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CaRMS interview behavioral questions


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Survey of the audience: When answering behavioral questions in CaRMS interviews (i.e. tell me about a time when...) is it bad/less desirable to talk about experiences from before med school? I assume some of them will ask specifically about clinical examples, and I obviously plan to use clerkship stories for that, but my better teamwork / leadership / working under pressure etc. examples are probably from the job I had 4 years ago before med school. Same deal with being asked to talk about meaningful things on my CV - most are from before med school. Curious to know what others think.

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I would personally try to brainstorm some ideas, maybe with another med student to help get the ideas flowing, around clinical examples just so you have them. I have a lot of work history pre-medical school and so I could draw a lot on that time, but I think it will help to have more recent examples and examples that are context specific. The subtext of CaRMS is, how will you be to work with, and a clinical example will likely be more relevant as it will be easier for the interviewer to apply it to their own work scenario. If you are going to use a pre-med school experience I would just try to relate it back to the specialty you're interviewing for (eg I feel confident that I can handle how high pressure the emerg can be b/c of xyz in my old job), but perhaps you can see how if you just used an emerg specific example it would be more convincing?

TLDR: Don't feel you cannot use those examples, just try to make them relevant to the specialty you're interviewing for and try to use clinical examples where you have them, is my advice.

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Depends on the question. For CaRMS questions like "Describe a time you disagreed with your superior's plan and what you did about it" they are usually looking for an example in the medical context, and especially in the context of the canmeds roles. Most will just plainly make the question "Describe a time you disagreed with your staff preceptor's management plan etc". If the question is more personally about you, like "what makes you happy" or "what do you do to de-stress" then it's very ok talk about a non-medicine thing.

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