Starting in mid-August you can start receiving interview invitations and you can continue receiving them up until the spring time. Most interview invitations are said to be sent between October and January (which I found to be true as well), and they slow down starting in February and March. It’s rare to get an interview invite after that.
If you’ve received an interview invitation, congratulations! That’s HUGE. While receiving a secondary is not necessarily selective, receiving an interview is. That means your application was competitive, and the admissions committee is genuinely interested in you. Some schools admit a very high percentage of the people that they interview, but for others that might not be the case. Regardless, if you receive an interview, you should celebrate and then immediately start preparing!
The actual interview and the interview day itself will vary from school to school, but I’ll talk about insights I received from my experiences.
Before the pandemic, interviews used to be all in person. For me, all of my interviews have been over Zoom, but I’ve had a couple friends that have had in person interviews as well. I’m sure the experience for both is different, but I can only speak to the virtual experience.
What they’ve tried to do with virtual interviews is recreate an in-person situation. This means that your virtual interview can last several hours and include several presentations (which means your actual interview may only end up being thirty minutes of a six hour day).
For Zoom interviews, make sure you’re wearing appropriate clothing and your background is clean (you can choose to use a virtual background). Also make sure that you have water close by. They will provide breaks to you, but be prepared for a long day of staying seated.
Traditional interviews are those that ask the standard questions like “Why medicine?” and “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” These are generally the “less intimidating” interview format because you essentially just get to talk about yourself and your application (that at this point you know inside and out). That’s not to say that you might not be asked a situational question, but it tends to be less likely.
I’ve had these with a faculty interviewer, a student interviewer, a panel of several faculty interviews, and once with 3 faculty interviewers and 6 interviewees in the same room (s/o Touro-CA). Though who the interview is with may vary, a lot of times the questions will be similar.
The one thing to note is that these interviews can be either closed-file or open-file. If they’re open-file, that means that your interviewer has gotten the chance to review your application file and the questions that they ask may be application-specific. Review your application and supplementary responses well so you are prepared to answer questions about it. Closed-file means that interviewers haven’t read your application file beforehand. Ultimately, whether it’s closed or open file doesn’t make too much of an impact on your actual interview.
Preparing for traditional interviews involves looking on SDN to see what questions other students were asked and preparing answers for those questions. Additionally, doing mock interviews with friends or advisors is very helpful so you get used to the environment.
Now let’s talk about the “dreaded” MMIs. MMIs are basically 6-10 short interviews that occur back to back. You will have 2 minutes to read a situation or a question and prepare before you have to speak to an interviewer for 5-8 minutes about it. Each MMI station will have a new question and a new interviewer (so that each interviewer grades the same question for all the interviewees to make it more fair).
The question you are asked may be a traditional interview question, but it is more likely to be an ethical scenario (asking you which of two people “deserves” an organ transplant more for example). They are meant to test your critical thinking and interpersonal skills.
The advice that I was given is that you should start with thanking the interviewer, then briefly summarizing the situation (so the interview can correct you if you are wrong about any aspect of it), then discussing the factors of the situation that would affect your answer (spend a bulk of your time doing this analysis), and then saying what you would likely do in this situation (what criteria you would use to evaluate).
The graders are basically checking off things that you say, so make sure to stay organized and hit all of the major points. I needed about a week to prepare for my MMI interview which I did through reading through potential questions and practicing them and doing several mock interviews. Make sure you prepare well!
The final thing that I will say is that on your interview day make sure you note your interviewers’ names so that you can send them a thank you note (you can either email it to the admissions committee or upload it to your applicant portal depending on what the school’s protocol is).