Crichton. Gaudere’s Law strikes again.
Edit: ninja’ed by Freudian Slit!
Warning! - This info is old old old…greater than 20 years old.
Back in the day, I was dating a fine lass. She wanted to go to Med school. She did get in but didn’t make it through…
Anyways…we were engaged, I had just graduated Grad school and didn’t have a job yet so I went with her/drove her to interviews. For some weird reason some med schools, when they found this out, wanted me in on the interview with her. I thought this extremely weird but their requests were almost…insistent.
I was told by several, after the interview, that I would be a good candidate for med school. WTH?!? were my thoughts…I was a MATH Masters grad. Well, turns out I started out in Chemistry with some biology…but that Med schools LIKED (using their term) ‘unconventional’ degrees. They WANTED different kinds of peope. One interviewer even asked me if I would attend Med school if they let me in. It gave me much to think about but I eventually said no.
One interviewer said that one of the best degrees to get in Med school was, believe it or not,…Art. You still have to have a Science mind and take appropriate undergrad courses but an Art degree makes you stand out and is NOT a disadvantage.
I brought this up to a few lawyer friends a few years later and one of them emphatically said that they love ‘exotic’ degrees and that a Math degree would be an advantage to getting into law school.
They want diversity and humans 
====
Back to the OP…
I have to second (or third etc) the idea of a ‘checking for a spine’ may be what the interviewer was doing. I have been to a couple of these and they are jarring. Basically, standing up to the interviewer shows you have one. A flavor of this is the ‘pressure’ interview where the interviewer really, really REALLY pushes you in a negative way. The ‘You are just doing what your parents want’ sounds very much like this. When you find yourself in this type of interview, realize it and respond with vigor…even anger…"How dare you say that about me! You don’t know me! Hell, back xxxxx, I did yyyyy…etc etc basically showing them that you WANT this.
Bizarre. I’m actually on the residency interview trail now, so it’s been about 4 years since I did the med school interviews, and I never encountered anything like that. 45 minutes was considered a pretty good length for an interview. 1.5 hours is more than a little weird. How did they even schedule that? Did she miss other parts of the day? I hope the interview was scheduled after everything else, or she probably missed all the financial aid talks and tours and stuff. As for what the interviewer was thinking, most likely they just don’t know how to interview. I had an interviewer who apparently only wanted me to answer in 2-3 word answers, as he would cut me off anytime I tried to expand on anything. “Who is your role model?” “My father was a doc-” “Who would you invite to your dinner in Heaven celebrating your life?” Stuff like that.
A second interview is definitely a good idea, so hopefully it goes smoother than this last one. If it’s similar, I’d probably think twice about going there. Then again, it’s med school. It’s hard to be picky unless you’re a superstar. Part of the process, sadly.
Figures. I even looked it up before I posted to make sure I had it right. Should have waited till I’d had a little more caffeine I guess.
I almost posted advice to not read the rest of that book, but I didn’t want discuss why not to read the rest of it. His recounting of his medical school experience was very interesting.
I won’t comment on the rest of what seems like a bizarre interview but I have to say I agree with him about the “intellectually disabled” versus “retarded” comment. Be as PC as you like, but retarded is a medical term and has an appropriate usage when discussed in a medical setting.
If your sister’s uncomfortable using the word retarded when she works with actual retarded people, she should get used to it.
Meh. Interviews in competitive fields tend to force interviewees to think on their feet. A guy I know was asked to open a window during his med school interview since it was stuffy in the room. The windows were all nailed shut. He realized this right away and chuckled about it.
Your sister may be ahead of her time. It is being proposed in DSM 5 that the term Mental Retardation be replaced with Intellectual Developmental Disorder.
She would have no problem using the term- if it were appropriate. But it is no longer considered appropriate to use the word retarded to describe a person. The interviewer was suggesting that my sister should have used retarded in her broad, intro essay talking about the experiences that brought her to med school. I can almost guarantee you that if my sister had done that, her application would have been dismissed from each school’s consideration because it is considered so inappropriate. The uncomfortableness comes from the fact that the interviewer was so out of touch- not the actual use of the word itself.
It may no longer be considered “appropriate” or politically correct, but all those terms that ‘nice’ people don’t use (retarded, moron, idiot, imbecile, & cretin) all have specific, separate medical meanings. Frankly, I prefer that doctors use specific, accurate medical terminology rather than catch-all euphemisms, even if the general public thinks that euphemisms are more ‘appropriate’.
Otherwise, this interview seems a bit odd. I think I agree with some others that the interviewer may have been trying to get a reaction from your sister other than the polished ‘interview manners’.