Maximise your performance at the 2025 Core Surgical Interview

The application process for Core Surgical Training (CST) has experienced a shake-up in recent years. In 2022, the JCST announced (with rather late notice!) that the MSRA would be used for shortlisting candidates for interview, and this continues for the 2024 recruitment cycle.

After you have scored highly in your MSRA, your interview makes up 60% of your overall score. The process is highly competitive, with over 1200 applicants being interviewed for 609 places. To score well and get your first choice job, you need to prepare for the interview like you would your exams.

So how do I prepare for my interview?

Effective preparation focuses on two areas: Knowledge and Delivery.

The Core Surgical interview is knowledge-intensive. If you don’t have the knowledge, it doesn’t matter how slick your delivery is, you won’t get the marks.

Equally, you might have consultant level knowledge, but if you don’t deliver it well, all those hours preparing will be for nothing!

This is your opportunity to demonstrate why you would make a good trainee.

This is where we come in…

The Medibuddy Online 2024 Core Surgical Interview Question Bank

If you’ve spoken to current CST trainees about how they prepared for their interview, you’ve probably already heard about our question bank. We are proud to have developed over 40 carefully crafted scenarios that mirror the interview. We’ve been doing this for a while now and know how important it is for the question bank to be up-to-date. Each year, our high-scoring editors make changes to the question bank to ensure it reflects the most recent interviews. Our team has secured some of the most competitive core surgical jobs in previous rounds, and we want to help you do the same!

Best of all, we’ve presented it in an easy to understand format, on a platform that you can access anywhere.

What will I learn from the Core Surgical Online Interview Question Bank?

The 2024 interview is broken down into two ten-minute stations focusing on management and clinical scenarios, and we have presented our questions exactly like they appear in the interview.

Why have we done this?

When we were preparing for our specialty interviews, getting accurate and helpful advice felt near impossible. The recruitment websites only provide you with so much information, and whilst asking those who have done the interview is useful, sometimes all it did was make us more nervous, instead of actually helping us to prepare.

Since then, we have been filtering through all the good and bad resources, so you don’t have to, and our high-scoring surgical trainees, have put it all together in one place, the Medibuddy Online Core Surgical Training Interview Question Bank.