BS-MD interview prep, what actually came up in your PLME / GAP / HPME interview
Asking the hivemind because the BS-MD interview cycle is starting and the prep guides online are vague.
Context: Indian-American male, NJ, applying Brown PLME, Pittsburgh GAP, Northwestern HPME, Rice/Baylor. Interviewed at GAP last week. PLME virtual scheduled in two weeks.
What I saw at GAP:
- "Why medicine" (stock, expected)
- "Why this BS-MD specifically vs traditional pre-med"
- "Tell me about your research" (I got grilled on the methodology, not just the result)
- A behavioral one ("describe a time you disagreed with a mentor") which I wasn't expecting
- One ethics question about end-of-life care that felt like an MMI lite
Questions I'd love takes on:
1. How technical did the research questions get for you? My PI was an MD-PhD and they asked stuff like "why FACS over IF for that step" which I wasn't prepped for at the BS-MD stage.
2. Did anyone get the "what if you change your mind about medicine" question? Best framing for it.
3. Do they actually expect you to know specific faculty / labs you'd want to work with as an undergrad? I've been told yes but feels insane to commit at 17.
Tbh I'll share what I learn after PLME if useful. Drop your war stories.
#applications#research#12th-grade
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Research methodology grilling is real. For the FACS-over-IF question, that's a phenotypic-sensitivity vs spatial-context tradeoff. Happy to send you a study prompt list for the technical Qs.
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12th· 33d ago
+1 the defend-a-paper-you-didn't-write thing is real. that one threw me at a Rice interview.
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12th· 33d ago
B-school interview prep angle on your "what if you change your mind" question: frame it as a future-self decision not a present-self lock-in. Talk about specific alternative paths you considered (research PhD? policy?) and the substantive reason each came in second to medicine. AOs at PLME explicitly look for that, generic "I've always known" reads as not having actually thought about it.