 what is up guys karma medic here and welcome back to another dose what do you guys think of my new decorations for loops cheerios so today i want to make a really cool video for you that i'm really excited to make it's about how to prepare for medical school interview questions it's something i wished i had when i was applying to medical school and when i was preparing for interviews so hopefully this helps you i hope you guys enjoyed this i'm doing a questions and answers video soon so that you guys can hopefully learn a little bit more about me about my background what i like to do my hobbies my interests blah blah blah so if you guys have any questions at all whether that's personal academic about kcl about medical school about applications about me about whatever just leave them in the comment section down below on youtube or on my instagram page karma medic and yeah i'll be answering all those questions in a q and a video soon let's get right into the video so you've made it to the interview stage of the medical school application process hooray hooray hooray congratulations this is great great news for you why because this is the one opportunity for you to show the interviewers who you are this is your opportunity to talk about your interests your hobbies this will show off your personality your charisma your energy all of that stuff and this is such a good opportunity to do so whether it's mmi interviews or whether it's panel interviews all of my tips everything is going to apply to both before i even got interviews to medical school i was already preparing for interviews because sometimes they give you only a week's notice sometimes it's usually like two weeks three weeks a month but sometimes you only get a week's notice and you want to make sure that you are as prepared as can be so i started preparing before i even got any interviews i was fully committed i was fully dedicated how interviews work is that interviewers are going to ask you questions and you're going to have to give an answer you're going to have to give a fairly short answer and it's going to have to include everything that you want to say as succinctly as possible giving the most detailed and important information as possible when you're preparing for medical school interview questions you want to know what kinds of questions are asked and the absolute best way to do this is just do tons of research on the internet step one is to make a word document title it whatever you want blah blah blah's lit interview questions document and you're going to run a write down all the damn questions that you find on the internet have to do with medical school interviews every single question why do you want to be a doctor what's your biggest weakness what's why this university what makes you a good doctor blah blah every single question you're going to want to write it down on that document and beneath each question you're going to start building your response you're going to start building an answer so a great way to find questions is to obviously just scour the internet there's tons and tons of resources most importantly you want to go on previous forums or university websites and look at the types of questions that they ask a lot of times the universities themselves will talk about what they will ask in an interview what kinds of things they want to see in an interview candidate and you want to make sure you write those down and you have them present second of all go on the student room go on other forums and look at students who have already been through the interview process look at what kinds of questions they were asked because it's very likely you'll be asked similar questions now a lot of people say that you shouldn't prepare for an interview that your answer should be like automatic and that you should be able to come up with your response on the spot I couldn't agree with this piece of advice less I couldn't want you to disregard anymore you should prepare for the interview like this is your life like the interview is the most important part this is where the admissions committee is going to decide if we want you or we don't want you prepare for this every single damn day every hour that you have you want to make sure that you kill it it's the last piece to the puzzle and it's super super important you can practice not being generic you can practice not talking like a robot you can practice sounding authentic don't worry about that stuff just make sure you have your content down you make sure you say what you want to say and get that across to the interviewers and then you can fix how it is that you're saying get in your delivery I'm going to go through a couple of steps that I think is the best way to create your answers to come up with what you need to prepare for a medical school interview question so like I said before first things first is to gather a huge huge huge range of questions I'm not kidding I probably had hundreds of questions in my document I ended up with a 10 000 word document of my responses this is no joke you need to prepare and make sure you're ready for the interviews after you've got down all of your questions you have to start somewhere so choose the questions that you think are going to be most relevant that you think might come up the most often and make sure you have answers for those questions first before the more obscure questions so you choose the question why do you want to be a doctor then beneath it you're going to sit down you're going to think and you're going to write out you're going to type out your response to that question now when writing out your response you want to use star s t a r and the reason for that is it's a really good way to structure a question the s stands for situation you want to give a really brief description of what the situation was just a quick summary of where you were what you were doing type of thing this is not the most important part of the question then you want to talk about the task what would you ask to do what is it that you had to do again not super super important this needs to be brief now the super important two things are actions and result or reflection actions is what you did to tackle this problem what you did to change something your actions your initiative this is the most important part and where the bulk of your answer should be following that is the result and the reflection the result is also very important but the reflection is even more important what you learned from that experience how you changed how you're going to go and act now in the future given what you did given the experience that you had the reflection is so so so super important once you've written that out sometimes it's going to be a page long if it's something like tell me about yourself or why do you want to be a doctor and sometimes it's going to be a small paragraph long okay and that's totally fine what you want to do is narrow it down to a point where you can speak it in one to two minutes you want to sit down in front of your computer and you want to read your response out loud and you want to time yourself if it turns out to be five minutes long that's definitely way too long and you need to cut it down if you're in the uk you want your answers to be anywhere between one and two minutes something like that because the interviewers are going to ask you multiple questions they're going to have follow-up questions so you want to be short and succinct once you have your answer down to one or two minutes that's great that's perfect now you need to practice saying this out loud first what I would do is just talk to my computer I would read out my answer and I would just practice saying it out loud because I don't know about you it's different for each person but for me this was something that took a lot of anxiety and a lot of obstacle to overcome for me to be able to say these answers with confidence and nothing helps like practice I would just say it and say it and say it try and memorize it so I can say it without looking at my computer because of course you need to remember this all from memory right once I could practice saying it out loud and I was comfortable with the material that I was saying I would start talking in front of a mirror this time without my notes without looking at the computer purely from memory now what talking to a mirror helps you do is that a you have to recall the information from memory and b you're able to see your demeanor you're able to see how you're acting whether you're fidgeting how you look if you're sitting up straight with good posture or if you're kind of hunched over like this if you're maybe leaning into the interviewer to sort of listen to what they're saying that shows good communication skills or whether you're just closed off like this and like really scared so looking in the mirror can definitely help with that and something similar to that is recording yourself now some people really like to record themselves others like myself don't I found that it just took way too much time to record and then to watch it back and record and then watch it back so I opted out for just looking into a mirror and talking to myself that way something I even did so that it would be more engaging for me was I just drew a smiley face on a piece of paper and I stuck that on the mirror and I was talking to the smiley face pretending that that was the interviewer so after you've spoken to the mirror hopefully you remember everything from memory now and you've got that part locked down now what you need to do is start talking to other people and this for me was the biggest jump in difficulty sometimes it's easier for you to talk to your best friend or to a family member or a parent and that's definitely where I would recommend starting if that's the most that's what's most comfortable for you for me I was in Toronto all of my family was in Greece and my sister was in the UK so I didn't really have family to talk to first and what I opted to do was to talk to people who I didn't know people who are also preparing for medical school interviews and that way I think it honestly took off a lot of pressure on me these people weren't my friends they weren't my family they weren't people who knew me so if I made a complete fool out of myself if I looked really stupid it wouldn't matter no one would care and I think that that's something that helped me get over my initial anxiety of saying my questions out loud to other people what I did is I met a couple of people who I had never known before in a interview mock interview practicing session that my university was hosting and I asked them if they wanted to practice with me speaking their answers out loud we were a group of three two people would talk one would be the interviewer one would be the interviewee and the third person would be an objective observer from the outside taking notes and after one of us gave a response both the interviewer and the objective third person would give their feedback just having that feedback from another person is so so so valuable and I cannot recommend it enough if you can form a small group like this it is the key to your success honestly to form this small group and start asking each other questions meet up once a day as much as you can and just go in circles one question per person and you keep switching rotating who's the interviewer who's the interviewee and who's the third objective person after failing so many times in front of those people being so red that I was a damn tomato I finally got over my anxiety of talking to other people and by the time I got to the interview room once I'd overcome the initial nerves and the initial scariness of the situation I became so friendly with the interviewers by the end of it we were having a totally different conversation separate to the actual interview so in summary the first thing you want to do is find a huge series of questions then you want to write out your responses to them using the star method after that you want to practice talking to the computer so that you can narrow it down to one to two minutes then you want to start talking in front of a mirror so that you make sure that you're confident saying it out loud and you can start remembering it from memory as well and after that you need to talk to another person another human being honestly it worked really really well for me and I think that it's a great adaptable way to practice for interview questions adapted to however you feel is best but I think it's a really good guideline I hope you found this video useful I hope you enjoyed the content and remember that I'm going to be doing a Q&A soon so ask me questions down in the comment section below or on my Instagram page and I'll answer them when I can in the Q&A video all right guys thank you so much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this I hope you found it useful and I'll see you in the next one peace