On CUHK medicine (MBChB) interview (non-JUPAS stream)....

If you're reading this, chances are you've been granted an interview by CUHK Medical Faculty and are in the process of preparing for it. If you live outside of Hong Kong, you'll have to get ready to fly back to Hong Kong for this important 15-minute process that will potentially determine your future career. To start off, I'd like to congratulate you on the interview invitation as the applicant pool is very large, consisting of applicants from many many countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the USA. Understandably, only people who have stellar academic results coupled with an excellent track record of health-related extracurricular activities will have a shot. Having been in your shoes, I'm fully aware of the stress, time, energy, and money associated with applying for medical schools. I've been through the whole application process for CUHK non-jupas medicine admission, and it is my hope that you may benefit from my experience and be at greater ease in front of the interviewers. As things change over time, your experience may well differ from mine, so please take the information that I'm sharing here as a reference instead of hard and fast rules.

So, here we go....

If you receive an invitation for an interview, you MUST personally attend it in Hong Kong. They don't conduct telephone interviews. I think it's important that you attend the interview on the given date and at the given time, instead of postponing it unless you absolutely can't make it. Some schools accept students on a rolling basis, and you would be doing yourself a disservice by attending the interview later rather than earlier.

They usually conduct 2 to 3 rounds of interviews from June to August, and offers of acceptance are given out along the way. The interview lasts for 15 minutes. You'll be interviewed by a panel of 2 interviewers, and they are likely to be one of the Assistant Deans of the medical school. See the following link for who they are:

http://www.med.cuhk.edu.hk/people.htm

I was interviewed by Prof S.O. Chan and Prof Y.K.Wing. The interview was conducted in English and English only. I guess it'd be nice, if you have the time, to read up a bit on the research interests of the Assistant Deans so, when opportunities arise, you may use your knowledge to develop some sort of rapport with them; but of course, you have to be tactful so as not to seem over-ambitious and aggressive. The interview is semi-structured. You'll very likely be asked some standard questions like "why medicine", but you'll also be asked specific questions that directly relate to your application profile; they can ask you anything in your application from your marks to your personal essay. It's strongly advised that you go over them prior to the interview to refresh your memory. During the interview, they'll have your entire application sitting on the table in front of them. The questions I got asked are as follows (in the order below):

1) Why do you want to study medicine?

2) (This one is directly related to my response to question 1, so it's irrelevant to you.) Who is the first principal of [my high school]?

3) Why do you want to study medicine in Hong Kong?

4) What is your academic qualification?

5) What is the training like in [my extracurricular activity]? Any memorable moments?

6) (This one again is related to my response to question 5)

7) Have you applied for HKU medical school or other schools overseas?

8) Are you aware of some of the problems that the HK medical field is facing?

9) What would you do if we don't accept you?

After the nine questions, I got a chance to ask them questions, and that concluded the whole interview process. It is important that you have a pretty good understanding of the HK medical system and other medically-related news, for example, public/private imbalance, insufficient government funding, the "3+3" contract, etc. For Hong Kong medical news, try the following:

http://www.hkma.org/english/newsroom/newsroom.htm (English)
http://www.hkma.org/chinese/newsroom/newsroom.htm (Chinese)

(Note: The above URLs change periodically for some odd reasons; should they become outdated, simply google the keywords "Hong Kong Medical Association" and "newsroom".)

I started reading those news clippings about half a year prior to the interview to familiarise myself with the HK health system. If you have time, I'd encourage you to start now. Oh yes, wear formal dress for the interview. Otherwise, you'll look like the odd man out.

I wish you the best of luck!