Background, motivation, and personal insight
- Why do you want to be a doctor?
- What makes a good doctor?
- Which quality do you think is the most important in a doctor?
- What qualities do you have that mean you will be a good doctor?
- What do you feel are the good and bad points about being a doctor?
- How would you balance your outside interests with studying a degree?
- How do you cope with stress?
- What are your best and worst qualities?
- What responsibility do you have?
- What do you think will be your greatest challenge in completing medical school or learning how to be a doctor?
- What will you do if you are not accepted to medical school?
- Tell us about yourself.
- Take us through your personal statement.
- Why do you want to be a doctor? What do you want to achieve in medicine?
- What have you read or experienced in order to prepare you for medicine?
- Why do you believe you have the ability to undertake the study and work involved?
- Why do you want to be a doctor, rather than another profession that is caring or intellectually challenging?
- What do you think being a doctor entails, apart from treating patients?
- What branch of medicine do you think would interest you? Why?
- When you think about becoming a doctor, what do you look forward to most and least?
- What impact do you hope to make in the field of medicine?
- What one question would you ask if you were interviewing others to study medicine? What would you most like us to ask you in this interview?
- Why study medicine rather than any other health care profession? How do you think medicine differs from other health professions?
- What aspect of healthcare attracts you to medicine?
- Why do you want to be a doctor? If you were to become a doctor, how would you wish your patients to describe you and why?
- What steps have you taken to try to find out whether you really do want to become a doctor?
- What things do you think might make people inclined to drop out of medical training?
- There are many different ways of helping people. Why do you want to study medicine, rather than working in any other health or social care professions?
- Can you tell us about any particular life experiences that you think may help or hinder you in a career in medicine?
- How would you dissuade someone from going into Medicine.
- How old are you when you become a consultant?
- What ways of working and studying have you developed that you think will assist you through medical school? What will you need to improve?
- How do you think you will cope with criticism from colleagues or other health professionals?
- Is there such a thing as positive criticism?
- Give us an example of something about which you used to hold strong opinions, but have had to change your mind. What made you change? What do you think now?
- Have you ever been in a situation where you realise afterwards that what you said or did was wrong? What did you do about it? What should you have done?
- How do you think you will avoid problems of keeping up to date during a long career?
- What are your outside interests and hobbies? How do these compliment you as a person? Which do you think you will continue at university?
- Tell us two personal qualities you have which would make you a good doctor, and two personal shortcomings which you think you would like to overcome as you become doctor?
- Medical training is long and being a doctor can be stressful. Some doctors who qualify never practice. What makes you think you will stick to it?
- What do you think will be the most difficult things you might encounter during your training? How will you deal with them?
- What relevance to medicine are the ‘A’ levels (apart from biology and chemistry) that you have been studying?
- What skills do you think are needed in order to communicate with your patients; how do you think they are best acquired?
- Can you learn communication skills?
- How have you developed your communication skills?
- What interests do you bring from school/college life that you think will contribute to your studies and practice?
- What challenges do you think a career in medicine will bring you?
- What do you think you will be the positive aspects and the negative aspects of being a doctor? How will you handle these?
- What attributes are necessary in a good doctor? Which do you have, and which do you need to develop further?
- Can you tell us about an interesting experience, and what you learned from it about yourself?
- Thinking about yourself: what characteristics do you think you would most need to change in the course of becoming a good doctor?
- If you could only tell me one thing about yourself, to help me to get a sense of you as a person, what would it be and why?
- If you could change two things about yourself, what would they be and why?
- What do you think are your priorities in your own personal development?
- What qualities do you lack that would be useful for a doctor, and what do you intend to do about this?
- What qualities do you think other people value in you?
- How do you think other people would describe you?
- How will you cope with being criticised or even sued?
- Tell me about a time that you have been sad or confused.
- Which of your qualities do other people find frustrating? What might you do about this?
- You will probably have got high marks throughout school. On this medical course, most marks are awarded as ‘satisfactory’ or not. How will you feel about seeming ‘average’ in this new situation?
- How will you cope with the death of a patient as a result of your mistakes?
- Think of a time when you had to say ‘sorry’ to someone. How did that change your relationship with that person?
- Some people are always very certain that what they believe is right. Some people are never certain. What kind of person are you in this regard?
- What makes a good working relationship?