What Questions Should a Medical Student Ask?

Is it Important to Ask Questions in your Medical School Interview?

Asking questions in your medical school interview is essential. It is a mistake you will want to avoid. Only answering the interviewer’s questions and failing to ask any of your own can give the impression of disinterest. Not something you want to leave your interviewer thinking about!

If you don’t ask questions you will also harm yourself as this is an amazing opportunity to find out all you can about the medical school, the way they teach and the way they support their students.

If nothing else it is a wonderful chance to get to pick the brain of someone with a more advanced career in medicine than yourself. Do you have a medical question that you have always wondered about but didn’t know who to ask? Ask your interviewer.

Your interviewer wants to have a conversation with you and understand who you are as a person and why you have applied to medical school. By making sure you are asking questions you should be able to help them with this and make the interview go smoothly.

It is extremely important that you feel confident in introducing yourself and asking and answering your questions.

How do I impress a medical school interview?

Preparing for your interview in advance is paramount. We recommend that before your interview you spend a few hours a day for a few weeks before the interview doing research and getting to grips with your questions and answers so that you will feel confident when you get into your interview.

Take some time to memorise these if you can. It can be hard to find the line between under-prepared and over-prepared.

You should feel confident in your answers, your ability to answer any questions asked of you and your ability to ask appropriate questions.

You should not feel like your answers a too rigid and rehearsed. This will show through in your interview and rather than showing off your medical knowledge and having a conversation about yourself, you will just appear to be unable to think on the spot. It will also demonstrate your ability to remember answers rather than actually have the knowledge needed for medical school.

We think a great way to set up your preparation is to divide a notebook into the following:

1. Divide your medical interview prep notebook into three core sections:
2. One section for keeping up with medicine-related news that you have either read online or watched on TV.
3. One for common questions.
4. The last section is for ethics.

You should not end up filling a multitude of notebooks. The whole idea of this is to have all of the notes you should need in one easy-to-access place. This should take out some of the overwhelming feelings that often come when trying to cram knowledge into your brain.

Instead of having loads of writing that you will never be able to refer back to, try just jotting down those bits of information that could genuinely be discussed in your interview. Make sure to have a variety of points to talk about and you should have plenty at your disposal by the time your interview comes around.

By doing this research you are also bound to come up with some interesting questions that you could ask your interviewers as well to show them how keen to learn you are.

Never say I don’t know

Medical schools are notoriously difficult to get a place at. These places are extremely competitive, in 2022/2023 during the admissions cycle, St Georges University of London had 2259 applicants but only 165 places to give out.

You need to use your interview to the best of your ability to shine and demonstrate why you think your interviewer should choose you, over the other couple of thousand people who want the same spot you do. To get into medical school you have to really earn it in so many ways.

We will be covering what questions to ask but it is also important to know what not to say. One way you could fail to do this is by sayings ‘I don’t know.’ This is a very common mistake to make and you should do your utmost to avoid it.

Even if you are totally unsure about a question, try to answer it. Your interviewer wants to see that you care about this interview and that you are really trying.

In a field that is so highly competitive you don’t want to leave the interviewing thinking you don’t have enough initiative to even bother trying to answer a question, you are not sure of.

You can absolutely take a moment to think and even ask your interviewer to repeat the question. The latter could serve as particularly useful just to give you an extra bit of thinking time should you need it.