Prompt
What are your greatest strengths?
Practice this question
Try answering it yourself first. The answer guide is below.
After you practice: what this question tests and how to approach it
What this question tests
- Self-reflection and growth
- Communication
How to approach this question
This question tests whether you know yourself well enough to name your strengths accurately and back each one with evidence. Choose two or three qualities that matter in medicine, such as reliability, listening or staying calm under pressure, and give a short example for each. Let the example do the persuading, because a named situation is more convincing than any adjective. Say how each strength would help you as a medical student or physician. Stay confident without overselling, and avoid claiming qualities your application doesn't support. If you can, mention how somebody else noticed the strength, since an outside view carries weight.
Answer guide
Answer "what are your greatest strengths" by naming two or three qualities and proving each one with a short, specific example. When an interviewer asks about your strengths in a medical school interview, the evidence matters more than the words you choose to describe yourself.
What the interviewer is assessing
The interviewer wants to see whether your view of yourself matches the record in front of them. They're listening for qualities that matter in medical training and practice, such as dependability, communication, curiosity and composure. They also want to hear how you talk about your own abilities. Applicants who are too modest leave the panel guessing. Applicants who oversell can sound like they lack insight. The best answers sound like an honest self-assessment that a reference would confirm.
How to structure your answer
- Name your first strength in a few words.
- Give one example that shows it, with the situation, what you did and what happened.
- Repeat for a second strength, and add a third only if you can keep the answer under two minutes.
- Close by linking these strengths to the work of a medical student or physician.
Choose strengths that complement each other. A pairing such as "I follow through on commitments" and "I listen before I act" gives the panel a fuller picture than two versions of hard work. Check that your examples appear in your application, or that you can describe them in detail if the interviewer asks a follow-up question.
Common mistakes
- Listing five or six strengths leaves no time to prove any of them.
- Choosing "hardworking" or "perfectionist" without a story sounds like a stock answer.
- Picking strengths with no link to patients, teams or learning misses the purpose of the question.
- Undercutting your own answer with "I guess" or "people say" makes the interviewer doubt you believe it.
- Overstating a strength, such as calling yourself an expert communicator, invites a follow-up you may not be able to support.
Example answer
Here is an example answer from a fictional applicant who studied music performance and later completed the prerequisite science courses.
I'd name two strengths: persistence and listening.
My degree was in cello performance, and I practiced around four hours a day for four years. Most of that practice was slow and repetitive. I'd spend a week on eight bars of music until I could play them cleanly at tempo. That taught me that I can stay with hard work when progress is invisible from one day to the next. I used the same approach when I went back to take organic chemistry at twenty-four.
I also learned listening through music. In a string quartet you can't play your part well unless you're paying attention to the other three people. I carried that into my job at a music school's front desk, where parents would often call upset about scheduling. I learned to let them finish before I tried to solve the problem, and most calls went better because of it. My supervisor wrote about that in my reference.
In medicine, I expect persistence to help me through the volume of training. I expect listening to help me with patients and with the teams I'll work on.
More on personal qualities
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