Monday 19 March 2007

Life Choices

In this life, we must take responsibility for the choices we make.
Tonight I had the choice of

1. Preparing my presentation for my interview for a training position in London tomorrow

2. Messing around on the internet for four hours.

Which do you think I chose?


Looks like I'll have to make up the presentation on the spot

I am such a retard

5 comments:

Phoenix said...

So how'd it go?

Dr Michael Anderson said...

It actually went really well. There were 3 stations of 10 minutes each - I think this is the standard format for MTAS interviews.

In the first, I gave my presentation - which was fine becasue I was talking about something I knew well. Then they asked me a bit more about my my topic and then they asked me about how I would research a topic I knew little about.

The second station was about ethics. they gave me a clinical scenario (I had the classic Jehova's Witness requiring transfusion) and asked me what I'd do, then they kept altering the scenario and asked me again what I'd do. This station was fine.
Then they asked me about a time when I felt out of my depth. I just picked one of times I got called down to resus on my ecent set of nights.

The final station was all the questions you could predict like "what makes a good specialist? Why do you want to do this specialty? why should we give you a job? Is research important? What's the difference between audit and research? What recent relevant research do you know about?"

All in all, I think it went pretty well. It went much better than the previous two I've had and I think that's mainly because they didn't keep banging on about foundation competencies and asking me to show them things that aren't part of my syllabus.

Phoenix said...

Good to hear it went well. It sounds similar to an interview I had recently (ST3 surgery at NW deanery)

1) Clinical scenarios (chest pain, emergency tracheostomy)

2) Ethical (a consultant makes sexual remarks to female patients) and research (tell me about a paper that changed your practice, critical analysis, levels of evidence, one of your audit projects)

3) Why do you want to do this? Where do you see yourself in 5 years and why? Did you find being an SpR different to being an SHO? You have a good number of publications here, pick one and present it to me, assume I know nothing about the topic)

I wasn't expecting a presentation so I picked a paper I've presented twice before. Phew.

Dr Michael Anderson said...

Yeah, I think there is a standard "format" to the MTAS intervies and it seems they ask the same sorts of questions no matter what the specialty.

To be honest, I'm finding these interviews really mentally draining and I'm praying that come April 19th I'll have a job and won't have to go through it all again in round 2

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