Interview Tips - How to answer "Why Medicine?"

Key Takeaways

hey guys welcome back to the channel if you new here my name is Ali I'm a final year medical student at Cambridge University and this is a series of videos where I've interviewed lots of my medical student friends and asked them to give you advice about the medicine application process in this video we're going to be talking about how to answer the common question of why medicine I'll give you my take on it initially and then we'll go through 7 tips on how to answer the question from various medical students and then we'll run through three students giving answers to the question so you have an idea of what an interview answer looks like and if you look in the description below there will be timestamps to all the tips and to the different in mock interview answers so if you want to skip ahead feel free if you want to share a particular bit of the video again you can reference the appropriate time stack so here's my take on on why medicine I don't really like it as a question I think the interviewers know that everyone's going to prepare for it and quite a lot of University they're actually not asking it anymore because they know that everyone's gonna prepare for it and therefore it kind of makes it as sort of useless question I think the people who do well with why medicine are the ones who genuinely have a specific moment or series of moments that they can reference when talking about their desire to do medicine so I've got a few friends who spend some time in a great ormond street when they were when they were kids because of health problems and that obviously contributed to their desire to do medicine and they could talk about it really well and their answers to why medicine are absolutely staggeringly really really really good but equally me and a lot of other people that i know we didn't really have those good reasons for for doing medicine we don't really have any exposure to hospitals when we were younger and the reason we want to do medicine is because we you know like sides we wanna help people like the idea of lifelong learning it seems like a cool career you know these kind of cliched answers that we kind of feel reluctant to talk about in an interview and that's why I don't really like why medicine as a question but you know my feelings on it are pretty irrelevant because a lot of universities still ask why you want to be a doctor so in answering that question what I would say is don't worry about it too much I'd like to think of it as equivalent to how was your journey here which is a question they ask you because they want to get you into the you know relaxed and into the swing of the interview and if they ask you why medicine they know that you've prepared an answer for it that's absolutely fine and it's ok if you give a cliched answer if you have something better you know something genuinely specific to you that will sound good in terms of why you want to be a doctor than great go through that but if not I wouldn't worry about it too much and in fact if you're in the position where you're just you know giving a clear answer I would suggest kind of stopping this video right now and not worrying about it because you know we this is quite a long video we've got lots of advice about how to answer this question but I think the way to think about it is to not think about it too much because it doesn't really matter that much so yeah but having said that I know that if you're still going to be concerned about it so now we're gonna roll through seven tips on how to answer the question from various different medical students so that should hopefully give you some ideas and then at the end we'll do three mock interviews with different medical students again about how they would answer the question but yeah let's roll through the seven tips time stamps - everything down below and I'll see you in just a moment so I think number one is be prepared you kind of know that question is likely going to come up so drop a few ideas down talk to lots of people talk to your teachers friends family and write down a couple of points but I'd say probably don't write down a paragraph that you're gonna recite you write down a few points that you're going to talk around yeah definitely the worst thing you want to do is come off I see you just wrote learn an entire paragraph but how you want to save the world and how you want to contribute to science and like the balance of art and science and you kind of want to just really go in have the main point and then talk about it and be able to talk about it just because you're so passionate about it and I think that really shows through when you don't rehearse it too much one of the main things is to make sure that you're not making your answer up and then it actually applies to you specifically because there's a huge number of reasons why people do choose to do mitts and then actually you will have a reason why you've gone through all of this application process why you've put yourself through trying to get really good grades so think about what that reason is for you personally but then there's also all of the you know normal things that everyone does say and everyone probably should say so if you're going to want to go into medicine you must like science you must like solving problems probably you must like working in a team working with other people and so there's lots of those things that will probably factor into your answer but for everyone individually there's going to be their own specific reason so it might have been that you've had a family member who you saw go through a difficult time in their health in the past it could be that you've had difficult health problems and try and think what actually from that experience taught you something what you saw during that time that made you think I want to be on that side rather than this side and I think one good thing that I did was I thought back to my wet experience or to that one moment where I thought you know what this is what I want to do for the rest of my life and I talked about that moment and I think that makes it personal and anecdotal and unique they don't come almost quite real as opposed to just a generic answer yeah and that's really good because it helps you stand out as well because everyone's gonna go in and say they're going to list reasons and then just helps hi it all together with you can actually talk about a moment where you can think of those reasons yeah or a particular doctor that inspired you and what what you liked about them the first thing I'd say is it is a question that's worth preparing for and I'm not sure how much importance they actually attribute to it but it's often one of the first questions you get asked and so if you if you give an answer that you feel confident with it really does sort of make you feel more comfortable throughout the rest of the interview personally I tried not to give too much of a cliched answer I said that I enjoyed the sciences at school I said I wanted a job where I could apply them and was constantly learning it is a bit cliched but if it's true for you then I think that's all that's important but everyone will have their own reason for one to do medicine ones that are worth avoiding include anything financial anything about sort of that's - sort of saving lives and - perhaps a bit idealistic about it but anything where it shows you have a realistic appreciation of what the career entails is probably not going to cause you too many problems so if you do just like science and want to help people then yes this is general generic answer but it's always still unique to you so what do you like about science what particular area of helping people do you want to do so if you if you've had experience in helping you know neurologically disabled people you know a particular area that you want to help people and just mention that just be specific make it unique to you yeah I mean everyone that has a list of generic reasons but it's all about how you flesh it out thanks baby why why do you like science and what about it do you enjoy how you think it can contribute to helping people and putting your spin on it really you just want to stand out and be different so you interview [Music] yeah absolutely I think that in answering a question why medicine the key objective which you want to find out so you're not just in there for the wrong reasons or that you have actually given some thought to the question so it's oh I thought you probably said it's okay to give cliched answers it's most important that you speak from the heart especially since you probably should have thought about this question before since this is a very long journey that you'll be undertaking and six years of study is quite a long time so give it so think about this question and answer really from the heart it's obviously a classic and people get really worried that it's gonna be a really cliche boring answer I'd actually just say say what you really mean because that way you'll come across passionate enthusiastic and don't worry about it too much because it's not the most important question to do well on because they know that people are just gonna have to give whatever comes to mind and won't sound very original it's don't worry about it say something that shows your passion add in an anecdote or some other details to make it more original if you can but yeah don't worry about it too much okay so that was seven tips about how to answer the why medicine question I hope you found that useful now we're gonna roll through myself Kenny and Paul giving answers to the question Paul and Kenny didn't know the question was coming up so what they're saying is quite off-the-cuff I knew the question was gonna come up because I made the video but I've tried to be as natural as possible and answer the question how I would have answered it when applying for medicine and also how I would answer it today if someone were to ask me why medicine because we've got interviews coming up for jobs and so on so yeah let's run through these mock interviews and hope you find them useful [Music] honestly the reason I want to do medicine is because I think it's a fantastic vocation that I would enjoy for the rest of my life so from from what I've heard of of medicine and what I've seen on my work experience it is kind of always changing and there's always new stuff to learn there's always kind of exams to take and things to keep on top of new research coming out and I really like that aspect of lifelong learning because it means that the field won't stagnate it means that I personally won't get bored with it and secondly I really like the human component of Medicine you're not just sitting in an office doing you know sitting on a computer you're interacting with people on a daily basis and as cliche as it sounds you're genuinely making a difference in their lives so it's it's the lifelong learning aspect and the fact that you get involved very intimately with people that's what attracted me to medicine I think my choice to do medicine wasn't it wasn't a snap decision it was kind of it was a build up of different decisions that accumulated in pointing towards this is what I want to do so it started around around GCSE when I fought always do engineering but I didn't actually get the grace for engineering it was it was quite it was quite a good thing because at that time I started kind of looking in and thinking about the skills I had in myself so for example that's when I really started to get into human biology because I'd always been a big fan of biology but I think the thing that put off put me off of it was more the kind of ecology and plant-based things and the human biology started getting more interesting particularly at the start of year 12 so I thought okay yeah biology this is definitely right up my street and just in general I think I'm quite I'm quite a people's person so I always knew that I wanted to work directly with people in sort of any capacity and in terms of what my personalities like I thought like I'm quite a I'm quite a driven person quite proactive person and in medicine I think those are things that you need to be so in terms of kind of transferable skills I already had medicine started to you seemed a lot a lot more attractive and so I decided I was going to go on some work experience and when I did got eventually got my work experience it definitely solidified it for me I thought this is absolutely right up my street and from there that's when I decided I was gonna pursue a career or Metin for myself I think that medicine brings together a couple of things which are quite important to me it provides really it provides a challenge and when I say it provides a challenge I mean that it demands that you know your you know your stuff such that patients can trust you the advice which you give so you need to be very good on your knowledge you also need to be very good at communicate with people because so much about medicine is the personal interaction and also if you go into a field which requires you to do procedures you need to pick up your hands as well so as you can see it's very multi-dimensional it brings together a lot of different skill sets it requires competence and a high level excellent to all of them so that's why I find it challenging and and a good career choice for me yeah yeah that's why I'm interested in it okay so that brings us to the end of the video thank you very much for watching I hope you found it useful that was seven tips on how to answer my medicine and then three examples of what an answer looks like a thing to say about all of these all of these interview questions is that there's really no wrong wrong or right er answer I mean apart from the obvious stuff that you know that would make you come across as like a bad person you can pretty much answer the question however you want and as you'll see from the tips there are some students who think that you know it's really good to stand out while giving this answer and then there are others like me to think that it doesn't matter if you're a bit cliched who cares they don't really care about the question anyway so yeah I hope this has given you a very broad perspective about how to answer the question if you have any questions or anything at all please leave a comment down below and me or one of my friends we'll get back to you as soon as we can and yeah if you like the video please leave it a thumbs up if you'd like to subscribe to the channel to see more videos like this coming up or to see videos of me vlogging about life as a final year medic then please hit the subscribe button and I will see you next time thanks for watching bye