PA School Interview Questions: Beyond The Basics
Posted By: Kubin | PA School Interviews
Most students who have been invited to interview for PA school start with the same strategy: they google a big list of PA school interview questions, make up answers to each one and begin memorizing them. In this article I’m going to show you why using big lists of interview questions is unwise, then show you how to approach your interview preparation more strategically by becoming familiar with common question types and how to approach them. Doing so will provide you with better results, and much more quickly.
This article is a little long, but you can jump to the sections that interest you by clicking the index below:
Article Index
- Why PA School Interview Question lists Cause Problems
- Moving Beyond Big Lists: Understanding PA School Interview Question Types
- PA school interview question types
- Biographical interview questions
- Behavioral interview questions
- Goodness of fit interview questions
- Projective interview questions
- Ethical interview questions
- Questions about the physician assistant role and PA careers
- Conclusion
- GET HELP FOR YOUR INTERVIEW
Why PA School Interview Question Lists Cause Problems
There are several problems with working from a large list of PA school interview questions:
- They prioritize quantity over quality. Trying to prepare for everything you might be asked will deprive your responses of the depth that interviewers are looking for. As a result, the fundamentals won’t get the time they deserve.
- It’s what everyone does. Working from a long list of questions is the most common method, and common methods yield common results. The last thing you want at your interview is to sound like everyone else.
- They’re overwhelming. With so many questions and answers to learn, answers get mixed up, and frustration sets in.
- Chances are, you will be asked different questions than you have prepared for. Sure, you may guess a question or two correctly, but if these questions are worded just a little bit differently than you’re ready for, your response may not work at all.
While coaching PA school hopefuls, I’ve seen the big-interview-question-list approach run applicants into trouble many times. In an effort to be “ready for anything,” students try to prepare comprehensively, spread themselves too thin, and neglect the most important material.
Moving Beyond Big Lists: Understanding PA School Interview Question Types
While there’s no magic technique that will always reveal the best response to an interviewer’s question, understanding PA school interview question types is the closest you can get to “decoding” them.
Understanding the common question types will help you:
- Figure out the what type of information the interviewer needs
- Narrow your choices for your response, and
- Structure your response to satisfy the interviewer’s needs
It’s like driving — you can’t pick a route until you know where you want to go, right?
PA School Interview Question Types
Great interview preparation starts with understanding the most common question type. Surprisingly, it’s the type that interviewees usually prepare for the least.
I’m talking about biographical interview questions.
Biographical Interview Questions
- Tell us about yourself
- What matters to you most?
- What experiences have prepared you to become a PA?
- Why do you want to become a physician assistant?
Biographical questions are the bread and butter of PA school interviews. They are used by interviewers to learn about the interviewee’s background, education, experience, personality, and values. They are the most important questions asked, bar none. This is the ‘most important and obvious’ material I was speaking about above. Knowing how to talk about yourself effectively is more important than any other topic. You can only guess if you will be asked about your views on less obvious questions (the opiate epidemic, drug prices, your favorite book). But you can be sure they will ask you about your background.
Why are biographical interview questions so important?
Because they won’t admit you if they don’t LIKE you, and they can’t like you until they KNOW you.
Providing strong answers to biographical-type interview questions will help your interviewer know and like you, which is mission critical. You know your own story better than anyone, right? Well, sure. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re good at sharing it.
Most interviewees prepare little, if at all for biographical questions. They incorrectly assuming that since these questions will be about them, they will be easy. As a result, their responses to biographical interview questions tend to be improvised and therefore awkward, vague, and forgettable.
Your Goal for Biographical Interview Questions
Your goal here is simple, but by no means easy: tell your story.
By your story, I mean more than just listing what you’ve done. In fact, much of what you share here should be information they can’t read from your application. Try to share information about yourself that helps the interviewer understand what kind of a person you are. Why are doing this (interviewing for physician assistant school)? Your responses to biographical interview questions should help the interviewer get to know you. Help them “get” you.
Telling your story well is challenging, and it’s why you need to practice. You should be able to tell it smoothly, honestly, without “selling yourself,” and with a little bit of personality. Responses to biographical PA school interview questions should be well structured and rehearsed, but they should sound totally unrehearsed. If that sounds hard, then you get the point.
Our newest coach, Lisa Walker, PA-C, and I just did a podcast episode on how to tell your story. Click here to listen to the episode so you can meet Lisa and get some great tips on telling your own story.
Behavioral Interview Questions
- Tell us about a time when you failed at something
- How would you handle a patient who demands an MRI that you were sure they didn’t need?
- Talk about a time when you had a conflict with a supervisor. How did you handle it?
Why are behavioral interview questions so important?
Behavioral interview questions place the you in a hypothetical situation to see how you would respond. One of the best ways to learn about you is to observe your behavior. But since interviewers can’t really follow you around observing, behavioral questions offer them a shortcut.
Interviewees have a tendency to answer them reflexively, before they have fully explored the situation in their mind. As a result, their answers to situational interview questions tend to lack detail and miss important implications.
Your Goals for Behavioral Interview Questions
Have a structure you use when you encounter behavioral questions about common topics. The most common topics include interpersonal conflicts, dealing with your failures/mistakes, and problems you have needed to solve creatively. With a structure in your mind, it’ll be much easier to decide how to respond when they come up.
Examples
Briefly tell us about a conflict you had with a friend.
You might
- Briefly tell the story of conflict
- Share what you did to resolve it
- Tell how it turned out, and
- Say how you and that person have gotten along since.
Following a set structure will help keep you on track.
Please tell us about a mistake that you made and how you dealt with it
You could
- Explain what happened (specifically),
- Share how it affected those around you,
- Share what you did to make it right,
- Tell how it turned out, and
- Reflect on what you learned from the experience.
Also key here is that you share a specific experience, rather than a general one. So rather than starting your answer with “Whenever that happens to me, I…” won’t do job. Instead, you need to tell a brief story.
You should have a few stories ready to go for common scenarios and be ready to tell them to make your points. Many behavioral interview questions relate to challenge in some way. So try to share what you learned or how you’ve grown from the challenges share. This communicates to your interviewer that you are a reflective, insightful person who is always learning.
Finally, with behavioral interview questions, keep in mind the skills that good physician assistants demonstrate. These include fairness, cooperation, assertive communication, protecting patient confidentiality, compromise, and honesty about mistakes. Showcase these skills in your responses.
Goodness of Fit Interview Questions
- Why do you want to attend our program?
- What would you bring to our program if we admitted you?
- What are you looking for in a PA school?
- Why should we choose you?
Why are goodness of fit interview questions so important?
To get into a physician assistant program, it’s not enough to be “good.” There needs to be a fit between you and the program.
PA school interviewees usually do a decent job of painting themselves in a positive light. But they often underperform on goodness of fit questions by talking only about what they like about a program. They leave out what interviewers really want to know: how an interviewee would fit with their program, its students, and its faculty. Hence, the name: goodness of fit.
Programs have personalities and styles, just like people, and admissions committees want to know if you and their program will go together like peanut butter & jelly, or peanut butter & mayo (cringe).
Your Goals for Goodness of Fit Questions
To answer Goodness-of-fit questions well, you need to know what a particular PA program values. You also need to talk about concrete examples of those values.
What about you speaks to those values? For example, if an interviewer asks you why you want to go to their school, you better be able to talk about what you know they value and what about you demonstrates that value.
A strong response to a goodness of fit question will speak to the intersection of the program’s values and yours. Don’t say you want to attend a program “because your program and I have the same values.” They hear this over and over again. Be specific. What do you and the program BOTH value? Tell them.
Trust me: every program’s values go deeper than their little mission statement. Your reasons for wanting to attend their program should too. Dig deeper in your school research to get to the core values that distinguish one program from another. Make sure to review your notes on that particular program just before your interview.
Projective Interview Questions
- Which Disney princess is your favorite and why?
- What is your favorite book and why?
- If you could be anyone, alive or dead, for a day, who would you be and why?
- Tell me a story.
Projective interview questions often frustrate PA school interviewees. Applicants to physician assistant school tend to be logical, science-minded thinkers. But these “weird” questions don’t give them factual material to lean against. They can leave them scratching their heads and wondering if they “got the question right.”
Why are projective interview questions so important?
Projective questions are designed to learn about interviewees indirectly. They invite truly unrehearsed responses. Like an inkblot test in psychology, projective questions don’t lead to right/wrong answers. They invite you to share parts of you that you might not have thought about. They don’t care that Belle is your favorite Disney princess, but they might care why she is.
Your goal for projective interview questions
To answer projectives well, you need to embrace the fact that these are qualitative, “flavor-seeking” questions. They are invitations to see through your rehearsed answers and to learn about your personality.
Students stress about projective interview questions, but you should actually try to have fun with them.
One trick is to work backward: decide what about yourself you’d like your answer to project. Then get a little artsy and share something that represents that thing. If they ask you what flavor ice cream you are, take a personality trait or two and think of a metaphor for it. “I’m sweet and nutty, so I guess I’d be Praline Pecan.”
Again, this is an answer structure have ready for these types of questions. So that when you get a projective question like “If you were a breakfast cereal, which one would you be and why?” you just think of the structure and fill in the blanks. Notice here that you could choose to identify with a common breakfast food or even make up your own. Let go of trying to be “right” on these, and focus being creative and whimsical if you can.
Ethical Interview Questions
- Is it ever okay to lie to a patient?
- A drunk driver and the person he crashed into are brought to your emergency room. They both need care urgently. Who would you care for first and why?
- A 74 year-old man who has no history of alcohol abuse and a 35 year-old man with a long history of alcohol abuse are both candidates for transplant of the same liver. Who should get it and why?
- A pregnant 15-year-old unmarried teenager comes into your office asking for an abortion. What would you do? Would you inform her parents?
Why are ethical questions so important?
PA programs want to train people to become thoughtful, ethical providers. The best way is to start is with thoughtful, ethical students. These questions evaluate your ability to be fair and thorough, often in situations where the right thing may not be obvious.
Your goals for ethical interview questions
The most important factors when answering ethics questions are fairness and thoroughness. Shooting from the hip here is a mistake.
Actions, in this case, need to be rooted in principles. Many applicants launch into what they would do without first considering the various forces at play. This tends to confirm the interviewer’s fear that a student will act without thinking through the consequences. If they do think through the consequences, they usually do so only briefly, just chipping the surface.
We all have values and biases, and ethical dilemmas invite them out into the open. The best answers to ethical questions cover the potential benefits and harms of the major options objectively first. Then they discuss why one course of action seems to be the best, based on ethical principles. Ethics questions can be hard, and often a poor answer here can cost you an admission. For more about answering these, check out our podcast episode on the topic, our ebook, or better still, hire us to coach you!
Questions about the Physician Assistant Role and PA Careers
- What is a PA? How would you explain what a PA is to a middle schooler?
- What do you think are the biggest challenges facing physician assistants in the next 10 years?
- Tell us what you know about Eugene Stead.
- What is the difference between licensing and certification of PAs?
In your interview you will definitely get questions about PA roles and responsibilities.
Why PA role and career questions are so important
They require you to demonstrate that you are sharp and informed about the field you’re trying to join. Since there’s plenty of confusion in the public about who PAs are and what they do, interviewers want to make sure that you’re not one of the confused ones.
Your goal for PA role and career questions
Preparation here is key. But it’s more than just knowing what a PA is; it’s about demonstrating a solid understanding of the field’s origins, practice, and points of debate. If an applicant doesn’t know something fundamental about the field, they probably won’t be admitted.
You should prepare by getting clear on the following, at a minimum:
- What PAs do and how their training and role differs from physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, and other health professionals
- The origin and history of the profession, including why it developed, where, and by whom.
- How PAs are credentialed nationally and in their home state.
- Current (non-medical) hot topics in medicine in general, and in PA medicine specifically.
Shadowing a physician assistant is probably the best place to get informed about the profession. When you shadow you have a golden opportunity to observe PAs in action. Ask them about areas of the field that you don’t quite understand. Begin thinking about issues that are frequently encountered in this profession. Be sure to check out some of our articles on shadowing by clicking here.
If you haven’t shadowed a physician assistant, then you have more work to do. Here are some resources you can consult to get up to speed on questions about the profession:
- AAPA.org
- Physician Assistant History Society
- Our website, www.insidepatraining.com (check out the blog)
- Our podcast, The Physician Assistant Insider, where we cover questions like what a PA does when called “doctor.”
- The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Physician Assistant section
- Wikipedia.org, Physician Assistant page
- KevinMD.com, physician assistant search
Conclusion
There is definitely a place for lists of PA school interview questions as you prepare for your interview. But just as it takes more than a box of tools to build a house, it takes more than a list of questions to get into the PA program of your choice.
Solid interview preparation starts with an eye for strategy by understanding why the most common types of questions are asked. It also requires thoughtful preparation, self reflection, and practice.
If you found this article helpful, you should definitely check out our Interviews
Archive, where you’ll find more helpful posts on interviewing for PA school. Two you might want to check out are: What is an MMI Interview? , and Group Interviews: Steps for Success.
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