The interview preparation programme is designed to help our students prepare for selection interviews. Although interviews used to be limited to medical schools and Oxbridge we are noticing that increasingly more universities and courses ask to interview students before they make them an offer. While some interviews are essentially get-to-know-each-other sessions there are some critical interviews such as those conducted at Cambridge and Oxford as well as those that select students for medicine. Performance at such interviews is crucially important and we take the preparation of our students very seriously. The interview preparation programme is open to external students and is taught by psychologist Theofano Megalokonomou who has a long experience in coaching students for such interviews. The training sessions are made-up of group sessions which are held on five Saturdays between late October and early December each year as well as personal one-to-one sessions where students are trained in simulated interviews. Medical interview training sessions include more personal training as well as ethical/situational judgement training sessions.

We cannot emphasise enough the importance of candidate performance at interviews, especially medical school selection interviews. Candidates need to learn to present themselves, to express opinion and views confidently but also need to understand the background information that is being sought during these interviews. Every year many excellent candidates are left without a place at medical school simply because they overlooked the issue of the interview of because they took up their preparation in the short interval between being invited for interview and the actual interview.  We are proud to report that most of our trained students were successful at their interviews.