As the cycle goes on I will be sharing some of my interview advice for med school–if you have any suggestions on what questions I should break down, or any questions you’d want me to address, leave me a comment and I will take a stab at it. :)
Today I wanted to talk about what is sometimes the last question during your interview–“is there anything else I should know about you?”
Never say no!
When I was preparing for interviews, I had the opportunity to do a mock interview with an older student, and in that mock interview session, I said “nope! That’s all I’ve got!”
During our feedback portion of the mock interview, the gave me a piece of advice that I follow to this day: never say “no” when an interviewer ask me that.
What to do instead
I think the “anything else” question is typically asked because there’s at least 5 or more minutes left in the interview, and the interviewer probably just has finished all of the questions they wanted to ask. Therefore, it’s YOUR opportunity to either (1) ask questions for the interviewer, or, what I like to do is (2) use it as an opportunity to talk about something that hasn’t been mentioned yet in the interview. (I personally prefer the second!)
When I was interviewing, I had a post-it note* of all the things from my application/story that I wanted to touch on. So for example, I wanted to make sure we talked about my research, my teaching assistantship, my time volunteering in hospice, and so on. I find that usually there’s one or two things left over by the end of the interview that I haven’t talked about, and so when the interviewer asks me “anything else?” I reach for one of those things.
How to bring it up? I would just say something like “actually, we haven’t had a chance to talk about [blank], can I take a moment to tell you about it?”
Anyway, this is a simple way to answer the “anything else” question during your interviews–remember it’s an opportunity to talk about something that has not been brought up!
Hope this is helpful, and let me know what questions you have.
*please note I am not advocating for you to read off something during your interview. My post it note was a brief list and something I glanced at quickly if I needed to; however, as the cycle went on I had the list committed to my head :)
