I was thinking about writing a manual with med school interview questions and answers. Most sites only have questions. I want to place 2 different answers to each question.
1. Would you buy it?
2. How much is it worth to you?
Thanks
So–looking for a little free market research advice?
I’m a med student so I wouldn’t buy it for the reason that I wouldn’t use it.
However, more to the point if a premed asked me about it I would strongly advise against buying such a book if it existed. That’s because the point of interviews is to be yourself, not someone else–and the absolute worst thing a person could do would be to use someone else’s answer. Of course anyone with any sense would recognize that intentional plagiarism from such a book would be a bad idea–but in a moment of stress unintentional plagiarism might still occur and could be a real disaster. The reason the questions on interview feedback sites can be useful is that they give people a chance to interview themselves and to think about the kind of approach they’d take to similar questions.
Best regards
Joe
I second what Joe says. The interview feedback sites - which are freely available - give the questions, and people should think of their own answers. I did interviews at my med school and I shudder at the idea of people giving me “canned” answers. The whole idea of the interview is that it should be thought-provoking.
To the OP, I couldn’t help noticing that you’ve been around OPM since 2002 but this is your first post. Tell us more about yourself, what has you thinking about writing, where are you in the med school process yourself?
I’m going to apply next year, but I don’t think I’d be interested in such a book. Reason? Same as Mary and Joe have given. I’d love to stand up and be different from hunderds of other people applying. The reason why I wouldn’t read the book like this is, becasue even if was going to use my own invention, there would always be a risk that unintentionally I could plagiarize ideas of someone else.
Soon I’m going to start putting my personal statement together. I’ve never seen a PS before. I’m temted to read at least few of them to get an idea of what they are looking for. But I’m also afraid that they would influence the way I’ll write my own, and it won’t be me anymore.
I guess the better idea would be to write a book with questions and ‘anti-answers’. i.e. what you should not answer to such questions…
it’s just my 2 cents.
Kasia
There’s nothing stopping admissions from reading such a book; if I were an adcomm person I’d do it too. Then I could deliberately bait the applicant with juicy questions to see whether they think for themselves or just parrot “winning” phrases from their prep books. “Yes, I have that book too. Now tell me what you really think!” You could sink your interview right there. It came out at the old premeds conference that some admissions people read the SDN interview feedback stuff. Caveat emptor.
Or as Dr. Cannon said at the conference: caveat webtor!
-Terry
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I was thinking about writing a manual with med school interview questions and answers. Most sites only have questions. I want to place 2 different answers to each question.
1. Would you buy it?
2. How much is it worth to you?
Thanks
Well, it might be nice to read up on the questions, but listing “answers” does not seem especially worthwhile. It seems like it would discourage people from relaxing and just being themselves.
I don’t think the plagiarism problem would be very big though. In order to be able to list an “answer” to a question, the question itself would have to be generic and impersonal to start with. (For example, most of the questions I got asked during interviews related specifically to my own personal experiences, and wouldn’t serve much purpose being listed in a book. I think a lot of questions are like that.) Then, to make the “answers” applicable to a wide enough audience that you could actually publish a book on the subject, the answers would have to be phrased in such a generic, all-purpose fashion that copyright-wise, they’d probably just fall into the public domain and/or sound like cliches.
Believe me, you do not want your answers to sound like that!
Now, if you could compile a really interesting collection of questions and themes that come up during interviews, where readers are guided to reflect on what their OWN answers might be, that would be more useful I think. Keep in mind there’s plenty of useful free material already available on the internet, so you’d have to compete with that.
Quote:
There’s nothing stopping admissions from reading such a book; if I were an adcomm person I’d do it too. Then I could deliberately bait the applicant with juicy questions to see whether they think for themselves or just parrot “winning” phrases from their prep books. “Yes, I have that book too. Now tell me what you really think!” You could sink your interview right there. It came out at the old premeds conference that some admissions people read the SDN interview feedback stuff. Caveat emptor.
Or as Dr. Cannon said at the conference: caveat webtor!
-Terry
Ok, I wasn’t at the conference, so I don’t know the context here–and yeah, I’m sure some interviewees do come across as being insincere enough that you might want to “test” them and it could be quite amusing. But why would an admissions person go into an interview that way, where they are looking to “trip up” an applicant? I don’t think the best way to get to know someone during an interview is to hatch little plots designed to trap them.
If applicants ought to go into these things with good faith, and not be “cheating” by copying other people’s answers–then admissions people should have the same ideal as well, and at least go into the conversation with SOME respect for the person they’ve invited to interview at their school. Why would you “parrot” a question from a website only to find out if your interviewee is “parroting” an answer from the same source? Schools only get one chance to interview each student–but oh well, if they want to spend it playing games, I guess that’s up to them.
As stated by others, no I probably would not buy a book such as this because I don’t think that a book could tell me how to be me! And being me (in every good sense of being me) is what I want to come thru on interview day. Also, SDN has the interview feedback section on its website and it sort of goes into that topic already. And that info is free-for-all.
Interesting market research… 
Try Barron’s Essays That Will Get You Into Medical School to see some common interview questions. You’ll see that most of the really good questions require anecdotes from your own life, or questions about your priorities, views, thoughts, plans, and dreams. In other words, they’re carefully designed to be very personal. So you could gather some questions (and Barron’s did), but I think we have to create our own answers.
Well, the horse is dying, but I feel compelled to whack it a few additional times. The purpose of the interview is to get to know you. So, a book of canned responses that should come across as impressive will, at best, not be hepful &, in the case of the AdCom folks having read the book (you can bet that they will have), could prove disasterous. The concept of a list of likely questions while seeming attractive on the surface is a concept so over-used & stale that I doubt even the author’s parents would purchase a copy.
My 2 cents worth…
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Well, the horse is dying, but I feel compelled to whack it a few additional times. The purpose of the interview is to get to know you.
Let me ride this poor broken down horse a bit as well. Although many schools do “structured” or “semi-structured” interviews (a set of questions that are asked of all interviewees), if your answer to a question is so general that nearly anyone else could be saying the same thing, then you aren’t giving the interviewer the kind of information s/he needs/wants. With general questions, you have to guide the interviewer into your experiences, strengths, thoughts. There aren’t canned answers to those. And the rest of the interview questions may well come directly from your application. Certainly that shouldn’t be a problem! No one knows you like you know you.
Cheers,
Judy