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Bryce Mendelsohn is a senior at Emory University and will graduate in May 2002. He has applied to and interviewed with MD/PhD programs at Washington University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities, among others, and is a seasoned interview veteran. He received a Pfizer Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship for Molecular Biology to continue work with Dr. Judy Fridovich-Keil in the summer of 2001. We will announce his final destination as soon as he makes his final decision. Bryce can be contacted by email at bamende@LearnLink.Emory.Edu.
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What will they ask me at the interview?
Most questions are common to all medical school applicants. Here are a few that will probably come up for you as an MD/PhD applicant:
- Why do you want to be an MD/PhD? (This is a very important question. One of the main criteria schools use when accepting applicants in whether or not they want to be an MD/PhD for the right reasons. If you appear to simply be interested in only medicine or basic, non-medical science, your interviewers will recommend that you go to medical school or graduate school.)
- What career do you hope to pursue with your MD/PhD?
- How did you become interested in an MD/PhD?
- If there were no MD/PhD programs, would you go to graduate school or medical school?
- Tell me about your research.
- Tell me more about your research.
- How do you feel about healthcare, managed care, and the impact it may have on doctor's salaries?
- What type of research do you want to do?
- What kind of patient care do you want to do?
- How does the length and commitment required of on MD/PhD candidate fit into your plans for a family, etc.? This question is usually asked of women and is inappropriate because many issues might cause a delay in the student's progress, whether the student is male or female. Just answer confidently that you are committed to completing the program.
- Who have been some of your mentors (often in the arena of research)?
- Tell me again about your research.
Be sure to really, really, have thought about these questions, and perhaps even rehearsed them in a mock interview with a faculty person you trust.
What should I ask them at the interview?
When an MD/PhD program interviews you, they are also trying to sell their school to you. You should ask them some pertinent questions that will help you get a sense of what they're about, and whether they are right for you. While the things that people want to get out of an MD/PhD program vary widely, there are some numbers about the program you should find out, and a few questions you might wish to have answered during your interviews.
Numbers to find out:
- How many students do you interview/accept/enroll?
- What is the stipend, how long can I receive it, and how many of your accepted applicants receive funding? (The average is around $20,000/year for an MSTP program)
- How long does it take, on average, to finish the program here? (If the average is more than 8 years, find out why.)
Good questions to ask:
- What careers do your graduates go on to pursue?
- What flexibility is their in your program in terms of when one finishes medical school, starts graduate school, and then goes back to medical school?
- What is your research? (They love to talk about their own research.)
- How did you get interested in that work?
One final quality you may want to investigate is the way in which the school combines the MD and PhD portions of the program. At some schools, they are quite separate. At others, one takes graduate classes while in medical school, and gets some clinical training during graduate school. Find out how you prefer it, and find out how the school operates.
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