Tech Checklist for an Online Interview

An online interview gives you one advantage: you control the room. It also gives you a new way to lose marks, which is spending your first station apologising for your microphone.

Technology problems are rarely fatal to an application. Assessors have seen every kind of freeze and dropout and most schools have a documented process for it. What technology does reliably do is eat your composure in the first ninety seconds, which is exactly where you can least afford it. The fix is boring and it works: test everything twice, days before, on the machine you will actually use.

Start with whatever the university tells you

Platforms and rules vary between schools and change between years. Some run on a standard video conferencing tool, some use a purpose built interview platform with its own browser requirements, some require a specific browser and no virtual background at all. If a test session or a system check link is offered, do it, even if you are confident. Read your invitation email and check the university's current admissions page rather than assuming last year's setup still applies.

Audio is the only thing that is genuinely load bearing

If your video is grainy, an assessor can still mark you. If your audio clips, echoes or cuts out, they cannot. Sound is the one part of the setup worth real effort.

Wired earphones with an inline microphone usually beat both laptop speakers and wireless earbuds. They do not run out of charge halfway through, they do not switch to a phone mid sentence, and they eliminate the echo that a laptop microphone picks up from its own speakers. Record yourself for sixty seconds and listen back on a different device. You are checking whether your consonants survive, not whether you like your voice, which nobody does.

The connection

• Use ethernet if a cable can physically reach. Wifi is fine most of the time and ethernet is fine all of the time.
• If you are on wifi, sit close to the router and stay there. Do not interview from the far corner of the house because the light is nicer.
• Warn everyone in the house of the exact window. Someone starting a large download or a streaming session at the wrong moment is a common and completely preventable failure.
• Have a phone hotspot ready and already paired, with enough data left on the plan. Test the hotspot at least once so you are not learning the process under pressure.
• Run your test at the same time of day as your interview. Household and neighbourhood congestion at eight in the morning is not the same as at ten at night.

Camera, framing and light

Raise the laptop until the camera is at roughly eye level. A stack of books is a perfectly respectable piece of equipment. A camera below your chin makes everyone look tired and slightly aggressive, and it means you spend the whole interview looking down at the assessor.

Frame yourself from mid chest up with a small amount of space above your head. Sit far enough back that your hands are visible when you gesture, because gesture is part of how warmth reads on video.

Light should come from in front of you, not behind. A window facing you is ideal, a window behind you turns you into a silhouette. If you are interviewing at night, a lamp beside the screen aimed at your face will do the job. Then close the curtains anyway if the sun moves during your session, because a station that starts well lit and ends in glare is a distraction you do not need.

The machine itself

Do this list the day before, not on the morning:

• Install any operating system or browser updates early so the machine cannot decide to restart itself at the worst moment.
• Turn on do not disturb, quit messaging apps and email, and sign out of anything that produces a banner. A message preview appearing on a shared screen is a small horror.
• Close every other tab and application. Video conferencing is the most resource hungry thing most laptops do.
• Plug the laptop in. Battery saving modes throttle performance and cameras quietly reduce quality when power is low.
• Check your display name and profile photo. An account still called by a nickname from year nine is not a disaster, but it is an easy thing to fix.
• Grant camera and microphone permissions in advance, especially on a Mac, where the permission prompt tends to appear at the least convenient second.

The room and the people in it

Pick the quietest door you can lock, and put a sign on it. Tell housemates or family the start and finish time, and be specific about the fact that a closed door means closed. Move the dog. Silence the smart speaker. If you live somewhere genuinely noisy, ask early about a quiet room at a university library or a local library booth, and book it well ahead of interview season.

Behind you, aim for plain and tidy. Blank wall, a bookshelf, a closed door. Avoid virtual backgrounds unless the university requires one, since they smear when you gesture and some platforms block them anyway.

Do a full dress rehearsal

Once, before the day, sit in the chair, in the clothes, at the time, with the setup running. It sounds excessive and it catches things nothing else catches: the shirt that flares on camera, the chair that squeaks, the neighbour who mows at nine. Our notes on how a virtual MMI differs from an in person circuit cover the performance side, and the clothing choices that behave badly on a webcam are worth checking in your own lighting rather than in a mirror.

Have one line ready for when it breaks

Write the admissions contact number on paper and keep it in view. Decide in advance what you will say if the audio drops: something short, calm and practical, such as asking whether they can still hear you and offering to rejoin. Composure through a technical fault is often noticed more favourably than a flawless connection, because it is the closest thing to a live test of how you behave when a plan fails.

None of this replaces preparing what you will actually say, which is why the case for beginning interview work as soon as UCAT is done still holds. The tech checklist just clears the floor.

Practising through the same hardware you will use on the day is the cheapest way to make it invisible. MasterMed's live AI interviewer runs timed MMI stations in the browser and marks you against a rubric, so your microphone, your lighting and your answers all get rehearsed at once. The first speaking station is free on the trial, no card, and the trial does not convert by itself.

Get the setup to the point where you never think about it again. That is the entire goal. The technology should be the least interesting thing about your interview.