Northwestern Feinberg's published M.D. interview format is three individual virtual interviews: two with full-time faculty and one with a senior medical student. Prepare for separate conversations about your experiences and motivation, including follow-up questions.

The current interview-day format

Feinberg's official interview page lists selected Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from late August through mid-February. Invitations are emailed from August through early February, and applicants are expected to schedule soon after receiving one.

Published day	Interview-day window, Central time
Tuesday	8:45 a.m.–1 p.m.
Wednesday	12:45–5 p.m.
Friday	8:45 a.m.–1 p.m.

The day also includes an orientation and a virtual tour with first- and second-year students. The invitation provides further details. These windows cover the day, not the duration of each conversation. Check your invitation and convert Central time to your own time zone.

Choose experiences that show how you think

The school's candidate guidance includes exploration of medicine, inquiry, service, professionalism, communication, and teamwork. Use it to select examples from your own application. It isn't a public list of guaranteed interview questions.

Prepare a few experiences in enough detail to handle follow-up questions. For a research example, explain the question you investigated, your own role, and a limitation. For a service example, explain what someone needed and what you learned from responding. For a team example, identify the disagreement and what changed after your action.

Don't claim the whole team's outcome as your own. If you don't know why an intervention worked, say what you observed and what you couldn't establish.

An experience-to-question worksheet

Make one row for each experience you might discuss. This is an original preparation exercise, not Feinberg's scoring system.

Experience note	Follow-up to practice
What you personally did	What decision was yours, and who supervised you?
What surprised you	How did that change your understanding?
One limitation	What couldn't your experience establish?
A next learning goal	What would you want to investigate or practice next?

For a fictional example, suppose you helped a team summarize survey responses but didn't design the survey. Describe your contribution as organizing or analyzing the responses. Don't say you led the study. A credible limitation might concern who responded and whose views are missing; explain it without inventing results.

Rehearse three different conversations

Use the following drill with a practice partner. The times are suggested practice blocks, not official interview lengths.

Spend six minutes discussing why you want to study medicine. Let your partner ask what changed your mind or challenged your assumptions.
Spend six minutes on an experience involving service, research, or teamwork. Ask the partner to probe your role and a limitation.
Spend six minutes discussing how you choose a learning environment and what you'd want to ask a current student.
Spend six minutes reviewing whether you answered each question directly and used evidence from your own experience.

That's 24 minutes. Repeating an experience in another conversation is fine if it's relevant. Don't force a new story just to avoid repetition, and don't deliver the same rehearsed paragraph regardless of the question.

Make “why Feinberg” specific

Choose one current, official curriculum or student-experience detail that matters to your goals. Explain the connection to something you've already done and identify what you want to learn next. Chicago's location alone isn't a substitute for understanding the program.

Check any clinic, research opportunity, or student activity before naming it. Use the school's own description to explain why the opportunity interests you.

Confetto's AI interview practice lets you rehearse spoken answers and review feedback. Use it to check whether your examples are understandable, then ask a partner to challenge your reasoning with follow-up questions.

Also have a WashU interview? Our guide to the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine interview covers its open-file and closed-file Zoom interviews.