NSU-COM (DO) Medicine Interview — Format, Questions & Prep Tips

NSU-COM is part of NSU’s multi-college health sciences campus. How do you see interprofessional collaboration shaping your medical education here?

Pharmacy, dental, nursing, optometry, public health — all on the same campus. Show enthusiasm for team-based care, shared patient cases, and cross-professional learning.

Why osteopathic medicine, and how does South Florida's patient population shape the kind of physician you want to become?

DO philosophy plus South Florida demographic awareness: Caribbean and Latin American diaspora, elderly Medicare population, large uninsured immigrant communities, tropical medicine considerations.

A Haitian patient refuses a recommended surgery due to cultural and spiritual beliefs about surgery. How do you approach this?

Cultural humility, patient autonomy, exploring the specific cultural context of the refusal, ensuring truly informed consent, interpreter services, alternative treatments.

South Florida has one of the US’s largest and most diverse immigrant populations with significant healthcare access barriers. How would you address these as a physician?

Language barriers, undocumented patients, cultural health beliefs, FQHCs, community health workers, navigator programs. Show systems-level thinking.

How do you provide culturally competent care to a patient whose cultural health practices differ significantly from evidence-based recommendations?

Mutual respect, exploring the practice before dismissing it, understanding cultural context, finding common ground with evidence-based care.

Describe a time you worked in a team with strong disagreement about the right course of action. How was it resolved?

Team dynamics, respectful disagreement, consensus-building, knowing when to escalate. Interprofessional team example strongest.

Florida has a large uninsured population and did not expand Medicaid until 2023. How does this affect the patients you will treat at NSU-COM affiliated sites?

Florida’s late Medicaid expansion, remaining coverage gaps, safety-net hospitals, FQHCs, community health center network. Show awareness of Florida’s specific healthcare policy context.

NSU-COM named its college after Dr. Kiran C. Patel. What do you know about Dr. Patel’s philanthropy and what does it represent to you?

Dr. Kiran C. Patel is a physician-philanthropist whose donation supported NSU-COM. Show you researched this before the interview — it demonstrates genuine school-specific engagement.

You're a student-doctor at an NSU-affiliated South Florida clinic. An elderly Cuban-American patient on Medicare is overwhelmed by conflicting advice from several specialists and asks you, in halting English, to just 'tell me what to do.' Talk with her.

Use an interpreter as needed, simplify and reconcile the conflicting plans, act as the trusted coordinating relationship, check understanding with teach-back, and respect her autonomy while reducing her confusion.

South Florida has unusually high concentrations of Caribbean, Haitian, Cuban, Venezuelan, and elderly Medicare populations within the same metro. How would that demographic mix shape the disease burden and the communication skills a physician needs here?

Diverse chronic disease patterns, tropical and infectious considerations, geriatric polypharmacy, and the central role of language access and cultural competency. Reason from demographics to clinical and communication priorities.

NSU-COM is a large, established school. With ~237 students, self-direction matters. Describe a time you built and stuck to a rigorous study system, and how you'd adapt it to COMLEX-USA preparation here.

Concrete, disciplined study system (spaced repetition, active recall, integrated review) scaled to a large-class environment and the COMLEX-USA series, with USMLE often added. Show you won't get lost in a big cohort.

On NSU's shared health-sciences campus, you're in an interprofessional case session and a pharmacy student flags a serious interaction you'd missed, somewhat bluntly. How do you respond in the moment and afterward?

Grace under correction, valuing each profession's expertise, putting patient safety first, and modeling collaborative humility. Show interprofessional teamwork as a strength of the NSU model.

An undocumented patient confides that they've been skipping care for a serious condition out of fear that seeking treatment will expose them. How do you respond ethically?

Duty to care regardless of immigration status, confidentiality, building trust, and connecting to safety-net and FQHC resources. Show patient advocacy and awareness of fear as a structural barrier in South Florida.

Why osteopathic medicine in a setting like South Florida specifically? How do whole-person care and OMT fit a population this diverse and this heavily geriatric?

Whole-person, culturally attuned care across a diverse population, OMT for musculoskeletal and chronic pain in the elderly, and a prevention orientation. Ground the DO choice in shadowing and the South Florida context.

If NSU-affiliated clinics found that Haitian patients completed follow-up care at much lower rates than other groups, what would you want to understand before concluding anything?

Language, trust, cultural health beliefs, transport, cost, and prior experiences — investigated through socioeconomic and lived-experience lenses, never treating ethnicity as a biological cause. Avoid patient-blame framing.