A Six Week Interview Preparation Schedule

Most six week plans are the same week repeated six times. Do some questions, read some ethics, feel vaguely behind. That is not a plan, it is a habit, and it produces a candidate who is well read and cannot get through a station cleanly.

A six week interview prep plan works when each phase does a different job and hands something specific to the next one. Foundations first, then station craft, then whole circuits, then a taper. Roughly four to six hours a week, most of it spoken.

The shape of it

Weeks one and two build material and get you speaking. Weeks three and four drill station types individually until each one has a reliable opening. Week five runs full circuits under time. Week six protects what you have.

The common mistake is spending four weeks on material and one on speaking. Invert that instinct. Material is the cheap part and speaking is the expensive part, and only one of them is being marked.

Weeks one and two: foundations

The aim by the end of week two is a small store of usable material and the ability to speak for two minutes without stopping. Not polish. Just capacity.

• Build a story bank of eight to twelve experiences, written as fragments rather than paragraphs. Each one should be able to answer three or four different themes.
• Write your honest answer to why medicine and why this school, then say it out loud until it stops sounding like a statement you wrote.
• Cover the ethical principles once. One sitting, not four weeks. You need to be able to reason with them, not cite them.
• Confirm the format for every school that has invited you or will. Check the university's current admissions page rather than a forum post, because arrangements change between cycles.
• Speak three questions a day, timed, recorded, no notes. Ten minutes. This is non negotiable from day one.

Spend one of these early sessions reading our explainer on how MMI scoring works in Australia. Knowing roughly what the domains look like changes what you practise for the next five weeks, and it is the difference between preparing to say enough things and preparing to reason well.

Weeks three and four: station drills

Now you separate station types and work them one at a time. Mixing them too early means you never get enough reps of any one to build a reliable opening, and the opening is where stations are won or lost.

Give each type two or three sessions across the fortnight: ethical scenarios, personal and motivation questions, teamwork and conflict, data or prioritisation tasks, and roleplay.

Roleplay deserves more than its share of this block, because it is the type people avoid and the type that punishes avoidance most. Our guide to MMI roleplay stations sets out what those stations are really assessing, and the drill that helps most is running only the first ninety seconds, repeatedly, with a partner who stays in character and does not help you.

Two rules for this phase. Always take the full reading time, even when the prompt looks simple, because rushing the door is a habit you will keep. And always repeat a station immediately after feedback, applying one change. A note you do not test is not a change.

By the end of week four you should be able to name your weakest station type without thinking. If you cannot, you have been practising the comfortable ones.

Week five: full circuits

This is the week that separates prepared candidates from people who have done a lot of questions. A circuit tests something individual stations never do, which is recovery: your ability to walk out of a station that went badly and start the next one as though it did not happen.

Run at least two full circuits, six to eight stations each, back to back, with realistic reading time between them and no discussion until the end. Mixed types, unseen prompts, no restarting. Feedback comes afterwards, all at once, the way it would in real life, which is to say not at all until it is too late to act on.

Notice the fatigue curve. Almost everyone drops around station four or five, and the fix is usually mechanical rather than mental: eat something beforehand, drink water, and have a two second reset you use in every doorway.

Run at least one circuit in the format you will actually face. If yours is online, do it on the same laptop in the same room at the same time of day, and read our comparison of virtual and in person MMIs for the specific things that change on camera. If yours is in person, do at least one session standing, in shoes, in the clothes.

Week six: taper

Volume comes down, quality stays up. Two or three short spoken sessions, three or four unseen prompts each, and nothing new added to your notes. Everything you learn in the last week arrives too late to be usable and too early to be forgotten, so it just sits there making you anxious.

Use the freed time on logistics. Clothes decided and worn once. Travel or tech tested. Sleep moved earlier by three days rather than one night. A plan for the two hours before the interview that does not involve revision.

The last full day should be light. One short session in the morning to hear your own voice working, then stop. Candidates who cram on the final day arrive with a head full of half remembered phrasing, which is the exact condition that produces recited answers.

The weekly rhythm

Four to six hours a week, split as three or four short spoken sessions of twenty to forty minutes plus one longer session at the weekend. Short and frequent beats long and rare, because speaking is a motor skill and motor skills consolidate with spacing.

If you are still at school or working full time, protect the short sessions and let the long one go. Twenty minutes on a Tuesday night is worth more than a three hour Sunday you dread and cancel.

If you fall behind

You will. Something will eat a fortnight. Cut in this order: reading first, note writing second, station drills third. Never cut the full circuits, and never cut spoken practice down to nothing, because those are the two things that cannot be replaced by understanding.

The hardest parts of this plan to arrange are the unseen prompts and the full circuits, since both need someone else. MasterMed's live AI interviewer runs timed stations and marks them against a rubric, which covers the drill and circuit weeks without needing to find a group at nine at night. The first speaking station is free on the trial, no card, and the trial never converts by itself.

Six weeks done properly leaves you at the door of your first station with nothing left to fix, which is a much better place to be than arriving with a list.