Once you submit your primary and secondary applications to a medical school, you will hopefully receive a notification inviting you to come in for an interview. While this should be a day of celebration, it can be a bit of curse as well, as the interview can be an anxiety-inducing event. Fortunately, if you keep a few key things in mind, it doesn’t have to be.
They already want you there
The fact that you’re being called in for an interview means that the school is sufficiently impressed with your application and that they like your credentials. So you can immediately drop your potential concerns of being under-qualified. They already think that someone of your caliber should be coming to their school. They just want to get to know you a bit more.
Understand the purpose
The interview basically serves two purposes. First, the school wants to make sure that your application is legitimate, and that everything you’d said on it is true. Basically, they want to make sure that the person on paper and the person in front of them match up.
Secondly, and much more importantly, they want to see what kind of person you are. A medical school class isn’t very big, and so they want to make sure that your personality will mesh with the personalities of the other students, and that it will mesh with their vision of the program.
They want to make sure that you’re a normal person. It seems like a strange way to describe it, but remember some qualities that pre-med students have. After a lifetime of being yelled at to succeed, and dealing with intense pressure to become a doctor, a lot of pre-med students have some out a bit socially awkward on the other end.
So you want to convince the interviewer that you can sit down in a room and have a conversation without being awkward or nervous. Consider it from there point of view. If you can’t make it through a conversation with a stranger in an office at the medical school, how are you going to make it in the ICU?
Nail the interview
So remember when you show up on interview day that your main purpose is just to convince the interviewers that you’re a nice, normal, sociable person. Don’t be nervous about the interview, or it will show. Just be conversational, and remember that you’re there to show them your personality.
Don’t worry about impressing them too much, or feeling any need to further expound on your accomplishments. They already like your accomplishments, now they just want to know if they’ll like you.
