Like an exam, not a chat. The interview is 50% of the General Surgery score and 60% of the Orthopaedic and Queensland BPT scores 123, so it outweighs anything you can add to a CV in a year. Practise structured answers out loud, under time, with someone who does not tell you what is coming.
Work out what it is worth first. General Surgery's 2027-intake regulations weight the interview at 50% of the final score 1. Orthopaedics scores the CV only as a gate — minimum 6 of 16, no ranking points — and ranks applicants on interview 60% plus a verbal referee report 40% 2. Queensland adult BPT runs a six-station MMI worth 60%, and that score also decides whether you start at SHO or registrar level 3. Psychiatry publishes 20% for "performance in interview", but the interpersonal, teamwork and foundations domains the panel scores take the interview-sourced share far higher 4. If the choice is one more audit or a month of interview practice, practise.
Prepare structure, not scripts. r/ausjdocs rule 7 bans asking for or posting past questions, and there is no point anyway — panels rewrite them. What does not change is the machinery: a rubric, fixed time per station or question, and assessors scoring against anchors while seeing twenty people in a day. Learn a small number of generic frameworks so you never freeze mid-answer, then rehearse them out loud against the clock 5. People fail by going blank, drifting off the question, or sounding identical to the last nine candidates 56.
Things that are not obvious. Find out who is sitting on the panel before you go in, because a critical-care panel and a network panel are screening for different things 5. Have three or four of your own terms worked up in enough detail that you can name specifics instead of generalities 6. And get a friend or a senior registrar to run you through several unseen stations back to back — a run-through where you already know the scenario tests nothing 5.
The counter-argument. Your own read of how it went is close to worthless. Plenty of people who thought they bombed got the job, and most scoring systems are hurdles, not beauty contests — you need to clear the threshold, not win 72.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
People fall apart during interviews since they freeze, forget frameworks, don't answer the question.
I've never thought an interview has gone well, but I've gotten all the jobs I've interviewed for.
All the interviewees will struggle to remember you if you say the same generic stuff as everybody else
my best advice for the anaesthetic interviews is that you need to be preparing for it like an exam. 3-6 months of regular study and practice.
Need to have a friend (or senior reg if you are lucky) to run you through 3-4 stations back to back that you don't know what senario is.
Asked 76 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /interview.{0,35}(tip|prep|advice|question|practice|help|nervous)|(tip|prep|advice|practice|help).{0,30}interview/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in interview-preparation threads that teach structure or process only; anything reproducing or paraphrasing a real interview question was excluded under r/ausjdocs rule 7, and the 'I thought I bombed it' counter-argument was included deliberately.