Interviews Over!

Phew, the ordeal is finally over! Finally I'm back home in Batu Pahat and I'm back in my safe, comfortable home. Not that my previous accomadations were bad, mind, but I just had a feeling of what Mandarin-speaking people would call 'sien', which can be loosely translated as a mixture of boredom, longing and irritability. Well anyway, I have passed this hurdle, now it's up to God to do the rest.

Alright, as I have promised certain people, I will now proceed to describe the interviews and tests that follow the successful shortlisting of a candidate into the Medicine and Dentistry faculty of the National university of Singapore, with a few embellishments from yours truly.

Let's start with Dentistry. As in one of the previous posts, I have explained the Manual Dexterity Test for this section of the Dentistry admissions programme. You are brought into a lab where you are presented with a block of plasticine, a cylindrical block of chalk, two wires, acrylic models, a scapel, a ruler, a pencil, a wire-cutter (shared among candidates) and a sheet of paper detailing your test. You are given three hours, and in that time, shape your plasticine into a replica of the acrylic tooth, sculpt a replica of the acrylic cylindrical block with a cube with a hole on top, and shape the wires to follow the shapes you see on the paper. Sounds easy? Some people are not good with their hands at all, so please reserve your comments. Well, face it, some people can make a Magnum Opus while others are lucky to have people who say insincerely that your painting is nice... Ok, let's go on.... The interview is a basic kind of thing, three associate professors who asks you all manner of questions, from 'What do you know about dentistry?' to 'Do you play any sports?' Yeah, strange, I know, but you DO have to answer...

For the Medicine side, you are ushered into yet another lab to sit for a WRITTEN ESSAY TEST. Hahahahaha.... And NO, it is not for determining if you have the messy writing of a doctor, it is for determining your 'personality', I guess. Well, it is a logical explanation! They will give you topics that are 'grey' such as subsidies for all or for only those who look after their health, in the sense they don't smoke, don't drink, yadda yadda yadda... They even throw in a phychometric test that supposedly dosen't affect your admission... It's basically a HUGE personality test, 170 questions, true or false, with an extra 10 IQ questions. After you rush through that, its the interviews. You have two sets of interviews, one with the admissions committee (I think, probably consists of some big shots, associate deans, administrators, blah blah blah) and the next one is with some doctors and professors. They will ask you some standard questions, such as 'Why medicine?', some personality questions, 'How far do you think patient-doctor confidentiality should go' and even some from the personal statement you sent in earlier. Be careful, not all of them are gonna be smiling all the way.

Okay, that pretty much covers everything for this section, I hope I have answered to everyone's satisfaction. Before I leave, another word of advice : If God wants you to get in, then by hook or by crook you're going in. That's final. Okay? See all of you around.