Guide to Committee Interviews
For Candidates of the Entering Class of 2010

Purpose | Format | Interview Tips

Purpose
The Committee Interview is one of the requirements you must satisfy to be eligible for committee support of your application to medical, dentistry, or veterinary school. Chief among its purposes are the following:

• To give the Premedical Committee an opportunity to focus on you just when you are poised to apply to medical school. We regard this as an invaluable occasion to learn more about you.

• To give you a chance to practice the difficult art of answering questions—pointed, nebulous, profound, and inane—on the fly.
  You may be nervous about the committee interview, and feel concerned that you may not present your best self and that this will count against you. This is not, however, the case. One reason to put you through this simulation is to permit you to make mistakes in a safe environment so that you can learn from them and then avoid them when it truly counts. In short, you don’t have to be perfect. All we ask is that you make an effort to prepare for the interview and to take this exercise seriously. While this is not a graded exercise, evidence of indifference to it will reflect poorly upon you and may convince the Committee not to take you seriously as an applicant.

Format
This exercise is intended to simulate loosely a medical school interview. Generally, the premed will be interviewed by two members of the Premedical Committee, including the advisor. There are, however, occasionally exceptions to this.

The premise is that the interviewer will learn the most about you if you are put at your ease. Our committee interviews follow suit. Nonetheless, at times the interviewers may press you or ask questions that are uncomfortable. We do this in the belief that such questions are ones you should be prepared to answer.

Closed File
Some medical school interviews are closed file, which means the interviewer has been given your name and perhaps your personal statement, but nothing more. In this case, the idea is for the interviewer to come in with few preconceptions and to develop impressions of you based almost exclusively on the interchange of the interview.

Open File
Open file interviews presumably have the opposite premise: The interviewer knows a lot about you on paper and seeks confirmation of your written self-representation during the course of the interview. While open file interviews may sometimes work this way, it is also not surprising to find that interviewers haven’t always found an opportunity to review your file; in such cases, the interview is in effect a closed file interview.

Interview Tips

Before the Interview
Part of the purpose of the Committee Interview is to simulate a medical school interview.  Please therefore

• Be on time, and allow for travel delays
• Dress professionally, as you would for a medical school interview

Interview Process
You will be interviewed by two representatives of the Premedical Committee.  Be prepared for questions that may address the following issues:

• Tell us about yourself.   Know where to begin with this question, and in what direction to guide the answer.  Think of the person hearing the answer to this, and how you can share significant information about yourself from the start.

• Open/Closed File: During the committee interview, don’t assume your interviewers have read your file. You should provide context for your answers as though you are speaking with someone who is meeting you for the first time.


• Motivation: Why do you want to become a doctor?  Many careers entail helping people.  Why is medicine, instead of another branch of the health professions, the right place for you?  Be able to defend this answer.

• Logical Thought: Do you understand more than one side of a problem? Are you open minded?  Are you able to support your opinions with facts as you discuss issues?

• Extracurricular activities: What have you done besides study that will make you a good physician/dentist/vet?  If you volunteered abroad, why did you do so when there are people in need just a few blocks away from Columbia?  What did you learn from your extracurricular activities?

• Maturity: As a Postbac what have you learned from your circuitous route to medical school?  If you entered the Postbac Program directly after college, why did you not pursue premedical studies as an undergraduate? Why are you leaving one career for another?  Will this happen again? What did you do to inform yourself about medicine before deciding that it was the field for you?

• Knowledge of the field: Medicine has as many challenges as it has rewards.  Be ready to discuss what you know about them.  Be ready to discuss recent events and current issues in the profession.   What would you say is the number one issue affecting the medical profession today, and how would you address it?  If one or both of your parents are physicians, be ready to discuss your own journey without sounding as though you are planning to join the ‘family business.’

• Red Flags:  “I see you got an A in the first semester of chemistry, and a B+ in the second semester.  What happened?”  “There is a gap of 6 months in your academic timeline.  What were you doing during that time?”  “Why did you transfer to another college after your freshman year?”  “Why did you drop calculus?”  Read your own academic history with a critical eye and look for possible areas about which you may be questioned.

Remember:  Support your answers with concrete examples from your experience.  The ideal answer will help you share details about yourself that are not obvious from viewing your transcript or personal statement.  Be prepared to answer at least 2 follow up questions for every response you give.  Schools may dig deeper into your answers to take you out of your comfort zone.

Nervous? Just about everyone is before these interviews. The best stay against an excess of anxiety is to devote some time to thinking about answers to questions like those provided above.

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