[Medical School] Interview experience / tips

These days, I have been having really bad insomnia. It's a vicious cycle!

SO...since I am wide awake, I decided to write about some of my interview experiences, and suggest some tips that I observed or am practicing on myself during medical school interviews. Most of these are things that I discovered this year, and aren't the typical "interview tips" (like...have a firm handshake or things like that). I am pretty confident  that some of these suggestions will apply to most (graduate school) interview situations. If anything, I will probably look back at this one day while I am preparing for residency interviews...

1) ** Take some control of the interview: Yup, that's right! I am definitely not suggesting you to dominate or talk over your interviewer. However, you can definitely answer some of the interviewer's initial questions in a way that will make the interviewer logically ask another question you want to answer. For me, I made a road map of some key points I wanted to hit during interviews. I brainstormed what I would answer to some of the most common interview questions so that I could end my answer in a way that would provoke the interviewer to ask another question I wanted them to ask me. For example, most of my interviews usually start off with "Tell me about yourself" or "Why [X]" (X in this case is medicine). I would usually give a brief background about myself and typically end my response mentioning something about research or past work experiences. Then the interviewer would be inclined to ask "Tell me more about [X] experience" ...and so on. If all goes well, I know I would have told the interviewer more about myself, experiences, goals in medicine / medical education, and why this school would be a good fit by the end of the interview.

Maybe this was intuitive for most of you, but I was totally unaware of this little trick until my pre-med adviser suggested it. Otherwise, I would have just simply answered the question, typically giving the interviewer free reign over any topic they want to ask ...including those topics you were unprepared to answer! Note that this trick does not work 100% of the time. Instead, it gives you a nice framework to work with. Even if your interviewer asks questions that doesn't go with your framework, that's ok! Just try going back to it as much as possible.

2) Relax! ...but seriously, relax: Interviews can be a bit nerve-racking. As long as you come prepared and are confident in yourself, your body language will show the same attitude, thus making you more appealing / approachable. Win! After people-watching many interviewees, I am starting to realize just how much body language can communicate what is going inside that head of yours. I was at one interview where this one girl was a nervous wreck, despite trying to appear confident. She kept frantically looking through her notes / resume, getting up to get water, and overall playing with her hair / suit. It certainly made everyone else around her uneasy too. If we can see her uneasiness, I'm sure the interviewer did too. Interviews are about selling yourself, so relax, and sell yourself! (On one interview, one of the admission staff told us about a girl who fainted in the past. While this is an extreme case, it does stress the importance of staying calm!)

3) Get to know your interview group: I went to interviews where my interview group was awesome. Conversation was great and I really got to know some of the other interviewees. I also went to some interviews where the entire group was silent. I tried to make small conversation...but got nothing. Since I didn't want to be that girl who kept pestering others, I too grew silent.

Interviews are a time to meet your potential peers. They are a first glimpse of how you would fit in with my class. With that said, take the time to get to know some of them. It may help you make a decision about one offer over another in the future. However, people are nervous for interviews, so don't let this one experience steer you to any final decision!

4) Attention ladies- some fashion advice:

• Dress conservatively: Rock those pant suits / knee length skirts. Sleek "office dresses" are discouraged (like this, even though it's cute and seems appropriate). I would know...I tried and the idea was shot down immediately, which leads me to the next bullet.
• Don't try to be "trendy": I am a huge sucker for trying to look trendy. Going through fashion blogs is a hobby of mine, so I always had this image of what I would want to wear to interviews. Unfortunately my parents and a lot of my friends shot down most of my ideas. Apparently deep-V neck blouses in bold colors is also a no-no : /
• Make sure your suit matches...including the same color shade! : I saw several girls whose suit bottoms / skirts did not match the shade of their jackets. Unfortunately, this makes you look sloppy.
• Don't wear gaudy shoes / purses: One girl was wearing pink / nude ballet flats with a giant flower at the front (also decorated with rhinestones). They were cute shoes, but unfortunately made her look junior / unprofessional. Another girl brought her large hobo-style purse with chains on it. However, those chains clinked during the entire school tour, brining some unwonted attention towards her way.

5) Find breakfast on your own: ...Because most schools ain't feeding you in the morning! Boo. 

6) Let admissions / interview coordinator know if anything goes wrong: They may be able to address your issues!

• I interviewed at a school during Hurricane Sandy. I called the office to let them know that there was a chance my flights would be cancelled due to the hurricane, and I may be unable to make it. Once I miraculously got to the city, my host told me the school was technically closed and classes were canceled on the day of my interview. Good thing I checked with the admissions office again, because the interview was still on! If I couldn't make it to my interview, letting the admissions committee know early on would have allowed them to reschedule me as soon as possible.
• Under certain circumstances, some people can request for a different interviewer. For most of these cases, the interviewer simply did not give the interviewee the time allotted for their interview (like 5-10 minutes out of 30). I am grateful to not be in this situation, but I have heard of others who have.

I think those are all the tips / observations that I have made on some of the interviews I've been to. Honestly, a lot of the tips came from friends who have already been through the graduate school process, so thank you!! I am by no means an expert at this though. These are things that I noticed or seemed to work best for me. Good luck and have fun!

Quit Early and Quit Often

I'm back! After a REALLY LONG BREAK. A lot of things happened since I last wrote and now. Here's a quick summary: I graduated. I got my consulting job. Quit my consulting job. Moved back home to LA. Applying to medical schools (...with some dancing on the side, of course).

Looking back on some of my old posts, I find it fascinating how I wrote some "deep" ideas and also some very silly anecdotes. But this past year, I made one of the hardest decisions, and the experience has really placed a new outlook and direction on my life. I figured this is something worth sharing, and I promise it won't be a silly anecdote!

The hardest decision I had to make was telling myself to quit my consulting job, after barely working there for a full year. I had a firm plan of getting a healthcare / life science consulting job, working there for 2 years before applying to medical schools. I thought this job would give me an understanding for how the healthcare system works and the dynamics that influence a patient's healthcare. That subject was quite mysterious for me, and something I really wanted to understand before I completely dive into the world of medicine. While I did learn a lot about this space (not to mention got a nice salary), I found myself not completely happy. Was it was the crazy 70 hour work weeks? No. Was it the people I worked with? No. Was I passionate about it? No.

I am all about hard work. But I believe that you are happiest with yourself, life, and career when you're working hard at something you are passionate about. I am very thankful I had the opportunity to work at my consulting company, but after months of working long hours for something I wasn't extremely passionate about was the ultimate deal breaker. However, the fighter personality inside me fought against this gut feeling for months. I hardly ever quit at anything, and I wasn't about to do it on my first job after college. I kept telling myself that I was just grumpy because I worked late the night before, or the amount of work was piling up.

When May 2012 rolled around, I came across a video of Professor Deepak Malhotra, a popular negotiations professor at Harvard Business School giving a speech to the graduating MBA class of 2012 (see link below). He articulated something that I had been feeling for months. He said "What makes you, you? What is your essence, and how do you create a life, and the choices, that allows you to exhibit that genius every day so that who you are, and what you're doing, aren't two different things?" He later went on to say that if what you're doing is something inherently different from who you are, then quit early... and quit often. Don't quit because something is hard, but quit because it inherently doesn't resonate with you.

I found this so enlightening that later that night, I wrote my 2-weeks notice and set the plans I had been holding at the back of my mind in motion. I loved learning about the space itself, but I dreaded everything else about the job. I wanted to be with actual patients and experience the trends I learned on the job first hand. I wanted to be a part of that decision-making process that helps improve / treat patients' health. It was definitely difficult coming to terms that I was quitting my first job sooner than I planned, but when left the office for the last time, I felt so free.

I'm glad I decided to quit. I'm now applying to medical schools for the next academic year. I am using what I learned from that job and bringing it to my part time job working with public health organizations and minority populations in LA. I am tutoring biology to high school kids. I'm spending more time with my family and friends, and picking back up the hobbies I had put on hold for a very long time. I absolutely love it!

So no matter what you're interested in, I hope that you are doing something that displays your genius. If you don't think you are, use my experience as an example, and make it happen! It's completely worth it :)



Professor Deepak Malhotra's full speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D73mm29XXAw

What I want for Christmas...

I visited my grandmother today at a nursing home in Gardena today. She is well over ninety years old, and she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease during my freshman year of college. Sadly, now all she can do is lie in bed. She can’t walk, talk, or eat on her own. It sucks because she was such an active and independent woman who managed to raise six kids and travel around the world even up to her late seventies by herself, and now she can’t remember all these good memories. While I was standing over her today, for the most part she stared blankly into space. But for a moment, I saw her eyes recognizing me, and she even tried to talk! At that moment, I realized that her inability to talk made this imperceptible barrier between me and her ever more real. She was unable to communicate her brief moment of awareness, and I felt I was unable to share this moment with her too.

I basically just wanted to share this story because today made me realize how special the bonds I have with my family and friends are. Rather than having this barrier that I, unfortunately, have with my grandmother, I am so lucky to have these people in my life, and appreciate the fact that they let me into theirs. The bond between two people is something that I often overlook, but sharing your daily life, dreams, and downfalls with another person is truly amazing. Just think about it! So what I truly want for Christmas this year is for everybody to be healthy and happy. I hope to live the life that my grandmother once lived, and I can’t wait to make new memories with the people in my life! Merry Christmas everybody!

P.S. If you’re interested in the philosophy and power behind language, you should read Martin Heidegger :)

To get you guys into the Christmas mood, I’m posting one of my favorite Christmas songs! Enjoy.

Aesthetics in Living Life

Oh hi there. I totally fail at keeping up with this blog! Basically traveling and going to school kind of kept me from taking the time to verbalize my thoughts. Now that the semester is over and I have some time on my hands, I decided to FINALLY write a post!


First off, I will not bore you with any excruciating details of my trip around Italy. Basically, I travelled to various cities in various provinces around Italy for a month, and it was truly an unforgettable experience. Because Mimi and I are art aficionados, about 70% of our trip was devoted to going to art museums and reveling at the sight of original artworks that we often see in art textbooks. I can’t necessarily speak for Mimi, but standing before, say the original Botticelli’s “Primavera” or walking around the Vatican in Rome or the Doges Palace in Venice, brought a consuming and surreal emotion in me that I still can’t quite describe. I guess, in part, I was mesmerized because I was in the presence of a delicate artwork that was created hundreds, even thousands of years ago. Another part was the actual aesthetic experience of looking at a painting / sculpture / monument. The size of the artwork, along with the details and luminosity that comes from recent restoration really appealed to my visual sense. Moreover, knowing a little bit about the back story to why the artwork was create and (to me most importantly) how it was created really taught me about Italian and European culture as well as appreciate the creative genius that was put into it.

The other 30% was spent on actually enjoying the city we were in. After long days of going around to different museums / historical sites, we would often take the time to explore the food and nightlife of the city. It was all good for the first half of the month, and then we realized two things. One: if you are a student and are considering traveling for over two weeks, be economical on food! Yes, it’s great to dine well while you’re on vacation, but a student like me is not made of money and food will take away your money really fast! We kind of figured this out half way through our trip so as a solution, we would try to find smaller places outside of touristy attractions (and I have had some of my best meals at these places!). There were also definitely nights when I ate cereal and milk or ramen for dinner. Yayyy :( Secondly, August is not necessarily the best month to find great nightlife…at least on the Italian peninsula. That’s because by the 2nd week of August the latest, a lot of business, including clubs and bars, are closed for the summer and everyone goes to places with beaches like Sardinia, which is ironically where we were coming from! So if you want to travel around Europe with good nightlife, consider traveling during June or July…or go to a coastal cities during August!


After getting back to America at the end of August, I was immediately occupied with the start of school. During this semester, I managed to move into an apartment with three other amazing girls in Central Square and find a job at a consulting firm that is well known in the healthcare and life science industries. Job in hand and senior year half way over, I can’t help but have mixed feelings. I am both extremely excited to start a new chapter in my life, but at the same time nostalgic and resistant for this current chapter to end. It’s funny how these two opposing motions come together, but when I am aware of an impending new milestone in my life, I can’t help but reflect back on the chapter I am on now. I reflect on all the ups and downs of my rollercoaster experiences at MIT, and I constantly question myself whether I made all the right decisions. Was there anything that I could have done better? I will never know, and honestly that’s the beauty and artistry of living life for me. Experiencing a moment is unpredictable. They can be influenced by the people you surround yourself with, the culture, and your own subjectivity; all these factors fuse together to create an organic, unpredictable experience. Because I think experiences are what shape me, I see myself as some organic, unpredictable work of art too. The fun about reflection is realizing that I am never really the same person with the same perspectives toward life. Recognizing this synthetic process that I am living through excites me about the future because I know that I will be a different person within the next two years, and I am really excited for how I will turn out.

Anyways, that’s a summary of what I’ve been going through for the last four months. Will (hopefully) rant more often now that I have more time! And as a visualization for my thoughts on "aesthetics in living life", I leave you with this amazing painting by Magritte called Empire of Light (which can be seen for your viewing pleasure at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice :D ).

Italian Adventures- Genoa and Cinque Terre

Sorry for not keeping up with the blog, but it certainly has been a crazy couple of weeks! So we ended work on July 30th. The lab threw us the cutest little party for us and gave Mimi and I really nice, traditional good luck Sardinian necklaces. After work, we partied it up at Il Lido for the last time and left for Genoa the next day.  Don't have a lot of time on this hostel's internet, so I'll give a brief rundown of what we've been up to for our first week of our Italy trip!

GENOA

Day 1: CINQUE TERRE. We spent the whole day at the Cinque Terre, which is composed of 5 fishing villages that are practically etched into the tall cliffs in the city called La Spezia. This area is protected, so people can only access this area via train or by foot. We started off at the furthest city from Genoa which is called Riomaggiore. We then hiked for 30 minutes along "Lover's Lane" which was cute into the next village called Manarola. People put padlocks or somehow make their mark along the walk! After Manarola we hiked for an hour to Corniglia, which is the one village that is not set by the sea. Instead it's  set up really high on the hills...so that was fun to climb. Afterwards, we were tired and took the train to the next two villages called Vernzza and Monterosso. Each village kind of looked the same: colorful buildings in close proximity to each other. There were very cute restaurants and shops that cell local handicrafts. We ate the best pesto dinner at Monterosso. And while we were eating dinner, a hotel manager invited us to drink some of his finest Ligurian white wine with appetizers at his hotel overlooking the sea. It was kind of random but SO AWESOME!

Day 2: Genoa the city- to be perfectly honest, there was nothing extremely special about this city. It was pretty in that there were pretty, European buildings....but everything was big and the monuments weren't that great. We even paid 4 euros to look into Christopher Colombus' teenie tiny house. Everything was too big, and the city was NOT planned out well. It's laid out in concentric circles and finding the metro station took us 30 minutes from the train station. yay! However, we did eat the BEST SEAFOOD PASTA EVER in this tiny restaurant we found hidden away in some tiny alleyway before we left Genoa for Torino.

gahh ok the time for the internet at this hostel is ran out so I have to run! Hopefully I can update you about Torino, Milan, and Venice some other time!