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Medical school interviews are the final hurdle of the admissions process before your hard work culminates in receiving an offer. With an increasing number of applicants every year to UK medical schools, it’s your chance to show your suitability to become a doctor. At the interview stage, the slate is effectively wiped clean, meaning that for most interviews, it is solely your performance in the interview itself that stands between receiving an offer or not. As you might’ve guessed, it is therefore essential for every applicant to prepare well. But with so much conflicting and repetitive advice, how do you know where to begin?
The MSAG have been leaders for UK medicine interview preparation for the past 13 years, and we were one of the first companies to run interview courses. Since then, we have continued to update our knowledge through research and the experiences of our trained coaches who have sat on the interview panels at Universities such as Cambridge, Kings, Brighton and St George’s.
This page is the culmination of our knowledge and is designed to become your one-stop guide for interview preparation. We will guide you through everything you need to do to bring your best interview performance on the day.
In 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, medical schools had to move their interviews from in-person to online. We have reviewed the website of each medical school for 2022 entry interviews, to bring you the latest information.
Which medical schools are doing interviews online? For 2022 applications, we know that 19 out of 41 UK medicine and dentistry schools have confirmed that their interviews will be held online. These are usually conducted over video call, on platforms such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
2 Universities have confirmed that they are hoping to run interviews in person, but this is likely to change if restrictions are imposed.
20 UK medical schools have not yet confirmed whether they will run their interviews online or face-to-face, and are likely waiting for more information regarding restrictions due to the pandemic.
This includes Bristol medicine interviews, Edinburgh medicine interviews, Leeds medicine interviews, Manchester medicine interviews and St George’s medicine interviews.
Once confirmed, we will update this page - so bookmark and check back!
Going through the medicine application process can bring up many questions. When will I receive interviews? When will interviews be held? When will I receive an offer or rejection?
The short answer is - the timeline for interviews varies depending on the Universities that you’ve applied to, and the features of your medical school application.
The earliest interview invites are usually sent from mid-November. For those expecting a KCL medicine interview interview, invitations are sent from mid-November. For both the Oxford medicine interviews and Cambridge medicine interviews, invites are from mid-November to give sufficient notice for the interview dates in December. Both Manchester medicine interview and Liverpool medicine interview invitations are sent from mid-November.
However, if you haven’t received an invite by the new year, don’t worry! Many other Universities send offers on a rolling basis, meaning that you could receive one any time from November to February! For example, Newcastle medicine interview invitations are sent between December and January. UCL medicine interviews are sent in batches on this rolling basis, from December.
Medical school interviews are held any time from November to May, with the majority being held between December and January. When these will be, completely depends on the Universities that you have chosen.
A large proportion of schools hold interviews over multiple dates. The earliest KCL medicine interviews will be in November, and run all the way until May. Bristol medicine interviews will run from December to April, in multiple batches.
Alternatively, some Universities choose to hold their interviews on a few set days. For example, Oxford medicine interviews are held on a handful of days in December. Likewise, Warwick medicine interviews will all be over a few dates in December. Cambridge medicine interviews are held over a three-week period in December.
Once the interview process is done, there is an (anxious) wait to be sent offers via UCAS - the culmination of your hard work to allow you to study medicine! What can help you during this waiting period? Well, the knowledge that medical schools send out their offer decisions at different times - and finding out when to expect offers from your chosen medical schools.
The earliest offers in previous years have been in December for some high-perfoming candidates at schools that make offers in batches, such as Manchester. Oxford and Cambridge medicine offers are sent out by early January for all applicants. UCL medical school aims to notify applicants of the outcome of their interview within four weeks of the interview. Most other medical schools, such as Newcastle, Sheffield, Liverpool and Leicester will notify candidates in March. KCL medicine offers can be issued up until the end of May.
Multiple Mini interviews (or MMIs) are a common type of medical school interview format.
Because MMIs usually function as ‘mini interviews’, they contain a wide variety of different question types, ranging from motivation and skills based questions, to roleplays with professional actors, and even task-based or picture-based stations.
The key point to note for your preparation is that MMIs differ between different Universities. They can differ in the number of stations, the length of stations, and the types of interview questions or tasks given. For example, Bristol medical school has used MMI interviews for many years but it does not usually contain a roleplay. Queen’s Belfast medicine interviews usually consist of multiple scenarios and role play stations. Keele medicine interviews have recently had a video station and KCL medicine interviews often contain a picture station.
It is important to be well prepared and informed about the number, length of stations and common interview questions at your chosen Universities, simply because they vary so much.
To help with your preparation, we host MMI mocks that are tailored to each medical school, using past questions collected over previous years and the insights of our experienced coaches. The variation between schools is also why many of our applicants will choose to come to a Mock MMI circuit for each of their chosen Universities. It makes sense - as for example, the MMI experience at Leicester will be very different to the one at Manchester! You can save by purchasing two MMI mocks at once in our bundle deal.
• Aberdeen medicine interviews
• Anglia Ruskin medicine interviews
• Aston medicine interviews
• BSMS interviews
• Cardiff medicine interviews
• Edge Hill medicine interview
• Exeter medicine interviews
• Hull York medicine interview
• Imperial medicine interviews
• Kent and Medway medicine interviews
• Lancaster medicine interviews
• Leeds medicine interviews
• Leicester medicine interviews
• Lincoln medicine interviews
• Manchester medicine interviwes
• Plymouth medicine interviews
• Queen’s Belfast medicine interviews
• St Andrews medicine interviews
• St George’s medicine interviews
• UCL medicine interviews
• Ulster medicine interviews
• Warwick medicine interviews
Panel interviews are another common type of medical school interview, and are often seen as the more traditional format. They have become more common since many Universities changed their format to online, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a panel interview, you are usually interviewed by 2-3 people, who may be practicing doctors, teaching staff, scientists or senior medical students. You remain with the same 2-3 interviewers throughout the interview, giving you more time to build a rapport and showcase your personality.
Just like with MMIs, not all panel interviews are the same! They can vary in the number of interviewers, the length of the interview and type of questions asked. For example, Barts and the London School of Medicine’s 2022 interview is a panel with two assessors, lasting for 20 minutes, consisting of personal questions and analysis of an article. In contrast, Sheffield medicine interviews for 2022 are in panel format, with two interviewers covering eight sections, with questions sent out in advance to applicants.
It is more common in a panel interview for you to be asked questions on your personal statement as the interviewers have a longer time with you. Read our section below for advice on preparing to be questioned on your personal statement.
• Barts medicine interviews
• Cambridge medicine interviews
• Dundee medicine interviews
• Glasgow medicine interviews
• KCL medicine interviews
• Newcastle medicine interviews
• Oxford medicine interviews
• Sheffield medicine interviews
Asynchronous is a newer type of medical school interview, which has been used by a few schools since the COVID-19 pandemic required interviews to be moved online. ‘Asynchronous’ means ‘not occuring at the same time’. These interviews involve applicants being given the questions in advance, video recording their answers during a time slot, uploading these videos to a platform and the recordings are then reviewed by the admissions team at a later time.
If you are expecting an Imperial medicine interview, the University has confirmed that the first stage of their interviews for 2022 entry will be an asynchronous MMI format. This will enable candidates to record themselves remotely, and the interviews will cover a variety of domains including teamwork, communication skills, ethical issues and contribution to the University. The full information is available on their website.
There are many questions that can be asked during your medical school interviews, covering a wide range of topics. Remember that medical school interviews are not designed to test your medical knowledge, rather they are used to look for candidates with the skills and attributes required of a good future doctor. The first step to success is acknowledging that you can prepare for the questions and answers - but knowing how to do this well is important!
This comprehensive guide will go through these common questions alongside our best interview tips, allowing you to prepare for them all to stand the best chance on your interview day!
There are a variety of common question types that come up in most medical school interviews, that you should be very familiar with and spend time preparing for.
Multiple mini interviews (MMIs), often have common question types that differ from other interview styles. Due to the fact that you spend a short amount of time at multiple stations, MMI stations are often varied and include some non-traditional question types such as roleplay, picture, video and task-based stations. These stations can feel very unlike any interview you will have done before, so it’s important to prepare and practice for them in a realistic mock setting.
If you have applied to medical schools that use MMI interviews, then you should be prepared for the variety of question types that come up.
In a Medical school Panel interview, the questions asked tend to be more traditional. In these interviews you can expect to be asked personal questions around your motivation, experiences and skills, due to being with the same 2-3 interviewers for the duration. Some Universities will also use your personal statement and ask you questions related to this - so it’s important to revise what you have written, before booking a panel mock interview!
‘Why do you want to study medicine?’ is probably one of the first questions that you expect to be asked. It is a motivation question designed to understand your reasons for wanting to become a doctor.
In answers to this question, interviewers are looking for well-thought out reasons that demonstrate a realistic understanding of a career in medicine, and reasons that are personal to you. It is important that your reasons are specific to becoming a doctor rather than any other healthcare professional.
You should expect to be asked this at all of your interviews and so thorough preparation for this question is key!
Many applicants are very nervous at the prospect of the roleplay station and the thought of acting in front of a professional actor and examiner! It is completely understandable, however role play stations are a very effective way of testing your interpersonal skills, and this is why they are common stations in MMIs. For example, Queen’s Belfast medicine interviews often have multiple roleplays in their MMI.
You may at first think that you can’t revise knowledge for roleplay stations, however there are some common types of role play scenarios that repeatedly come up.
Many applicants are very nervous at the prospect of the roleplay station and the thought of acting in front of a professional actor and examiner! It is completely understandable, however role play stations are a very effective way of testing your interpersonal skills, and this is why they are common stations in MMIs. For example, Queen’s Belfast medicine interviews often have multiple roleplays in their MMI.
You may at first think that you can’t revise knowledge for roleplay stations, however there are some common types of role play scenarios that repeatedly come up. We advise preparing for a role play station by familiarising yourself with these common scenarios, and then practicing with a mock MMI circuit in front of an actor!
Motivation questions are asked to try to understand your reasons to apply to medicine and the particular medical school that you are interviewing at. ‘Why do you want to be a doctor?’ is a very common one, but you should also be prepared for others.
‘Why do you want to study at X medical school’? Is another common motivation question.
When asking you about your work experience, interviewers want to see that you have a realistic understanding of the career. These questions can appear both in MMIs and panel interviews, and some Universities may even ask you about a particular experience that you wrote about in your personal statement - so remember to re-read this!
To answer these questions well, you need to demonstrate personal insight into a career as a doctor. A good answer won’t just detail what you saw on work experience, but you need to show what you learnt from placements and how this impacts your motivation to become a doctor.
You’ve probably heard of the SJT if you sat the UCAT, but these scenario-based questions also come up at medical school interviews!
As the name suggests, you will be asked for your judgement and how you would respond to certain situations. You may encounter similar situations as a medical student or a doctor, and these questions are designed to test your ability to prioritise, make decisions and justify your actions.
Medicine and healthcare is a constantly evolving field, and it is important for future medical students and junior doctors to keep up to date with healthcare news and topical issues. You can be asked questions in your medical school interview about current healthcare issues such as privatisation, the COVID-19 pandemic and the problems facing the NHS.
Without a strong foundation of knowledge to prepare for these questions, they may catch you off guard, so it’s important to read around current healthcare issues.
What do you think are currently the biggest issues for healthcare in the UK? Make a note of them and plan some model answers for potential hot topics questions. You may want to look at good sources for healthcare news to help with your revision.
Prioritisation tasks can be a bit of an unexpected interview question, but prioritisation is an important skill to have as a future medic, to aid in decision making and with the workload of the job!
For these question types, you will usually be given a list - this could be a list of items, of actions or tasks and you will be asked to prioritise them. You may be asked to choose the three most appropriate or important items on the list, or rank them in order of importance.
St George’s MMI interviews often have a prioritisation task, and Anglia Ruskin MMI interviews have also had these tasks in previous years.
Imagine entering your next MMI station, taking a seat and being shown… a picture of a building, or a landscape, or an old oil painting!
Did you know that you could be given a ‘picture station’ in your medical school interview? KCL medicine interviews have used picture stations in their MMIs for many years.
Calculation stations can appear as part of some University’s MMI assessments. Keele medical school sends out a pre-admissions maths test, designed to test numerical skills. These stations are to ensure that you have a minimum mathematical ability to be able to successfully train as a doctor, for calculations such as drug dosages.
You do not need to have studied A level/Higher level maths in advance of these tests as higher-level Maths is not a requirement for any UK medical school.
If you have applied to a medical school and are worried about a calculation station or pre-admissions Maths test, you can book a 1-1 tutoring session with us to specifically work on your numerical skills to ensure that you are well-practiced for the day.
In a data interpretation MMI station, you will be given a piece of data, usually a table, chart or graph, and asked first to interpret it, and then various follow up questions.
The best way to prepare for these stations is to practice interpreting different types of data in a realistic mock MMI circuit.
Oxbridge medicine interview questions are known to be tricky and are designed to test your critical thinking and problem solving skills. Oxbridge medicine interviews are scientific, but are designed to test your knowledge and abilities beyond the A level and BMAT syllabus to see how you think laterally.
They can be intimidating, but we at the MSAG have a group of successful Oxford and Cambridge medical students to guide you through these interviews. Book a mock Oxbridge panel interview where you will be interviewed by at least one current Oxbridge student and tested on Oxbridge-style critical thinking questions!
So now that you have great personal insight into the interview process and what it takes to get a good interview score, where do you go from here? At the MSAG, we have been helping applicants with their UK medicine interviews for 13 years. Most interviewees who we work with use the following resources to aid their preparation, and with a high success rate of receiving an offer, it’s a tried and tested method.
Our Live online interview course is where most of our applicants begin their interview prep. The 8 hour long course will teach you how to successfully answer the most common medical school interview questions that can appear in both MMI and panel interviews. These are:
You will be taught by a variety of our expert tutors ranging from current first year medical students to senior doctors, who have all once been in your shoes and successfully passed their interviews!
Once you have learnt how to structure your answers to the most common interview questions, it’s time to put this into practice! Most successful medical students will tell you that practicing for interviews is what makes all the difference in getting that offer.
An MMI is a unique setting for an interview, and with multiple interviewers across multiple stations, it’s very hard to replicate at home with family and friends. This is why, if your chosen medical schools use an Multiple Mini Interview format, it’s important to sit a realistic MMI mock where you can experience multiple stations, different interviewers and moving between them.
In our mock MMI circuits, we use real past interview questions from your chosen Universities to best mirror the style that you can expect on the day. This means that if your chosen medical school has many roleplay stations, you can expect this in your mock MMI. Likewise, if your school has no roleplays, you won’t have one in your circuit! We aim to provide the most realistic tailored MMI mocks through using real-students experiences from recent years.
Panel interviews can be practised more easily with family, friends or teachers. However, it is very difficult to replicate the feeling of being interviewed by strangers in the intense setting of a medical school interview!
We recommend practicing with a realistic mock panel interview, where you will experience being interviewed by assessors who have never met you before, and who have an in-depth understanding of what medical schools look for in successful candidates. The mock setting will be realistic, with both interviewers and the applicant recommended to wear formal dress.
For our mock panel interviews, we also use real past questions from your chosen Universities, collected from successful applicants who were recently in your shoes.
If you have an Oxbridge medicine interview, we run specialist Oxbridge mock interviews where at least one of the panellists is a current Oxford or Cambridge medical student, and are trained in the scientific style of questioning.
In the past, our students have used 1-1 interview tutoring to:
You may have received some feedback from a mock MMI circuit or a mock panel interview that you need to improve in a particular area - it could be structure, content or delivery. Or perhaps you are already aware of a weakness with a certain question type such as roleplay, and find it difficult to practice this realistically with friends and family at home.
For 1-1 tutoring sessions you will be matched with an experienced tutor, either a current medical student, qualified doctor or dentist who have been through a selective recruitment and training process.
Whether you want a couple of sessions before your interview date, or regular, long-term coaching, we will formulate a tutoring plan based on your current strengths and weaknesses that is completely tailored to you.
It is important to us at the MSAG that the barriers to entry into medicine and dentistry to those from widening participation backgrounds are lowered, creating a healthcare workforce that reflects the population that it serves. We offer means-tested reduced rates for all of our interview courses, MMI circuits and mock panel interviews for those applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. If you qualify and would like to know more, please email hello@themsag.com
We have also drawn up a list of some high-quality free resources that can help you with your interview preparation!
The MSAG’s online interview course is a free resource for anyone preparing for their medicine or dentistry interviews. It is a blend of interactive video and text learning that covers the most common question types you can expect to see on the day. It is hosted on our state-of-the-art online platform, and was the winner of the 2019 PIEoneer award for Digital Innovation!
It consists of (with no hidden costs):
The interview prep website contains various videos and activities that explain what UK medical schools are looking for in candidates. This includes:
It only requires a quick registration to sign up and is completely free.
This is a great resource by the Royal College of Surgeons of England, which shows examples of over 20 interview questions, categorised by question type. You can click on the questions which will show the recommended points to include for a strong answer. Why not try reading these questions, planning out your answers before clicking and see what the model answer contains? You can then see how similar your answer was and if there’s anything vital that you missed!
