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What are your weaknesses? | Interview questions answered
What are your weaknesses?
Although it may be true for you try to steer away from answers such as ‘I am a perfectionist’, as this doesn’t show you being open and honest about an actual negative quality you possess and seems more as though you are trying to dodge the question.
Nobody is perfect, everyone including the examiner has weaknesses!
The main thing to remember when answering this question is to make sure you acknowledge your weakness, but also that you reflect on it by saying how you have been trying to overcome this/ improve on this.
What the interviewer is looking for is that you are self reflective, honest and accept that you have limitations.
For example, you can talk about a weakness you have is that sometimes you take on too much responsibility because you find it hard to say no to people. However, you can say that you understand the importance of not doing so as it can affect the quality of your work and cause you stress. You can say that in order to try and rectify this, you have now made a timetable and limited yourself with how many extracurricular/ social/ work responsibilities you take on every month and this has greatly improved your work life balance and decreased stress.
mediteach top tip
As much as you should be honest, It’s probably not a good idea to say things like you can’t communicate well or that you are not empathetic. This is because these are fundamental values that you should possess, to an extent at this stage, if you want to be a doctor. However, you could say that you used to be a shy person however you took it upon yourself to join public speaking classes in order to improve this and you now have honed the skill of being a good communicator.