Should I Come Up With A Structure to Answer my Questions?

Session 12

The medical school interview is hard. Can you make it easier by having a structure to answer your questions? Or will that ultimately make it harder?

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[00:37] What’s Going On?

Yesterday, I did a mock interview with a student. It was actually our third or fourth mock interview and a student I’ve been helping along this whole journey. And we’ve been working together for months as we worked on the personal statement, extracurriculars, and secondaries. So I know this person.

During our interview yesterday, she started off terribly. And I stopped the interview. I usually don’t normally stop an interview. I asked her “what’s going on?” She was off her game. And she didn’t really understand what was going on.

So we talked and figured it out. She went to her career counselor office at school where she did a mock interview with non-premed people. And the advice they gave her was just terrible.

She was just focused on creating a structure around her answers so she can fit her extracurriculars into the answer. She was advised on having a structure to make sure she was bullet-pointed in everything else. She was so focused on that structure that she wasn’t talking to me.

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[02:10] It’s All About Communication

If you can’t communicate properly with the person sitting across from you, you’re not going to get accepted. They’re testing you. They’re judging and ranking you based on your ability to communicate. And if you’re so focused on a framework to answer a question and fitting in extracurriculars because you’re advising office told you so, you’re not going to communicate very well.

So roll all of that advice out the window and just talk to the interviewer. Answer the questions. Have a conversation with the interviewer. And that’s what I told this student. As soon as she did that, she was back to her normal self. She was just having a conversation with me. She was letting me know who she was and that she can communicate.And the interview turned out to be much better.

Again, the interview is all about communicating.

[03:50] The Goal of the Interview

I recently talked to a person about the medical school interview and he had somebody in to interview why he wanted to be a doctor. The person couldn’t clearly communicate that. Maybe he had great reasoning but he forgot everything during the interview.

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