Preparing for the CUNY School of Medicine interview

As you prepare for your interview at the CUNY School of Medicine (CSOM), understanding its unique mission and the complexities of healthcare in New York City is your intellectual north star. 

CSOM places a premium on urban health equity, community engagement, and care for historically underserved populations. Here’s your hyper-local, high-impact guide for interview excellence.

1. The CUNY Med Interview: Structure, Themes, and What They’re Really Asking

CUNY’s interview process is a love letter to New York’s diversity and a stress test for your commitment to urban primary care. Here’s the breakdown:

Format:

• Multi-Panel Interviews: You’ll face 2-3 sequential panel interviews, each with distinct focuses:

  1. Faculty/Clinician Panels: Combines faculty and practicing physicians from NYC Health + Hospitals. Expect probing questions about your hands-on experience in underserved neighborhoods (e.g., “Describe a time you advocated for a patient facing housing insecurity”).

  2. Community Leader Panels: Includes directors of local organizations like BronxWorks or Harlem United. They’ll dissect your understanding of hyper-local challenges, such as syringe access programs in Staten Island or asthma disparities in Mott Haven.

  3. Hybrid Policy-Ethics Panels: Mixes ethicists and health policy experts. Prepare for scenario-based questions like, “How would you allocate limited naloxone doses during an overdose surge in East New York?”

Themes:

• Health Equity as a Human Right: CUNY’s mission to train primary care physicians for NYC’s safety-net hospitals.

• Community-Embedded Advocacy: How your lived or volunteer experiences align with neighborhoods like East New York or the South Bronx.

• Structural Competency: Diagnosing systems, not just symptoms (e.g., linking asthma rates to diesel bus depots near public housing).

Insider Tip: Interviewers often work at NYC Health + Hospitals. Name-drop their Gotham Health clinics (which serve 100,000+ low-income New Yorkers) or their role in the Test & Trace Corps to demonstrate granular knowledge of their ecosystem.

2. New York’s Healthcare Policy: Where the Rubber Meets the Road

NYC isn’t just a city—it’s a petri dish for progressive health policy. Master these three battlegrounds:

NYC Care (2020):

1. The nation’s largest municipal insurance plan, guaranteeing low-cost care to 800,000 undocumented and uninsured New Yorkers. Impact: ER visits for preventable conditions dropped 12% in its first year, but wait times at Bellevue’s primary care clinics now exceed 6 months.

   • Tip: Propose solutions like training CUNY med students to staff weekend clinics in Queens.

Mental Health Crisis in Schools:

2. After a 34% spike in teen suicide attempts (2022-2023), NYC launched TeenSpace, offering free therapy via apps like Talkspace. Yet, only 18% of Brownsville teens have reliable Wi-Fi to access it.

   • Tip: Highlight CUNY’s HEALS Program, which deploys students to school-based health centers in the Bronx.

Opioid Overdose Surge:

3. NYC saw 3,000 overdose deaths in 2023—60% involving xylazine. Health Department’s response: Street Health Outreach + Wellness (SHOW) vans offering wound care and buprenorphine in encampments.

   • Tip: Reference CUNY’s partnership with OnPoint NYC, the nation’s first overdose prevention centers.

3. Current Events: The Five Boroughs’ Front Lines

Local Flashpoints:

• Maternal Mortality in Bed-Stuy: Black women in Brooklyn die in childbirth at 9x the rate of white women. NYC’s Doula Initiative trains community birth workers, but only 12% are Medicaid-reimbursed.

• Asthma Alley’s Relentless Toll: The South Bronx has the nation’s highest pediatric asthma rates. Recent protests halted a FreshDirect warehouse expansion—a win for South Bronx Unite.

• Migrant Health Crisis: 180,000 asylum seekers now sleep in Roosevelt Hotel ballrooms. Mount Sinai’s Humanitarian Emergency Logistics and Response team (HELP) reports TB outbreaks.

National Issues with NYC Stakes:

• Housing = Healthcare: 92,000 homeless New Yorkers face 20-year life expectancy gaps. CUNY’s Street Medicine Team treats foot ulcers in subway cars.

• Climate Change as a Diagnosable Condition: July 2024’s heatwave killed 350 seniors in public housing. NYC now prescribes free AC units via Medicaid.

Tip: Cite CUNY’s Institute for Health Equity when discussing policy fixes.

4. The 5 Questions CUNY School of Medicine is most likely to ask during your medical school interview

1. “Walk us through how East Harlem’s social determinants of health would impact your approach to a diabetic patient.”

2. “NYC Care covers undocumented immigrants. How would you respond to a taxpayer who calls this ‘unfair’?”

3. “You’re at a Queens clinic. A mother refuses HPV vaccines for her daughter due to ‘neighborhood rumors.’ What do you do?”

4. “Describe a time you adapted your communication for a non-English-speaking patient. What did you learn?”

5. “How should CUNY address the ‘brain drain’ of primary care doctors leaving NYC?”