SFU Medical School Interview: MMI Format and Dates (2027)

SFU Stephens Family School of Medicine runs its interview in person at the SFU Burnaby campus on March 13 and 14, 2027. Although the medical school is based at the SFU Surrey campus in the Fraser Region, the MMI is hosted at Burnaby, and in-person attendance is mandatory. Applicants who cannot attend in person are removed from consideration.

You rotate through a circuit of 8 timed interview stations and 2 rest stations. In Cycle 1, each station lasted 8 minutes with a 2-minute transition and reading period, and the school expects similar timing this year. For a full list of programs that use this format, see our list of medical schools that use the MMI.

Two details in the Applicant Manual change how you should prepare. First, come ready to discuss any autobiographical or experiential details from your application during the MMI. Second, if you reported conversational fluency (CEFR B2 level) in a language other than English on your application, you may be required to complete at least one portion of the interview process in that language.

If you applied through the Indigenous admissions stream, you complete the MMI plus a short panel interview with Indigenous physicians and community members. You are also invited to a community gathering with other Indigenous applicants, faculty, staff, and the Indigenous health team, and Elders and Knowledge Keepers are present during the MMI to offer emotional, cultural, mental, and spiritual support.

To rehearse an 8-minute station out loud, Confetto runs timed MMI circuits with AI follow-up questions and rubric feedback. Start your free week on our Canadian medical school interview prep page.

The primary application and all supporting documents, including activity verifications, closed on October 7, 2026 at 3:00 PM PT. Unlike Cycle 1, Cycle 2 requires five character references only from applicants who are invited or waitlisted for an interview in mid-December 2026. Your five referees must submit a short online reference questionnaire (not a letter) by February 15, 2027 at 3:00 PM PT, or your MMI invitation is removed.

If you need a disability-related accommodation for the MMI, contact SFU's Center for Accessible Learning (CAL) at caladmin@sfu.ca as soon as possible after receiving your invitation and before the deadline in your invitation email. Limited travel assistance is also available for invited applicants, with details sent alongside interview invitations.

SFU Stephens Family School of Medicine is Western Canada's first new medical school in almost 60 years. Its inaugural Fall 48 class has 48 seats, and the class size increases to 64 seats for Fall 2027.

To pass Stage 1 (Academic Eligibility Review), Open stream applicants must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents who reside in B.C., Nunavut, Yukon, or the Northwest Territories, while Indigenous stream applicants may reside in any Canadian province or territory. Applicants must also meet one of three equal academic threshold options: the GPA option (minimum 3.83 Adjusted GPA on a 4.33 scale), the MCAT option (minimum 510 overall with at least 123 in each section), or the GPA and MCAT option (minimum 3.67 Adjusted GPA and 505 MCAT with at least 123 in each section).

On its Fall 2026 Admission Statistics page, SFU reports 1,864 total applications, of which 1,697 were complete and met the academic eligibility thresholds. In Stage 2 (Initial File Review), reviewers evaluated those 1,697 files for alignment with the school's mission, social accountability mandate, and desired attributes, identifying 447 aligned applicants. Because 447 aligned applicants exceeded the available interview spots, SFU used an Equal Probability Selection (EPS) process to fill the 205 interview invitations, of whom 199 were B.C. residents. Under EPS, every academically eligible, highly aligned candidate has the same chance of being selected for an interview.

Once you pass Stage 1's academic threshold, higher GPA or MCAT scores give you no extra advantage. After the MMI, the Admissions Committee conducts a Stage 5 Holistic File Review that considers your five character references, non-academic characteristics, and MMI scores and comments to make May 2027 admission offers.

SFU's mission is: "To advance community-based primary health care through education, scholarship, innovation, research and service." Its vision is: "To advance equitable, community-based primary health care for all." The school's social accountability mandate is to graduate physicians committed to team-based, community-level primary care in the Fraser Salish region (a catchment of more than 900,000 residents) and across British Columbia, directly addressing B.C.'s family physician shortage. Indigenous Peoples of Canada are a priority population for the school, which partners with Fraser Health, the First Nations Health Authority, and local Divisions of Family Practice.

The MD curriculum is a 3-year, 131-week program (MEDS 410, MEDS 420, and MEDS 430) starting in the first week of August, delivered primarily by family physicians and other generalists alongside specialists, researchers, and Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers. Within the first month of Year 1, students are placed in community family medicine clinics for longitudinal relationships, and each student works with a dedicated coach using an e-portfolio dashboard mapped to CanMEDS and First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Health core competencies.

In both file review and the MMI, SFU evaluates candidates against the published applicant attributes from Section 2.3.3 of the Applicant Manual. Map your stories to these definitions before interview day.

• Interconnectedness: Embracing an interconnected way of being, acknowledging relationships and responsibilities within systems, and committing to collective flourishing and social interest.
• Comfortable with Uncertainty: Being comfortable within complexity and having the courage to make your best effort even through uncertainty.
• Committed to a Greater Good: Acting in a manner that helps others and contributes to a more harmonious society and world.
• Analytical Decision Maker: Identifying and synthesizing varied forms of information for well-reasoned, evidence-informed decisions that recognize tensions and alignments.
• Ethical Decision Maker: Having the capacity for critical consciousness, recognizing social and political structural influences on society, and applying moral reasoning to challenge and transform those systems.
• Responding to Challenges: Persevering productively when faced with adverse circumstances and conflicts, and self-reflecting to encourage future growth.
• Accountable to Impact of Self on Others: Anticipating, recognizing, and taking personal responsibility for the impact your actions, thoughts, and words have on others.
• Open Heart, Open Mind: Continuously challenging your own perspective, embracing the opportunity to learn, and drawing education from all encounters.

With 8 interview stations and 2 rest stations at 10 minutes per slot (2 minutes to transition and read, 8 minutes in the room), a full circuit runs 100 minutes from start to finish. Eight minutes inside the room gives the assessor time to ask follow-up questions or pivot to your application experiences.

Once your five character references are submitted by February 15, 2027, you have four weeks before the March 13 and 14 MMI weekend at SFU Burnaby. Use the station structure and four-week plan below to prepare.

• Week 1 (Mid-February): Reread your two ApplyMD personal statements and your community and employment entries (up to 6 total activities). Write two bullet points for each entry linking a specific moment to SFU's applicant attributes and to primary care in B.C.
• Week 2 (Late February): Build context on B.C.'s primary care system. Read SFU's Mission, Social Accountability, and MD Curriculum pages so you can speak accurately about longitudinal family medicine placements in the first month of Year 1, the Fraser Salish region, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Call to Action #23, and the In Plain Sight Report Recommendation #18.
• Week 3 (Early March): Run at least two full 8-station timed circuits (2 minutes reading, 8 minutes speaking, with two 10-minute rest breaks) out loud. If you listed an additional language on ApplyMD, practice answering two everyday and health-related questions in that language at a B2 conversational level.
• Week 4 (Week of March 13 and 14): Confirm your Burnaby campus building, check in-person arrival instructions from your invitation email, and plan your route up Burnaby Mountain with extra buffer for weekend transit or weather.

Our team wrote the 12 practice questions below to match the six station topics and special elements listed in Section 7.1.3 of the SFU Applicant Manual, plus the Indigenous Stream panel.

• 1. Ethical Decision Making (Critical Consciousness): A rural health clinic in British Columbia receives funding to launch either a mobile outreach van visiting agricultural workers twice a week or an evening drop-in clinic in the town center. How should the clinic leadership decide, and what structural factors should they weigh?
• 2. Awareness of Social Health Issues in Canada: Many British Columbians do not have a regular family physician and rely on episodic walk-in or emergency care. Beyond training more doctors, what changes to how primary care is organized in B.C. would make the biggest difference for underserved communities?
• 3. Collaboration: Within your first month at SFU, you are placed in a community family medicine clinic. A medical office assistant and a clinic nurse disagree over how to schedule a patient who frequently arrives late due to transit connections, and the nurse asks for your view. How do you handle the conversation?
• 4. Communication and Cultural Safety: An older patient who recently immigrated to the Fraser Region comes in with her adult son for newly diagnosed hypertension. She speaks limited English, and her son tells you not to mention medication side effects because it will make her refuse the pills. How do you proceed?
• 5. Critical Thinking (Comfortable with Uncertainty): A local health authority reports that emergency department visits for pediatric asthma have spiked in one neighborhood over the past six months, while neighboring areas saw no change. Walk through what information you would gather before proposing an intervention.
• 6. Personal Qualities (Accountable to Impact of Self on Others): Tell me about a time when something you said or did had an unintended negative impact on a coworker, classmate, or community member. How did you recognize it, and what did you do next?
• 7. Personal Qualities (Responding to Challenges): Describe a sustained challenge in a paid employment role or long-term community commitment where your initial approach did not work. How did you adapt, and what did that teach you about working in a team?
• 8. Personal Qualities (Open Heart, Open Mind): Tell me about an encounter that forced you to challenge a strongly held assumption you had about health, fairness, or community responsibility.
• 9. Autobiographical and File Verification Station: Choose one of the community involvement or paid employment entries from your ApplyMD application. How did that specific community or workplace shape your interest in community-based primary care in British Columbia?
• 10. Collaboration and Interconnectedness: You are working on a longitudinal project with three classmates and a community non-profit partner. Halfway through the term, the community partner asks to change the project's focus to something your classmates feel won't look as strong on a residency application. What do you do?
• 11. Additional Language Fluency Check (if claimed on ApplyMD): In the additional language you listed at a B2 conversational level, introduce yourself, describe a community you belong to, and explain how you hope to serve patients who speak this language.
• 12. Indigenous Stream Panel Question: How has your lived experience and connection to your community shaped your vision for culturally safe primary care and Indigenous health self-determination in British Columbia?
• Sample Answer for Question 6 (Personal Qualities: Accountable to Impact of Self on Others): Example answer written by our team. The applicant is invented. While working as a shift lead at a busy community pharmacy in Surrey, I reorganized our intake queue to speed up prescription drop-offs. I implemented the change right before a Monday rush without consulting our part-time pharmacy assistants. Within an hour, an older Punjabi-speaking patient left frustrated because the new sign-in sheet was only in English, and one assistant felt blindsided when patients blamed her for the confusion. I realized my focus on speed had ignored both my team's workflow and our patients' language needs. At the end of the shift, I apologized directly to the assistant for making the change unilaterally and owned the mistake with our pharmacist manager. The next day, I sat down with the assistants to redesign the intake process together, keeping a verbal check-in option for patients who preferred speaking in Punjabi or Tagalog. Taking responsibility meant admitting that good intentions do not excuse the stress my shortcut caused my coworkers and patients.

If you are also applying to Ontario programs through (/articles/omsas) or comparing prerequisites and admissions rules across provinces, see our guide to Canadian medical school requirements.

Ready to practice for the March 13 and 14 Burnaby MMI out loud? Confetto simulates timed 8-minute MMI stations with follow-up questions and rubric feedback. Start your free week.

A community family medicine clinic in Surrey has received a one-time grant that can fund either a full-time social worker to help patients with housing, food security, and income supports, or a part-time nurse practitioner to take new patients off the clinic's waitlist. The clinic physicians are split. How should the clinic decide, and which would you recommend?

• OMSAS

• SFU Stephens Family School of Medicine: Applicant Manual (Updated June 2026)
• SFU Stephens Family School of Medicine: Application Stages
• SFU Stephens Family School of Medicine: Key Dates
• SFU Stephens Family School of Medicine: Fall 2026 Admission Statistics
• SFU Stephens Family School of Medicine: Mission and Vision
• SFU Stephens Family School of Medicine: Non-Academic Requirements
• SFU Stephens Family School of Medicine: Academic Requirements
• SFU Stephens Family School of Medicine: Financial Information