Talk about a time during medical school where you had a setback or failure. How did you respond to that setback?

The rigors of a three-year Dermatology residency training program provide many ups and downs for residents. With this question, your interviewers are trying to understand and predict how you will manage in the face of adversity.

You must be able to give a concrete example of a difficult time you experienced or a failure and then show how you were able to improve your circumstances. You should be able to show that you learned from the setback and that you won't make the same mistake again.

"My first board exam score was not as high as I had hoped. After reflecting, I realized that reading many textbooks was not the most effective study method. I adapted my study plan for my next board exam to focus instead on practice questions. I dramatically improved my step two score by doing this."

"Setbacks and failures can happen to everyone. I try to approach them as opportunities for improvement and learning. During medical school I worked on research project that was difficult for me to get off the ground. We had collected data having spent hours on chart review but did not find any significant findings on our analysis, and our project came to a standstill. While I was initially disheartened, I spoke with some of my mentors, including senior residents and attendings that had a lot of experience with research. I learned how to clean my data, and run another analysis, to find some more interesting findings in the data. I also learned how to frame negative results into a more interesting manner so that they may contribute to the literature. After a lot of work, our manuscript was published, and this taught me skills that I used in my future projects."