The PARACHUTE: How to Answer Any Medical Interview Question You've Never Seen Before

Hey, Alex from the future here. The following is an excerpt from an episode that is available on my premium feed for subscribed members only. If you enjoy this, go over to my subscription feed at AlexanderMedic.supercast.com and grab your subscription now. Hi everyone, welcome back to AlexanderMedic, the Australian Medical Interviews podcast with me, Alexander. I'm your Wopper Train Medical Interview Coach. I'm sorry for the attire today, but I wanted to jump on and make sure I cover this topic while it's fresh in my mind before I go off and enjoy my weekend. I wanted to talk about how do you answer a question when you have absolutely no idea how to answer it or what to do, right? Not a question that you've prepared for and you've forgotten. Not a question that you can't quite articulate, but a question where you sit there and think I generally have no idea of how to do this. What do you do? Because this is going to happen. Or if you haven't prepared for it and it happens, you're going to absolutely ruin your interview. And what happens in that time, most candidates do one of three things. They freeze, they start rambling, or they give such a generic boring answer that the panel just moves on and they just switch off before you finish speaking. So today I'm going to give you a couple of tools that are structures, not that that's my favorite thing. I'm going to talk about what my approach is that I teach and help you to give a coherent, credible answer to almost any question that you've never seen before, including questions about glasses manufacturing, for example. But stay with me. That's going to be my example to show you. So first, why do questions come up that you haven't prepared for? I mean, sometimes there's some medical schools that have been known to ask really random questions because they're trying to filter for this kind of thing. So it's deliberate in some instances and sometimes you just haven't prepared for it and that's just bad luck, right? But they want to see how you think when that safety net is gone, they're not trying to test whether you know the answer, they're testing how you can reason through how you can approach a problem that you haven't encountered before. This is explicitly what clinical medicine requires at the heart of it, right? You'll see patients that you've never seen before. You will face clinical situations that you have no obvious protocol or treatment thing for. The interview is testing the same cognitive muscles and sometimes it's incidental. Sometimes the panel has just a particular interest like AI and medicine, check out my recent episode on that, healthcare policy changes or specialty specific developments. And they may ask without realizing that most candidates haven't exactly covered it. Either way, the question has arrived. It's been delivered to your ears and you have about five seconds of thinking time before silence becomes super uncomfortable. So what do you do? The answer is you reach for a structure, not a content specific structure, a thinking systematic structure, something that generates the shape of an answer, even when you haven't got the content to fill it. So the one I want to spend the most time on is the most universally applicable and the most underused. It's a systems based approach. It works like this. Any complex problem, clinical, ethical, organizational or completely abstract can be broken down into a few phases, right? Now I want to take a specifically non medical example, something that I use quite often in my coaching to demonstrate how powerful this structure is, right? Clients will often say, I mean, I don't know anything about this topic. How do you expect me to come up with a good answer? Why did you give me this question? I say, all right, ask me a question about how glasses are manufactured. Do I know how glasses are manufactured? No. But imagine a panel asks you a question, how would you manufacture glasses? Tell us the process into manufacturing glasses. Like looking glasses, not glasses in the house. You probably don't know anything about optical manufacturing. You probably never manufactured anything if you're a doctor because you spent your whole life studying. Those of you who do, congratulations, that little nugget that you know about is going to come helpful in this in this made up interview. So essentially, this is how I would answer this. I would break it down into the most obvious gross steps possible. So let me talk you through my thinking, breaking it down into three, four, maximum five steps. In this example, I might say there's three phases. Thanks for listening to this trailer episode. If you want the full episode, go over to my premium subscribe section, AlexanderMedic.supercast.com, where you can claim your subscription and other episodes that will help you with your medical interview. Enjoy.