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For each of the Medical Schools you’re applying to, you need to check whether they use MMIs or panel interviews. You should be able to find this information by looking at the university websites or checking our interview guide.
To prepare for some common interview questions, you should also think about why you wanted to apply to each of your chosen Med Schools. Do some research into the university, the course and the opportunities available (as part of the course and at the university in general, e.g. extracurricular activities).
It’s likely that you will be asked a Knowledge of Med School question, so it’s important to be prepared.
You should read the GMC guide to good medical practice before your interview. You don’t necessarily need to read the whole thing, but you should certainly look at relevant parts. This guide will help you to understand the qualities you’ll need to uphold as a Doctor.
When you understand ethical principles such as the four pillars (beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, justice) and the three Cs (consent, capacity, confidentiality), you can use them to answer ethics questions.
While you may be doing a lot of reading about NHS hot topics to prepare for your interview, it is important that you also practise speaking about these topics aloud as it’s very different.
One method I used was: after reading about a topic, I would then try to summarise what I had learnt aloud to check that I was able to articulate my thoughts clearly.
By the time you start preparing for your interviews, you should already have a lot of different experiences under your belt such as work experience, volunteering and extracurricular activities.
I recommend noting down everything relevant that you’ve done in the last few years, organised by what type of activity it was. It’s important that you reflect on your work experience and prepare some key points about what you learned from it.
Reviewing your experiences will help to refresh your mind on everything you’ve done. You can also use your notes to prepare answers to Teamwork questions like “Tell me about a time you used leadership skills?”
It’s vital to start preparing for interviews early, even if you haven’t received any invites yet, because you won’t always get a lot of notice when an invite does arrive. Alongside your interview prep, you will also need to keep on top of your A-Level studies, so time management and good scheduling is key.
It might be wise to start your prep by spending just a few hours per week on it – then, when you actually get an interview date, you can increase this time.
Look for periods in your calendar when you’ll be free for interview prep and decide what you’re going to learn during this time. Try to tackle something different in each of your prep sessions, e.g. if you do ethics one day, the next session could be about NHS hot topics.
If you need support, consider doing an interview course so that you can learn strategies in just one day, or get some practice with MMI Circuits or mock interviews.
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