Here are 6 great tips to help you ace your Medicine MMI interview. Let’s start with 3 tips about handling nerves during your MMI medicine interview, and even in the weeks before your medical interview as you prepare for it.
1. From now on only picture yourself succeeding. If every time you think about your MMI interview or during your preparation for it, you feel nervous, worried or even afraid and you always picture yourself stumbling or freezing, then the chances of your fears actually coming true in the real Medicine interview massively increase. Not to mention this causes you to link negative thoughts and feelings with your Medicine interview. It will just make the whole process of preparing for your MMI interview generally unpleasant and not something you look forward to.
Instead turn this psychology on its head. Your brain is like a computer and you are in control of the images you see and the thoughts you feel. You are probably just not very used to thinking of your brain being so controllable in this way. Most people just react to their environment and follow established habit patterns. From now on every time you think about your interview, picture yourself doing really well. Picture the scene as vividly as you can – imagine yourself very articulately explaining yourself. Picture yourself being confident and charming and the day going extremely smoothly. Picture yourself being empathetic and reassuring. You can even go into the future and start to think of receiving your offers, telling family and friends etc. Make the pictures brighter and more vivid. You could even lie down and spend a few minutes visualising this every day.
Make sure you don’t just vividly visualise but you actually experience the feelings you would get in these scenarios. Every time you think of your interview instead of feeling anxious, scared etc. start to feel excited about how well you are going to do. If you do these two things, i.e. change the way you picture the MMI interview and change the way you feel about it, every time you think about your medicine interview you will feel good. You will probably even learn to look forward to your medicine interview and will associate positive feelings towards your interview every time you think about it. This is entirely a world away from your previous feelings of anxiety and nervousness every time you thought about your medicine interview!
2. Embrace the unexpected and don’t resent the hard work required to prepare for your Medicine interview. Again, this is part of changing your mindset and treating your brain as a computer that you can change at will. Instead of thinking of unexpected or new stations as something to be fearful of, think of them as an opportunity to showcase your best abilities. Visualise yourself (see above) doing well. Learn to think of the hours you put in preparing for your Medicine interview as hours used to build your dream of becoming a doctor. Visualise yourself achieving your goals as you do your medical school application preparation. In everyday life, some people shy away from challenges or hard work. Other people find them thrilling and actively seek them out. They get bored by doing easy things and feel exhilarated by pushing themselves to their limits or working extremely hard. This shift in mindset will give you a significant advantage over the competition. While they are worried and nervous about a new MMI station or hate the fact that they have to do so much preparation for their interview, you can be excited about these situations and enjoy working hard.
3. Be ok with feeling a little nervous. At the same time start to feel excited! You have wanted to be a doctor for so long and now someone is giving you that chance with open arms. Embrace it! You now have an opportunity to put all that hard work preparing for your MMI to use and demonstrate what you can do. Thousands of applicants have been eliminated at this stage and haven’t been lucky enough to have the chance that you have. Know that you are in control of your mindset and how you feel. If you want to find challenges exciting instead of causing you anxiety and nervousness then absolutely you can. If you doubt this then simply think who can stop you from feeling this way? Only you can.
Here are three tips for dealing with the preparation for your MMI medicine interview
1. Don’t forget about preparing for traditional interview questions. Remember that MMI merely describes the set up of the interview not the content of the stations. Some universities will have MMI interviews where each MMI station is just a mini traditional medical interview. Most of the universities with MMI stations will include at least a few MMI stations which include some traditional medical interview questions.
2. Know the format of your interview beforehand. Make sure you read all the documentation you receive before your Medicine MMI interview. Learn how many stations there are. How long you have per station and what kind of skills they will be testing.
3. Check what type of MMI stations are typically asked at the specific medical school you have your MMI medicine interview. Check past Medicine MMI station scenarios. However, be prepared to expect anything at the stations also.
How can Medicine Answered help you in your Medical school interview?
Medicine Answered can help you with all stages of your Medical school application. We deliver excellent one-day interview courses and one to one medical interview tutoring. All of our courses are delivered only by doctors who successfully passed all four medical school interviews and gained all four UCAS offers. This is unlike our competitors as our courses are not delivered by non-medics, medical students or people who were not fully successful in the application process themselves. Our philosophy is that your time is valuable and limited. To help you maximise the use of that limited time to prepare for your medicine interview, we believe that you should only be taught by experts who have excelled at their own medicine interviews and have sat on both sides of interview panels.
In our Medicine interview course, we thoroughly cover traditional and MMI medical school interviews and everything in between. We teach you techniques you can apply in all MMI stations and traditional interviews instead of just focusing on learning how to answer hundreds of individual questions. We concentrate on massively increasing your confidence about the interview and reducing your anxieties to maximise your performance on the day of your Medical school interview. We offer Medicine interview courses in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and various other cities. You will also receive an exclusive discount to use our other services such as our one to one Medical tutoring with a doctor (this can be done in person or online at a time to suit you) on any aspect of the application process or our 360° application review. This premium service not only involves a professional analysis of your Medicine personal statement but also a review of your entire medical application and suggests areas of improvement and topics about your Medicine personal statement which may come up in interview.