A Two Week Interview Preparation Plan

Short notice is normal. Invitations land when they land, and plenty of good candidates get fourteen days rather than six weeks. The plan below assumes you are starting close to cold, and that you have somewhere between one and two hours a day, most days.

The single most important decision in a two week interview prep block is what you refuse to do. There is no version of this fortnight where you cover everything, and trying is the reliable way to arrive underprepared in the areas that matter.

The first evening: ninety minutes of triage

Do not start practising tonight. Start by removing uncertainty, because uncertainty is what will consume your attention for the next thirteen days if you leave it in place.

• Read the invitation properly, twice, including the attachments nobody reads. Note the format, the platform if it is online, the timing and anything you have to submit or confirm.
• Check the university's current admissions page for how they describe their interview this cycle. Formats change, and a forum thread from two years ago is not evidence.
• Sort logistics now, in one go: travel or tech, the room, the clothes, the day off work. Book what needs booking tonight.
• Write the fourteen days into a calendar with actual session times in them. Not a study plan document. Calendar entries you would feel bad about deleting.

The clothes decision genuinely belongs on night one, because left alone it will resurface at eleven at night on day twelve and eat an hour you cannot spare. Our guide to what to wear to a medical interview will settle it in ten minutes. Choose, check it fits, hang it up, stop thinking about it.

What to skip, on purpose

Skip the long ethics reading list. Skip health policy detail. Skip building a comprehensive question bank. Skip writing out answers in full, which is the biggest time sink available to an anxious person and produces almost no spoken improvement.

The reason you can skip all of that is what stations are marked on. As our explainer on how MMI scoring works in Australia sets out, assessors are generally working from broad domains rather than a content checklist, and formats vary by school so check the university's page for what they publish. Nobody gets a mark for knowing the name of a principle. They get marks for reasoning through a situation in front of a person, and you can build that in two weeks.

One thing you should not skip: whatever material you would need for a why medicine or why this school question. It is the most predictable content in the whole interview and the most embarrassing to fumble.

Days one to four: material, fast

One hour a day, half writing and half speaking. Build eight to ten experiences as fragments, each one flexible enough to answer several themes: a time you got something wrong, a conflict, a time you led, a time you followed badly, something you kept doing when it stopped being fun.

Then cover the ethical principles in a single sitting, forty minutes maximum, and move on. You need enough to reason with, not enough to teach.

Every one of these four days ends with fifteen minutes of speaking. Three prompts, timed, recorded, no notes, no stopping when it goes badly. Starting spoken practice on day one rather than day six is the difference between two weeks and one.

Days five to ten: station craft

Now it is almost entirely spoken. An hour a day, split into two blocks if that is easier to protect. Work one station type per session so you get enough repetitions to build an opening you trust.

Give roughly two sessions to ethical scenarios, two to personal and motivation questions, one to teamwork and conflict, and one to roleplay. If your school runs a station type you know about, weight towards it.

Roleplay is the one people postpone until they run out of days. Do not. It has the steepest early learning curve of any station type, which means a fortnight is enough to get noticeably better at it if you start on day five. Our guide to MMI roleplay stations explains what is being assessed, and the highest yield drill is running only the first ninety seconds, over and over, with someone who stays in character.

Two habits to hold across this block. Take the full reading time at every prompt, even at home. And repeat every station once, immediately, with a single change applied. You have thirteen days and no room for notes you never test.

Days eleven to thirteen: two circuits

Run at least one full circuit, ideally two: six to eight unseen stations, back to back, realistic reading time, no discussion until the end. This is the only way to test the thing individual practice never touches, which is whether you can leave a bad station behind and start the next one clean.

Do it in the real format. Same laptop and room if it is online, standing and dressed if it is in person. And do it at roughly the time of day your interview runs, because a person who has only practised at ten at night has no idea what they are like at eight in the morning.

Expect the first circuit to feel worse than your practice has. That is the format doing its job, not evidence that the fortnight was wasted.

The last day

One short spoken session in the morning, three prompts, purely to hear your voice working. Then stop. Nothing new goes into your head after lunch, because anything learned on day fourteen arrives as half remembered phrasing and phrasing is what makes people sound recited.

Print or check whatever you need. Sleep early, having moved your bedtime for two or three nights rather than trying to fix it in one. Plan the two hours before the interview so they do not become revision by default.

If you have almost no time at all

Plenty of applicants are mid semester, working, or both. If you can only find twenty minutes a day, spend all of it speaking to unseen prompts and abandon the written material entirely. Speaking is the skill under assessment. Everything else in this plan is support for it.

The bottleneck in a short block is nearly always access to fresh prompts and honest marking at the hours you are free. MasterMed's live AI interviewer runs timed stations and scores them against a rubric, so a twenty minute gap on a Wednesday becomes a usable session. The first speaking station is free on the trial, no card, and the trial never converts by itself.

Fourteen days is genuinely enough. It is not enough to become a different person, and it does not need to be. It is enough to stop being surprised by the format, to have material you can reach for, and to have already heard yourself answer badly a few times somewhere that did not count.