How to answer
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
A question most students have a rehearsed answer to, which is the problem. Interviewers can hear a prepared weakness from the first word.
What it is really asking
Whether your view of yourself matches what other people see. A strength without evidence is a claim. A weakness that is secretly a strength is a sign you are managing the panel rather than talking to it.
For medicine in particular, the panel wants a weakness that would matter in a doctor and that you are doing something about now.
Also asked as: “What is your greatest weakness?” “What would you bring to medicine?” “What do you need to work on?”
What interviewers hear too often
- Perfectionism. The most common weakness in every circuit, and the least believed.
- Caring too much. A strength wearing a weakness’s clothes.
- Adjectives as strengths. Hardworking, empathetic, a good communicator, with nothing to show for any of them.
What a good answer does
- A strength someone else has noticed. Backed by a moment where it showed, or by what someone said about you.
- A weakness that matters. One that would cause a real problem in medicine if you did nothing about it.
- What you are doing about it. Something concrete, current and honest about whether it is working.
Two openings
Both invented, and neither is yours to borrow.
The first is the answer every panel expects. The second names a real habit with a real cost, and it would matter in a hospital team.
The follow-ups to expect
- Give me an example of that strength.
- How would that weakness affect you as a doctor?
- What have you done about it in the last six months?
- What would your teachers say your weakness is?
Test your own draft
- The disguise test. Would a reasonable person count your weakness as a strength? Then pick another.
- The evidence test. For each strength, is there one specific moment you could describe?
- The ask test. Ask someone who knows you well what your weakness is. If their answer differs from yours, think hard about why.
What it is marked on
Related questions
Other guides
- Start here What the interview is testing, and how the cycle runs.
- Timeline planner Put in your interview date and get a week by week plan.
- Pathway planner The whole road from school to consultant, drawn around your choices.
- Practice stations Real MMI stations with a two minute reading phase and a station clock.
- By university The interview at every undergraduate-entry school: format, timing, and what is marked.
- What is marked The six things every station marks, and how to practise each one.
- How to answer The questions every panel asks, what each is testing, and the follow-ups to expect.
- Question themes The subjects questions come from, from rural health to the profession, with prompts.
- Interview dates When each school sends invitations, holds interviews and makes offers this cycle.
- When you hear back Every school’s offer dates, and why the wait after the interview is so long.
- Formats What an MMI and a panel interview each are, and how to prepare for each.
- Interview soon? Days to go? What you can still book at short notice, and the prices.
- For parents Who your child is working with, and what I will not promise.
If you want a session
In a session I teach the structure, then ask the follow-ups until your answer holds. Thirty minutes, $40, online, credited to any package.