Second interview recap

I realized I never wrote up a recap of my second interview, so here it goes. It's a beast and took me a few days to write because there was just so much to say. So bear with me. It was an eventful day.

I got into town the night before at 10 pm for an 8 am interview and a few of the people with whom I was waiting for the shuttle to the hotel were also interviewing for the same medical school. There were also several people who had come for their residency interviews so it was interesting to get that perspective as well. Even though I was closer in age to the residency interviewers I felt like such a newbie pre-med around them.

My interview day began with meeting the director of admissions who was just as personable and funny as the one from the first school at which I interviewed. This further reinforces my theory that the two schools are identical not only in their emphasis on creating a community within the medical establishment but also that it all begins with the personality of the director of admissions.

Anywhos, since there were only several of us interviewing in the morning (they had an afternoon session...more about that below), the director had us all say where we're from and what we are currently doing in life. It was really cool to hear what everyone else was doing and that the director took the time to make some funny comments about our lives. He couldn't think of anything for me, by the way. Apparently I lead a very non-joking life.

While I thought I had completely bombed my interviews at the first school, these ones seemed to go very well. I actually felt comfortable in my suit jacket (it had felt like a monkey suit at the last interview) and I was much more at ease throughout the whole thing. Maybe it's because I didn't have so much emotional investment in this interview and could be relaxed or perhaps it was because I had gotten a decent night of sleep, but either way I felt very good about my answers and felt like I nailed it.

My first interviewer was a philosopher/pediatrician (Dr. P) and had an air about him that just brought comfort to the interview. It helped that we sat in his cluttered office that very much resembled the offices of my undergraduate professors so it was very familiar. That, and people with clean offices just generally make me nervous so it was nice to see he was the polar opposite of that.

He started the interview by asking if I had any questions for him, which kind of threw me off. I generally have one or two prepared, but I sometimes think of more during the course of an interview because I can gauge what kind of information I can get from my interviewer. So I went to my staples (I don't even remember what they were at this point) but kept it short because I wanted to give him enough time to ask me his own questions. After-all, I'm there to woo them and the more time I have with my interviewer, the more effectively I can do that.

Dr. P has five standard questions he asks every interviewee because he says he's discovered over the years that everything he gathers from an interview boils down to those. I don't remember all of them anymore but they were the typical: Why this school? Why MD? How would you contribute to this medical school class? And something else.

During my "Why MD?" answer I mentioned that I didn't have a sudden "Wow!" moment in my life that pushed me towards medicine but that it was a large number of factors that influenced this decision. In short, I didn't have much of a concrete reason and I mentioned that to him (oops). My interviewer's response was that it's good that I don't have such a succinct answer because that just makes it seem prepared and not entirely genuine.

So my blubbering was actually seen as a positive, which was in stark contrast to the surgeon's response from my first school's interview. At that one, I got the impression that I wasn't concise enough and needed to give her a more direct "This is the moment I knew I'd be a doctor"-type answer. The differing reactions of the two interviewers to my responses are probably also due to the differences in their personalities and specialties (philosopher here and surgeon there).

Also, I'm really interested in global medicine and Dr. P mentioned that his colleague is starting a program in Italy (yeah, who would've thought Italy needed it?!), which totally made my day. After the homeland, Italy is my favorite country in the world and I've been scheming for a way to get back there in some professional capacity. But since it isn't exactly a developing country, I figured my visits would have to be of the vacation variety and my medical work would be done elsewhere. Alas, the stars are beginning to align!

My second interviewer was an old white dude with hearing aids (Dr. O) who started the interview off by saying "Women shouldn't play rugby." Wait, what? I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or serious so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and brushed it off. He then told me how he used to play back in the day and what techniques he used to win, which I told him were illegal (in a nice and friendly tone, of course). I figured that answer was more diplomatic than what I had really wanted to say: "You probably played when you couldn't lift in line-outs," which is rugby-speak for "You're a geezer." As you can see, we didn't see eye to eye.

The rest of the interview actually went relatively well. Since I'm really good at schmoozing old white dudes (I've had my fair share of jobs requiring this very skill), we got along great. He talked, I listened. And a few times I managed to sneak in some of my "This is why I'm awesome" talking points.

Dr. O seemed very interested in my international medical trip with the U.S. Navy, and it was refreshing to see him actually take interest in my application instead of talking about the school for change (his only application-specific question up until that point had been to ask when I moved to the States since I was born abroad...not exactly something I could elaborate on). That is, until I realized he was scoping it out to add it to the global medicine/international health program and didn't really care for my perspective on it or what I'd learned from the experience.

To top off this *awesome* interview and since I've done a lot of random things in my life, Dr. O asked what was my greatest adventure, "But don't say rugby." I just kept the smile plastered on my face and seized the opportunity to finally talk about myself.

So the second interview went like this: insult women's rugby, glorify the medical school, steal ideas for international programs, and insult women's rugby again for good measure. In short, it was an exercise in getting used and insulted.

A little while after this interview, one of the admissions office ladies came up to me and asked how I'd liked Dr. O because all the students absolutely loved him. I succeeded in containing my guffaw of disbelief and told her what she wanted to hear.

While waiting for the next set of presentations, some of the afternoon interview students had begun to trickle in. The day was structured so that some candidates (myself included) had interviews in the morning, followed by talks by the admissions department, lunch with medical students, and a hospital/medical school tour. The morning interviewers were free to leave after all this while the afternoon interviewers only now had their interviews. As a result, we overlapped with another group for a good chunk of the day and got to meet a few more potential classmates (if we all get in and all decide to attend this school, of course).

Seeing their nervousness during the tour and throughout the talks reaffirmed my decision to interview earlier in the day even though I am so not a morning person. It was nice to have the most stressful part of this ordeal over and done with and get to fully absorb everything else they were throwing at us.

The first talk after our interviews was given by the admissions director and talked about the unique way the clinical years are structured here. At the end of it, the director was visibly stalling while waiting for another dude to show up to give another speech. When the second dude finally came by, he joked that the admissions director must've bribed us to keep us waiting for him. To that I replied that yes, he'd kept us quiet with the promise of food. When my comment didn't get the chuckle I expected (since it was clearly sarcastic) I made sure that my name tag was turned around so they couldn't write anything in my file.

Usually I'm more formal during interviews but that quip slipped out because the director of admissions at the dream school interview constantly joked about the promise of food if we only made it through the next set of presentations. So I figured this was fair game to lift the mood a bit. Apparently I'm more laid back at interviews than this school expects. Whoopsies.

The lunch with medical students was only eventful because we got bitched out by the cafeteria staff for sitting in a room the organizers thought they had reserved. The current medical students kept saying that this is not normally how people are around here and that generally everyone is really nice and all that, but my experience from the 36 hours I spent there suggests that it's still not the niceness I'm used to from where I grew up or where I currently live. Maybe they're comparing it to the general attitude of the entire region and in that respect, people in the school's region are much kinder and more neighborly. But they still have a long ways to go to gain a certifiable "nice city" description.

I asked one of the third year medical students if they get a lot of scut work while on the wards and she looked at me like I was from outer space. Maybe it wasn't the most common question she gets asked but after the obvious "What's it like to live here?" and "How do you like your curriculum?" I had run out of things to ask, and I figured that was something I can't learn from their website. In the end, her reluctance to answer and her shock at hearing me ask that made me drop the subject for the rest of the day. I didn't think I was going to end up at this school anyway so I didn't have too much interest in getting to know it better by that point, so I ate my sandwich while smiling and making small talk for the rest of the lunch.

We got a tour of the facilities after eating and it was given by their 60+-year-old volunteer staff. It was actually pretty awesome. It seems like everyone these days is getting a new children's hospital so we got an extensive tour of that. I wasn't all that impressed because it paled in comparison to the dream school's new one (do you see a pattern here?) but everyone else was pretty wowed. I just plastered a smile on my face and commented on the great facilities like I was expected to. Other than that, nothing too exciting happened on the tour.

The people who had interviewed in the morning and were thus done for the day were much more relaxed and actually seemed to enjoy hearing about the history of the place, while the ones still waiting to interview in the afternoon were visibly stressed. Again, I'm glad I was in the morning group.

One of my fellow 8 am interviewees had graduated from my undergrad about 5 years after I had so we spent a large part of the tour talking about the town and how it had changed since I had left. I reminisced about my time there and it's so crazy how much I've forgotten about the town, the cross streets, and the local bars and restaurants since my graduation several years ago. It's rare I get to talk about my alma mater with a stranger and having that connection with her made it feel like we were in this together. It made the whole day a lot more familiar and I didn't feel nearly as out of place in this strange land as I would have had she not been there.

My hotel also provided a shuttle service from the medical school to the airport so I was able to get a driving tour of the campus (as we picked up all the residents that had interviewed at various departments) as well as the region. I don't know if our driver took the roundabout way through town or if getting to the airport is indeed this complicated, but we got a long tour of the nearest major town. It was very cool to drive through the rural part of the state and then see the urban area near downtown. What a difference!

I was also somewhat reassured that I could find some semblance of a social life here after cruising through their bar and restaurant area but it was still very small and kind of deserted. All the aspects of a legitimate city were there: nice pedestrian downtown, tall office buildings, quiet suburbs, rundown inner-city housing, except they were packed into a much smaller area. It was like a miniature city condensed into a 10-block area.

Since this school is in the middle of nowhere, we took a puddle jumper to a major airport in the region to connect to my flight home. The plane carried about twenty people max and United Airlines (how I loathe thee...) still insisted on boarding with their boarding groups. It was kind of like the scene from "Meet the Parents" where Ben Stiller is waiting by himself in the boarding area while the ticket agent calls out all the groups before his. "Now loading Zone 1," and no one moved. "Zone 2 please come forward," and still nothing. We just all looked at each other in ridiculous disbelief. Finally the last group was called and we all got on the plane, where we had to be re-seated based on our weight so the plane was balanced properly. Like I said earlier, it was a puddle jumper.

I was home about 36 hours after leaving, so it was a very short trip. All in all, I feel like my interviews went very well and the admissions staff did a wonderful job making us feel welcome and showing us around. The wait for this school is long so I won't hear back for a while.

Tragically, this interview was on the day that Sandy Hook Elementary School got shot up by a lunatic so the five hours I had to waste waiting for my flight at the airport were spent watching the news in shock with everyone else in the terminal while joyous Christmas carols played in the background. Such a weird juxtaposition.

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ETA: Some of this was written after I'd gotten my waitlist decision from this school so I was a bit more honest about my dislike of the program, the region, etc. I have a lot more (shall we say) interesting things to say that I'll save for my application cycle recap when this whole thing is behind me, whichever way it turns out. So stay tuned for my real feelings about this school.