don't feel like you have to strangle the interviewer and basically saying, here are what are things I've done. Here's another thing and another thing and another thing, because in the effort of trying to impress often you just throw people off and rub them the wrong way. So use your experiences as a segue for the questions that you have to answer. If you're asked about like, why am I going into internal medicine, you could say, I did this experience and these are the main things that took away from it. Where I loved research and this is a project that I worked on and I love this. So I want to do this more in residence. You can understand the difference between that person and the other person saying, yeah, I got published and like New England Journal and like circulation and like you need to take me to your program. So while being impressive as important, remember that you've already made it to the interview trail. I mean, somebody looked at your application and says like, this person is interesting and impressive. They've made the grades that we care for. You don't have to do the extra effort of like trying to sell yourself, be you answer the questions, know your application in and out. There's an experience that you put on there. Be prepared to talk about it thoroughly because then you can have a normal human conversation. And my last tip to really just crush it on your residence interviews is to make a great first and last impression. One of my favorite things is that you never get a second chance to make a great first impression. So once again, when you walk in that room, solid first impression, shake their hand, look them in the eye, get their name and say it back. Just in case if it's difficult, you can make sure you pronounce it correctly and it'll be easier for you to actually introduce and converse with that person instead of saying like, how are you because you just totally forgot their name? Like, can you tell me more about it? But if you actually know that their name is Dr. Hill, like Dr. Hill, can you tell me about why you chose this program or like, what do you love about it? And if you nailed the first and middle part of the impression to make sure you ended with a bang, but continue to smile shake their hand once more, thank them for their time, ask any questions that you already had as we talked about earlier in the video. And then after your interview, one of the things I recommend is to just send a very quick thank you email to the people who interviewed you to say, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate everything you told me about those experiences or about the program. Thank you for answering my questions. If you do have additional questions, like genuinely actually have additional questions, ask them, but don't feel like it's again, fake to be interested and say, I had like three more questions that I totally forgot to ask. Have a natural conversation with them. And by no means should you feel pressured to send like a thank you card. Most interviewers will just interview so many people they'll probably get lots of thank you cards and they really won't have a big difference in terms of impact of whether they choose to take you or not. But a very nice thank you. We'll just kind of close the loop of somebody who is pleasant at the start and very pleasant at the end. And my only caveat is if the residency program tells you not to contact the people who interviewed you just to keep everything fair, then just don't obviously do it. But if they don't say anything, then I usually will just say a quick thank you to whoever interviewed me. And if I'm interested in that program later on, if I'm going to rank them really highly, then usually I'll send them another email and saying, Hey, like interview trails done, hopefully you're doing well. I just want to let you know, I really enjoy the program more so than any other ones that I did on the residency trail. I'm considering ranking you guys really highly. And that will sometimes get up to the person who has to make the decisions, and maybe they'll help you out. So good first impression, good last impression, end it with a smile, loosen up and using all those tips guys, those is basically how you nail your residency interview. Again, you go in with the desire to just share things about you that you already know without the desire to impress your obstacles and setbacks or simply that setbacks. Use them as opportunities and jumping points of what you've learned and have those lists of experiences you can actually talk about things without feeling scripted. Okay, don't be that boring luxury version that we had in the earlier in this episode. Please don't do that. But if you guys have more questions about how to crush it, how to do well on the residency interview trail, again, you can check out the resources that we have down below. If you want access to the free spreadsheet that we had already shown on this episode, then I'll be linked down below in the med vaults in case you have any issues finding it. Let me know. But with that being said guys, thank you so much for watching. If you did enjoy this video before you click off, just go ahead and hit that like button and subscribe button to really just help the channel grow and ideally show in front of somebody else who's like nervous about their residency reviews, you hitting that like button and that subscribe button may just increase your chances that you just help a fellow colleague. So super appreciative for all of you guys that always do. But if this video was helpful, then make sure you check out this video on how to know which residency program to apply to, as well as this kind of playlist on everything that I learned in residency myself. So while you guys are enjoying these two, as always, thank you so much for joining me on my journey. Hopefully I was a little help to you guys on yours and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace my friends.