Interviews are anxiety-inducing for even the most laidback of people, but success favors the prepared.
The night before each interview, I made sure to arm myself with plenty of information about the dental school. Doing this isn’t revolutionary, but it bears repeating since it helped me begin each day at least with confidence, even if not a steady voice.
My routine was as follows:
Browse the school’s dental website
Google the school and look at a few links about the program that aren’t from the main site
Peek at SDN to read about other students’ insights
Prepare my interview questions and answers
Skim my primary and secondary applications
I only spent 20-30 minutes reading up on each school and admit that for some schools, I’d have benefitted from doing more research. This is because on interview day, while some schools presented their program highlights to us before the actual interviews, others held interviews first and talked about their program after.
Obviously, for those schools that waited until after to do any presentations, I had to know the unique aspects of their curriculum before even arriving on campus to talk about them during my interview. For some schools, I was prepared in this manner, while for others, I wasn’t.
What I couldn’t research well before my first interview but have becomes very familiar with by now, is the general flow of the interview day.
Each school followed some variation of this schedule:
Welcome session
Tour of the college (my favorite part!)
Student panel
Financial aid presentation
Interview(s)
Naturally, not all schools followed this schedule. Some had the activities in a different order, some provided a meal during the day at some point, and two schools cut out the financial aid presentation (they were both private, expensive universities—maybe they didn’t want to highlight costs?). Yet another school held the actual interview on a different day than informational sessions.
For the most part, though, every school seemed to want to get to know each student and sell their programs. This led to the interviews to feeling relaxed and informal. I felt as though I could steer each conversation toward topics that highlight me as a candidate or as a unique person. Two schools’ interviews were a bit more like an interrogation and they seemed to use the good cop, bad cop strategy to keep me on my toes, and those interviews definitely made me even more nervous. My responses during them weren’t as eloquent or concise compared to my responses during the other interviews. I felt like I didn’t perform as well at those two schools, but then again, it’s also hard to gauge my performance when interviewers are bubbly and overly approachable—are they acting friendly because we have a good connection, or is this how they interview everyone?
As I finish writing this, I’m waiting at the airport to head home from my last interview and now, all I can do is wait for December. Stress levels back to 10.