What are the questions you may be asked on the interview day
 Questions to Ask the Faculty
 Questions to Ask the Program Director
 Questions to Ask the Residents

What are the questions you may be asked on the interview day

1. List three accomplishments of which you are most proud of and what each accomplishment valuable as a resident in this specialty?
3. What clinical experience have you had in this specialty?
4. Do you have any questions?
5. Tell me about yourself?
6. What three adjectives best describe you?
7. What might give me a better picture of you than I can get from your resume?
8. Tell me a story about yourself that best describes you?
9. If you were going to die in 5 minutes, what would you tell someone about yourself?
10. Of which accomplishments are you most proud?
11. Are there any hidden achievements or qualities that you are secretly proud of?
12. How have you changed since high school?
13. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
14. Tell me about your “secret identity” – The part of your personality that you don’t share with strangers?
15. Any skeletons in your closet you want to tell me about?
16. How well do you take criticism?
17. What’s your pet peeve?
18. If you could change one thing about your personality what would it be?
19. If you could be any cell in the human body, which would you be and why?
20. Do you see yourself as more relaxed/casual/informal or more serious/dedicated/committed?
21. Which is more important, the ability to organize, structure, and prioritize or to be flexible, modify, change and make do as needed?
22. Which is more important, knowledge or imagination?
23. Strangest Halloween costume you ever wore?
24. What do you value in your own life?
25. If you had unlimited money and (x amount of time) what would you do?
26. 3 wishes, what would they be?
27. What kinds of people are your friends?
28. Describe your best friend?
29. How are you similar and dissimilar to your best friend?
30. How would your friends or co-workers describe you?
31. Who are your heroes?
32. What is your favorite movie, book?
33. What is the last book you read?
34. What do success and failure mean to you?
35. What do you do in your spare time?
36. Favorite games/sports? Why?
37. Have you done any volunteer work?
38. How did you choose these outside activities?
39. If you had a completely free day, what would you do?
40. Describe for me your typical day?
41. What is the most bizarre thing you have ever done (in college, high school, etc)?
42. What is the most unusual occurrence in your life in the past (x amount of time)?
43. Which organizations do you belong to?
44. What are your plans for a family?
45. If could not be a physician, what career would you choose?
46. Why choose to be a doctor?
47. How do you make important decisions?
48. Are you a risk taker or safety minded?
49. What made you choose your undergraduate major?
50. How did you select undergraduate college and medical school?
51. What were the major deficiencies in your medical school training? How would you plan to remedy this?
52. If you could begin your schooling again, what would you change?
53. Have you ever dropped a class, why?
54. Have you ever quit or been fired from a job?
55. Biggest failures in life and what have you done to ensure that they won’t happen again?
56. Have you always done the best work of which you are capable?
57. Which types of people do you have problems working with?
58. What qualities drive you crazy in colleagues?
59. Describe the best/worst attending with whom you have ever worked?
60. Do you prefer to work under supervision or on your own?
61. With which patients do you have trouble dealing?
62. How do you normally handle conflict?
63. How do you respond when you have problems with someone?
64. What do you do if someone senior tells you to do something you know is wrong?
65. With what subject/rotation did you have the most difficulty?
66. Why do you want to go into this specialty?
67. What would you be willing to sacrifice to become a physician in this specialty?
68. What is the greatest sacrifice you have already made to get to where you are?
69. If your chosen specialty did not exist, what would you do?
70. How much did lifestyle considerations fit into your choice of specialty?
71. Why did you apply to this program?
72. What qualities are you looking for in a program?
73. What interests you most about this program?
74. What have you heard about our program that you don’t like?
75. Are you applying here because it is a familiar environment?
76. What will be the toughest aspect of this specialty for you?
77. How will you handle the least interesting or least pleasant parts of this specialty’s practice?78. What qualities are most important in this specialty?
79. What kind of qualities does a person need to be an effective physician?
80. Why should we take you over other applicants?
81. What can you add to our program?
82. What computer experience do you have?
83. Describe your ideal residency program?
84. What is your energy level like?
85. How many hours of sleep do you require each night?
86. How well do you function under pressure?
87. How do you handle stress?
88. Can you handle stress without the resources you are accustomed to relying on?
89. Tell me about the patient from who you learned the most?
90. Most memorable experience in medical school/college?
91. What errors have you made in patient care?
92. Greatest fear about practicing medicine?
93. Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?
94. How do you see the delivery of health care evolving in the 21st century?
95. Is health care a right or a privilege?
96. What problems will our specialty face in the next 5-10 years?
97. What would you do if the house staff had a strike?
98. What do you think of what’s happening in mid east? Congress? Economy?
99. Teach me something non-medical in 5 minutes?
100. Where else have you interviewed?
101. What if you don’t match?
102. Can you think of anything else you would like to add?
103. How do you deal/cope with failure, give example?
104. What was your favorite course in medical school?
105. Describe a conflict you had with someone and how it was resolved?
106. Describe something that was very difficult in your life, how you dealt with it, and what you learned from it?
107. What needs to be changed in our health care system?
108. How can you do your job more effectively?
109. What is the most pressing problem in medicine today?
110. What is the most rewarding thing you have ever done?
111. Tell me some of your successes?
112. Tell me some of your failures?
113. How do you show your commitment to medicine?
114. Who is the most influential in your life?
115. What is the worst thing that has ever happened to you?
116. What do you do for fun?
117. When did you decide you wanted to be a physician?
118. Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
119. What leadership roles have you held?
120. What are the biggest problems in medicine and in your chosen specialty?
121. What do you think of socialized medicine?
122. Do you know how hard residency is?
123. Do you want research to be a part of your career?
124. What is your most important accomplishment?
125. What makes you different from everyone else?
126. What do you expect out of your residency?
127. What is your most important lesson learned from childhood?
128. What do you expect will be the hardest part of residency for you?
129. Who in your family are you closest to?
130. What makes you happy?
131. What makes you sad?
132. What makes you unique?
133. Is there anything else not in application that you want to tell me?
134. How do your friends describe you?
135. 3 people you would invite to dinner and why?
136. Describe important relationships you have had with people?
137. Anything else you want to tell me about yourself?
138. What was your most difficult challenge in life?
139. Why do you want to come here?
140. What are some challenges that will face this specialty?
141. What motivates you?
142. Why are you here?

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Questions to Ask the Faculty

1. What types of non-clinical responsibilities are there? (Research, projects, writing, administrative)
2. What research projects are the faculty and residents currently working on? How is funding obtained? Who gets first authorship?
3. Is there time to do research? If you need to present at a national conference, will the department pay for your way there?
4. Is there training in administrative and legal aspects? Is there hands-on experience dealing with insurance, billing, contracts, hiring?
5. What are the population demographics? (Indigent, insured, etc)
6. Who does specific procedures? How is that delegated?
7. Is there conference time? Is it protected time?
8. What is the amount of exposure and experience in other specialties?
9. What is the underlying philosophy of the program? What is the mission statement for the program?
10. Are there any required/provided certifications? (ACLS, ATLS, PALS/APLS)
11. Are there any skills labs?
12. How are procedures recorded and credentialed?

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Questions to Ask the Program Director

1. Where are your graduates? Geographic areas? Academic vs. community?
2. How have your graduates done on the board exam? Did all pass on the first time? How did they do on oral exams?
3. How have residents done on in-service exams?
4. Any new faculty coming on? Any leaving?
5. Type of resident evaluations? How often? How is feedback supplied to residents?
6. What changes if any do you anticipate in the program’s curriculum? Why?
7. Have any residents left the program? Did they enter the same field elsewhere? Why did they leave?
8. Do you help graduates find jobs? How do you accomplish this – counseling sessions, faculty contacts? Will faculty review job offers with residents?
9. What are the weaknesses of this program and how are they being improved?
10. What are the strengths of this program?
11. I am very interested in your program, what else can I do as an applicant?
12. What can I expect from you as a resident in your program?
13. What do you expect from me as a resident in your program?
14. What are your future plans and how long do you intend to stay here?
15. How are faculty chosen? What are their strengths, weaknesses, interests?
16. What is your accreditation status?
17. Has the program ever been on probation? If so, why?
18. How often are you reviewed by the RRC and when is the next review?
19. Do you support resident involvement in national associations?
20. How many national conferences do residents get to attend and when?
21. Does the program pay dues to specialty academic societies (e.g. AMA)
22. What processes are in place to deal with issues for residents?
23. What is their policy on maternity/paternity leave?
24. How are the residents treated by the ancillary staff?

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Questions to Ask the Residents

1. What contact will I have with faculty and how often?
2. How is the faculty coverage?
3. How involved are faculty on their cases?
4. How often do you want faculty input but find it’s unavailable?
5. Who teaches – senior resident, attending, both? Do you feel you have the opportunity to teach as a senior resident?
6. How much didactic time is there? How much time is spent in lectures, seminars, journal clubs?
7. What has higher priority: Attending conference or clinical duties?
8. What are the types of clinical experiences I can expect?
9. Are there struggles between services for procedures?
10. Is it difficult to obtain consults from other services?11.What is a typical patient census?
12. Have graduates felt comfortable performing all necessary procedures by the time they graduate?
13. What type of procedural experience is there?
14. Will I have time to read?
15. What type of support staff is available? Who starts IV, blood draws, clerical work, takes patient tox-ray? How often do you wheel patients to X-Ray?
16. What is the call schedule? Is it home call or hospital call?
17. What is the patient population like? (Indigent, insured, HIV, penetrating/blunt trauma?)
18. Do the residents go out as a group? Are the events for all residents or just those in the program?
19. How often do social events occur? Any activities of special interest to residents?
20. Are the majority of residents here married or single, any with kids?
21. Where do people live?
22. Is parking a problem?
23. What if there is a problem, will the program stand up for the resident?
24. How are shifts done? What is their length? Advance from days to evenings to nights? Night float?
25. Are there any away electives? Where?
26. Is there research time? How much and what is required?
27. What are the weaknesses of the program and how are they being improved?
28. What is the one thing you would improve at this program if you could?
29. Are you happy here?

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Source: www.applicantguide.blogspot.com

I applied to 150 Internal Medicine programs

It gets more competitive every year especially for the International Medical Graduates (IMGs). Most of the IMG-friendly programs claim that they received more than 3000 applications this year. The record gets broken each year. This might also be due to each applicant applying to more than 100 programs. I thought applying to more programs would fetch more number of interviews. Hence I applied to 150 programs. Also I was planning to apply for Family Medicine (FM) programs if I don't get a good number of interviews in Internal medicine. Thank God I did not have to apply for FM. I should say I went through the eligibility criteria of each program before I applied to it. There is no point in applying to a program where you are not eligible to apply to. It gets filtered probably by their software itself. So please do not blindly apply to a large number of programs thinking that more number would fetch you more interviews. Rather apply to all the programs where you are eligible to apply.

Applying to programs sponsoring J1

Though I wanted to join only programs sponsoring H1B visa, it is not a good idea to be choosy. It is always better to keep our options open and applying to both J1 and H1B programs.

Credentials

USMLE Scores are by far the most important filtering factor used by programs. Work hard and get good scores. What is a good score? Well, this is a hard question to answer. For Internal Medicine, more than 90 would help. But remember there are a lot of double 99s around. So work hard and put in your maximum effort for USMLE Step 1 and USMLE Step 2 CK. Heard that USMLE Step 3 score is not that important. Don't know how far that is true. I got 86 and a program director during the interview said it is a good score for USMLE STEP 3. Some people say double 99 is required to get into good programs. I don't think that is true. I got 95 and 99. 95 didn't hurt me. Programs mainly use scores just to filter the applicants. After that, they look into the whole application. So DO NOT lose heart if your scores are less. There are people who have joined residency with very low scores like 79. So never give up! What about a failure in USMLE? Work hard and always try to pass the exam in first attempt. But if you fail, that is not the end of the tunnel. Again there are a lot of guys who joined residency with multiple attempts in USMLE. There is always a bright light at the end of the tunnel.

Year of graduation: Though I have read that programs prefer fresh graduates, during the interviews I found many candidates who have completed post-graduation in home country. Do programs prefer guys who have already done residency in their home country? I think so. It does not mean that you should do a post-graduation in your country to improve your credentials. If you have decided that you are going to be in America, why waste time doing stuff which are not going to be recognized in the US. There are a lot of guys who have entered US residency straight from med school undergraduation.

ECFMG Certification and USMLE STEP 3: I was ECFMG certified and done with USMLE STEP 3 when I applied to programs. Having USMLE STEP 3 scores in hand when you apply would help you for sure. I am quite sure that it will fetch you some extra interview calls. Especially if your USMLE Step 1 and/or USMLE Step 2 CK scores are less, it will definitely help you if you apply with a USMLE Step 3 score. That does not mean that you should postpone your application until you get the USMLE STEP 3 score.

Research Most of the University programs look for research publications/ presentations in your CV. On the other hand most of the community programs are not bothered about this. US publications/ presentations carry more weightage than those done outside. I did not do research separately in any institution. I just participated in research in the hospital where I had USCE.

US Clinical Experience (USCE): This is another very important thing which the Program Directors (PD) look for in your CV. Many PDs use this as a filtering criteria. Don't waste time thinking whether observership would be considered as USCE or not. Some consider. Some don't. But that does not matter. Because getting observership itself is very difficult and competitive now. So apply to all/both observership and externships. Do whatever and whenever you get. Something is better than nothing. Try to do as many USCE as possible. It is expensive but worth it.

Applying on September 1: This is very important. Never compromise on this. Send your documents (LORs and MSPE) to ERAS as early as possible in August and be ready with your CV and Personal Statement to apply right at September 1 00.00 AM (EST). Take your exams well ahead in order to apply on Sep 1 with at least ECFMG certificate. This is to get a good number of interviews. USMLE Step 1 score alone is enough to get you interviews. But do not take risk. It is always better to apply with all the scores on Sep 1.

God's mercy: - According to me, this is the most important factor. I strongly believe that I got 26 interviews and prematched only because of God's mercy and grace and NOT BECAUSE OF MY CREDENTIALS. I am not writing this statement just like that. I have experienced a lot of obstacles and miracles over the last 2 years especially in my path towards residency in the US. In fact, it is God's miracle that I am writing a blog on tips and tricks for the Match as until recently I was a symbol of failure. My US visa for CS exam was rejected 4 times consecutively and I got my visa on my 5th attempt. (I would blog on my US visa experiences soon). I would have reached a dead-end in my life as well as career if I had not applied for the visa for the 5th time. It had been God's plan. Well, God could have given me the visa at the first attempt itself. Why should he make me run from pillar to post? Firstly, I would NOT have known God if I got it on my own at the first attempt.

Secondly, I would have got a false opinion of my capabilities. In reality, I am an average student. It is because of God that I have reached at least to this level. I would not have realised this otherwise. Thirdly, to improve my faith in God. Problems and obstacles in life are the ones which take us closer to God. Also, I would like to confess here that my USCE and Research opportunities were purely God's miracles and they came to me at the right time. Without these, I am sure I would not have got even 10 out of those 26 interviews. Take home message: Praise the Lord. After all, that was the purpose of our creation. Glory be to God Almighty and my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.