Oral Exams In Medicine: With These Three Secrets You Will Succeed!

Last week I took my final oral exam to be a certified internist and nephrologist.*

I had three weeks of preparation time, during which I had to work.

Two hours of learning per day for three weeks for the complete internal medicine and nephrology sounded frightening to me.  But with a strategy and a little bit of luck: I passed.  Here are my three most important tips on oral exams in medicine.

The good news is: Most professors want you to pass. But they want to see how you approach a clinical situation and how you will handle things. Most of them won’t ask for too specific knowledge, after all, you are not a medical encyclopedia.
Many times you will be presented a patient with a general chief complaint and the first question will be: “What do you do?”

  1. Start with a general answer.

    My answer always is this: get a precise medical history.

    This has several advantages:

         You get into the position to ask the questions.
         You get more clues toward the right answer.
         You kill time by staying in the safe zone.
    Except for radiologists most doctors are excited about history taking. So you can’t really lose here.

  2. Don’t start any fights.

    Sounds pretty logical, right?

    Well, there are actually examinees, who start heavy discussions during an oral exam and are very persistent .
    Don’t try to teach the professors anything you have read. Refrain from discussions that say: „I know this stuff better than you do, and since I’m here, I might as well teach you something.“ They will feel tempted to ask you more detailed questions to demonstrate, who really is the expert here.They don’t like to be embarrassed in front of their colleagues so you are going down, buddy.If the professor explains you something, nod along and tell him how interesting that is, and that you’ll read more about that after the exam.”

  3. Smart Preparation

My exam preparation always consists of two components:
the general part and the more special part:
  • General: cover the most common topics and diseases of the subject you’ll be tested in and focus on diagnosis and treatment of these:
    • Internal Medicine: Thrombosis, Acute myocardial infarction, Pneumonia…
    • Radiology: Pneumonia, Stroke, Pneumothorax, Bowel obstruction …
    • Neurology: Stroke, Dementia, Parkinson’s, MS…
  • Special:
    For this part, you should get information about the professor, who will be testing you:
    • old exam protocols,
    • look up his clinical field of interest,
    • publications she has co-authored and so on.
Don’t go crazy on this, just try to have a general impression on what this guy or gal is interested in.
Good luck, I hope you pass!
*BTW: that was the reason I haven’t posted for so long, I really needed every minute. Sorry about that, but that won’t happen again!!
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Category: Career