Medicine Interview Tips - Talking about Work Experience

Key Takeaways

hey guys welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is Ellie I'm a final year medical student at Cambridge University and in this video we're gonna be talking about how to answer the common interview question of what did you learn on your work experience the first thing to say is that there's really no wrong or right answer to it from and actually for any of these interview questions any book that you read any video that you watch about how to answer interview questions the only correct answer is what works for you so you ready what you should be asking yourself is what did you learn from your work experience if anything and you know the point of videos like this and the point of interview books is just to give you some kind of idea of what you can say some kind of idea of structure if you're a little bit unsure preferably the answer should come from within as it were and that's that's the best way to answer these questions but you know if you're watching this video it's probably big because you have some level of stress anxiety unsureness about with the medicine interview and that's absolutely fine we all have some element of nervousness before our medicine interviews and it's always good to kind of seek out more information so I'll just say that up front the correct answer is what is specific to you but having said that we've now got segments with eight different medical students where they talk about what they said in their interviews and give you tips about sort of things you can say how you can phrase it that sort of stuff and then at the end of the video we'll have two mock interview answers they'll be myself and my friend Kenny giving answers to the question what do you don't new work experience but answering it as if we were actually medicine applicants just to give you an idea of what a full answer might look like and then right at the end of the video I'll do this classic like/comment/subscribe thing and I'll share my own thoughts about work experience and its value and I'm a little bit cynical about work experience so if you if you care what I have to say on the topic then that's like towards the end of the video if you don't then you can just stop the video before that point and just you know get the tips on how to answer that question so without further ado let's roll through the clips of eight medical students talking about what they said in answer to this question and tips that they will give you and I'll see you very shortly [Music] so talking about what I learned for my work experience I was very real I be careful because obviously you don't want to break confidentiality but you can talk about different things that you've seen so for example and when I was in GP I talked about the fact that I noticed that my dad was so close to a lot of his patients so we live on a very small island in Kent and might a lot the people that my dad sees in their GP surgery at people that we live around and I talked about how I love that there was such a community feel and that what a huge impact a doctor could have so that's something that I learnt from my work experience was seeing actually that doctors are a bit more than just someone that you see in a consultation they can really impact your life and other things that I talked about with things like um how hard-working the doctors were so like times that they arrived in time that they left and talking about how I noticed that sometimes they were tired sometimes they struggled so talking again talking about the pros and cons like note issuing a blunt experience and mentioning how you feel that you would deal with them is something that I learnt from my reading experience so for example I said you know sometimes I do take a little little bit longer than some people to do some things because I like to work through them and I'm a bit of a perfectionist but I noticed that what doctors are they're often under a lot of pressure and that's something that I would be working on during medical schools to improve so stuff about not only like what you've seen because a lot of time when you talk about work it's made your gonna talk about literally the clinical things that you've seen so I solve this disease all that but talk about the skills and the characteristics that you need to the doctors and how you can build those up within yourself good way to describe what you've learned from your world experience so I think the main thing is to show you what you've learned from it as everyone says it's always about what you've learned from it not how much you did and what you did so I would definitely be thinking about the transferable skills that you've seen other people use and that you have learned yourself and things that you want to learn in the future so it's often things like teamwork is a massive part of medicine so if you've seen a good cohesive team for instance I saw it's an operation being done and I talked a lot in my personal statement I mean in my interviews about how that team of scrub nurses theater technicians and doctors worked really really cohesively together and that taught me the importance of that for great patient care you can also talk about the lessons that you've learnt and things like I talked to a GP before I applied to medicine and they sat me down and they talked to me about the financial difficulties the pressure that was being put on the system the aging population crisis that were coming into now and all of those things were were things I put down saying I had actually learnt from and was excited to pursue in the future and learn more about um I think for me a lot about work experience was to see how tough it was going to be I think the main landing point I took was that a lot of the doctors were trying to just wait means tell me actually medicines really hard right now to come into I'm not sure you really want to do it which I think was useful for me because I think initially very and I was very much like medicines great you're gonna be able help people is great gonna be able to do such an amazing job but it doesn't always feel like that and obviously going to work experience you should see doctors who are tired burnt out and yet I think that's important thing to know because you have to go in realizing that it's not just this glamorous job where you're saving lives and like you know leading a team and here's a lot of hard work and I think that's something good go into new I think in my work expansion in the hospital felt I felt a bit lost and I didn't really do very much I was kind of just standing around so in that sense it was quite hard to reflect on it but I think there's always things you can learn even when you're observing so I took I talked a lot about the MDT that's kind of a bit of a buzzword so the multidisciplinary team seeing how the occupational therapist the physiotherapist the social worker the doctor have worked in a team yes I think that's quite a good one to mention so I think first of all that they hopefully have read your personal statement is not a given so you could just remind a little bit about what it entailed it's good to pick up rather than on sort of the most exciting medical thing you saw for example the most akule surgery or the most innovative therapy it's good to pick up on sort of doctor-patient relations or how doctors work together in a team if you can think of an example of when you thought that the case or being given was particularly effective or perhaps examples of where the case or wasn't wasn't all that effective and why that might be that shows a greater depth of insight into what you learned from your work experience rather than just name dropping a few operation people always worry that you need these super medical placements with lots of exposure to like all the procedures and all the healthcare but actually you shouldn't prioritize that you shouldn't prioritize going to a fancy national or international hospital overdoing the really basic stuff with all people and other vulnerable people such as people with learning disabilities because what they want you to learn is all of those complex issues with those demographics the patient demographics that you will have to face as a doctor rather than necessarily the ins and outs of how medical procedures work they want you to have an appreciation of the people and how to handle those people well and how to relate to those people those will really shine through much more when it comes to you being a medical student and doctor then you knowing what a cholecystectomy is for example so I personally learned some really important points of communication skills with old people and children with learning disabilities I learned the discipline for children with learning disabilities has to be completely different and you have to be very aware to change up your communication style depending on who you're communicating with I would say describe what you've done describe things which which you've seen which gave you some thoughts or reflections and well just generally describe your experience of how it made you feel okay so that was eight students giving their tips on how to answer the question what did you learn any work experience it'll be found it useful now we're gonna go into a segment of myself and my friend Kenny giving answers to the question in like a mock interview setting ish so we both tried to answer as we would have done at the time when we were applying to medicine and this will hopefully give you an idea of what an answer might look like mine's a bit shorter than Kenny's but I mean both are equally valid so yeah I hope you find that useful and I'll see you after that for a bit chat about well I think about work experience so I did work experience in a few different hospitals in Pakistan and also a few hospitals in the UK and that was quite interesting contrasting the whole sort of developing country health care system with the NHS and one of the things that that really stuck that really stuck out to me from my work experience was kind of the attitude the attitude of the doctors in both places the doctors felt that they were quite overworked quite underpaid and yet they were still sort of very happy happy to be doctors like I would ask them that you know if if you won the lottery would you still want to do medicine and every single person say yes I would still want to do medicine although admittedly most of them said that they'd probably go part-time but I mean it that experience has kind of showed me that the people who people who do medicine and I'm hoping that that'll be true with me as well they genuinely do enjoy their jobs and that they genuinely do find it really rewarding so I'd say that was the biggest thing that I took away from my work experience so I had quite a bit of a few things here and there of the way experience I did but the one I think I learnt the most from was when I spent a year as a healthcare assistant at a local hospital and my role essentially was helping patients with their personal hygiene so things such as toileting and things such as feeding and as well as basic monitoring basic like vital science of patients and so it was quite nice being in the hospital and for a number of reasons like firstly it was really it was really nice experiencing a shift in the hospital the shifts that I did were 12 hours long and I did days and nights and I think that that was really good to give me just a general sense of the kind of shift patterns the doctors have and how you've got to be able to kind of live your life while working so that's something big that I learn also as a narcosis and also you work with nurses and you work with doctors you work with physiotherapists you work with phlebotomist you work with so many people just in different capacities so it was good way to first of all learn about the other roles in hospitals but it was also a good way to see what life is like in a multidisciplinary team and that people bring different things to the table but all the care is patient centered and another thing I learned there too is just how to interact with patients it's I think I think people take for granted that when someone's in hospital wits is essentially probably one of the worst times of their life and it taught me how important it is to look at a person as a person as opposed to as as a disease or as someone who is feeling or as someone who needs to be taken to the toilet or that someone and who I need to help wash so that was definitely something that I learned my experiences that definitely benefited me okay so now we're at the final segment of video if you're still with us thank you very much for watching so far hopefully you've learned something from the eight medical students giving their tips and how to answer the question and then hopefully you found it very useful to hear myself and can he give a full answer to the question as if we were in an interview so you know hopefully that was useful now I want to talk to you a little bit about work experience and and my feelings about work experience just because I think I think work experience is one of those things that it's become like a like you know a really important part of the medicine application and I think the idea behind work experience is that you start off thinking I might want to do a career in medicine and then you research a little bit about it and then you do some work experience and then theoretically this work experience makes you think oh wow you know I are having having experienced life in a healthcare setting I've realized that this is for me this is what I want to devote the next 60 years of my life to and I think there's a massive floor with that in fact I think it's it's it's almost like deciding that you want to marry someone based on spending just a handful of of kind of dates with them and I'm not saying that's an inherently bad thing because I know an Asian culture and as you know the whole Muslim thing and stuff as well there's a lot of there's a lot of kind of value in kind of just meeting someone a few times and then kind of committing to marry them because they know that most of most of the happiness of a marriage most of the stability of a marriage comes from the effort that you put into it rather than pre-existing compatibility see the works by Alain de Botton the course of love is a rather good book that I would highly recommend you read if you're interested in this tech kind of topic but I digress we were talking about work experience I think work experience is kind of like that it's it's really unfair to expect a 16 17 18 year old Normie sorry if I'm discriminating against the grad students here but you know everyone discriminates against you anyway because you're quite old where was I yes work experience I think it's fundamentally unfair to expect a 16 17 18 year old whatever etre to commit themselves to a lifelong career in medicine by just having a few days or even a few weeks experience in a hospital or a GP because that doesn't tell you what life is actually like and even if it did even if it did give you a very good indication of what life as a doctor is like I don't think that's a good enough reason to go for a career I was talking to a lot of my friends about this over the last few weeks in preparation for this video and we all kind of said said said some of the things that on our work experience we didn't really gain that much from it this is hospital work experience we all gained quite a lot from our volunteering and I volunteered at a hospice and at a school for special needs students which was really really good talking about specifically about the hospital work experience which seems to be the kind of work experience that's like the holy grail of work experience everyone tries to go for the hospitals they tried to go to hospitals abroad I went to a hospital in Pakistan I went to hospital in Nigeria you know or all of this kind of stuff because they think that hospital work experience gives them some kind of special insight into life as a doctor and I think this is unfair and and my friends actually agreed with me in this regard we'd all kind of decided in advance that we wanted to do careers in medicine we we decided because we liked science wanted to help people it seemed like a good it's a very open option you get to spend six years at university which is so much better than spending three as a university coz universities just incredible and everyone who graduates off to three years regrets graduating because they're like ah you know I kind of wish I was there a bit longer because university is just fantastic Loni love University anyway we had all these reasons for doing medicine and then we did work experience and we did work experience to tick that box in our in our applications that we've done work experience and none of us actually found it to be particularly useful like I did work experience in a fancy cardiothoracic surgery Centre in London and he hai was cool watching heart surgery for about 20 minutes and then the rest of the seven and a half hours I had absolutely no idea what was going on my legs were sore like it just wasn't inherently valuable even nowadays as a final year medical student I wouldn't want to watch a hot operation for eight hours unless I knew what's going on because it's just a bit pointless and and this is the pattern that like a lot of my friends also found with our work experience we didn't really enjoy it because he's just kind of following people around try not to get in people's way kind of like life as a medical student and we don't think we really can learn too much from it because we didn't know anything about the medicine side of it and the only thing we could glean from it were kind of what the doctors would tell us and in my case most of the doctors were saying don't do it it's a bad career and you don't make much money it's it's just not worth it I think the only useful things people get from work experience are if you can talk to a specific patient or if you can genuinely see a good interaction between like a doctor and a patient and if that moves you emotionally enough to make you think you know what this is what I want to do for the rest of my life and I think that's quite a kind of a romanticized version of events that we put in personal statements and we say in interviews we say oh there was this one moment where I saw this amazing consultant talk to this patient and that changed my life and I think that's kind of the expectation when it comes to work experience that you have these moments but you know I'm personally very skeptical as to how many people actually have those moments I certainly didn't have any the five or six people that I asked didn't have a single one of those moments on their work experience where they saw that so I'm skeptical of whether those moments actually exist and if they do and I also don't like the fact that the whole work the whole culture around work experience is like that you're kind of expected to have these moments because I know when I was applying I really struggled to come up with things that I learned on my work experience and I sort of took that as a sign that maybe I should be doing medicine because I didn't enjoy my work experience and I don't think that's really fair because the reason to do medicine is not because you had this like emotional sudden cathartic moment where you suddenly realized oh my god it's like the ultimate career because I saw this doctor talking to this patient and it was it was amazing it's because you genuinely thought about it and you realize it's like fifty years of your life devoted to constant like academic pursuits constant like you know turning up to work every day staying long hours but you do generally get a make to make a difference in people's lives and I think I think that's why people should be doing medicine and that's why I think this whole the whole this whole thing about work experience is it's not ideal volunteering should be part of a medicine application in my opinion but getting work experience in a hospital or a GP I don't know I'm very skeptical as dudes as to its value if you've done work experience in a hospital or GP and you found it useful then please let me know in the comments but I'm very happy to change my mind on this but like at the moment I really I really doubt the value of hospital workers parents equally if you're in the similar position that I was that you've done your work experience and you're a bit underwhelmed but you still want to do medicine because there are many better reasons for doing medicine other than I did it on my work experience it was fun then again please leave a comment down below and it'll be it'll be interesting to hit to hear your perspective on this because you know I'm open to changing my mind but I've always been a bit a bit wary of work experience anyway this video is about how to answer the question of what you learnt in your work experience you'll see that if you look back in the video despite the fact that I don't think I learnt anything from my work experience I still think I can give a pretty good answer to the question and if you're in the same position as me where you didn't really learn anything on your work experience you still want to be able to give a good answer to the question because like it or not it is the state of the medicine application these days work experience is important it is a checkbox you have to do it it is part of the application and if you haven't done it it looks a bit weird so hopefully this video has given you some kind of insight into how you can answer the question but like I said right at the start the most important thing is that you answer it in a way that's specific to you so if you did learn something from you experience please completely ignore my ranting about my experiments and just talk about what was specific to you I cannot stress this enough the correct answer is what is the correct answer for you as corny and cliche as that sounds so yeah thank you very much watching this video hope you find it useful if you like the video please give it a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed to the channel please consider doing so and I will see you in the next one have a lovely evening okay