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What CRNA School interview questions are you most likely to be asked?
When you face the CRNA school interviewing committee, you’ll be asked a lot of anticipated and unanticipated questions.
Are you prepared to answer them?
The truth is, when you are under the pressure of an interview, you will not suddenly do your best. Instead, you will revert to your highest level of preparation.
Lucky for you, I’ve done some of the tedious work for you and made the preparation easier.
To save you some time, I’ve scoured the internet and categorized interview questions by groups to make them easier to work through.
When you’re preparing for your CRNA School interview, it’s important that you don’t get tunnel vision.
In fact, so many RNs focus exclusively on clinical questions and forget to prepare for the more general ones. To make sure that doesn’t happen to you, remember to prepare your answers to questions from each of the following categories:
- General (why do you want to be a CRNA?)
- Questions about your support system
- Your career goals
- Program specific questions (why this program over others)
- Educational history
- Work history
- Ethical
- Clinical (study your CCRN questions)
- Anesthesia profession
- Questions to ask the school
General Questions
Here, I’ll share with you the 20 most frequently asked general CRNA school interview questions. You’ll notice they’re not much different than the interview questions you nailed when you became an RN and got hired for your first job.
- Why do you want to become a CRNA? (This question WILL be asked. It’s THE most commonly asked question in the CRNA school interview). Make sure your answer is no more than 2 minutes long and has a beginning, middle, and end.
- What would make you a successful CRNA?
- Tell us about yourself and your experience.
- Tell us about your strengths and weaknesses?
- How do you describe success?
- How do you handle conflict?Give a scenario.
- What leadership experience do you have?
- Tell us about volunteer work or community service you have done.
- What are your roles and responsibilities?
- Who is the greatest influence in your life?
- How do others see you?
- If you could be any animal, what would it be, and why?
- What is your favorite color and why?
- If you were a number, what would it be?
- What do you want your tombstone to say?
- What do your enemies say about you?
- If you could have a meal with any 3 people in the world, who would they be?
- What are your two most important achievements as a nurse?
- You seem so confident; are you prepared to be a novice again?
- How do you handle criticism?
Questions about your Support System
CRNA school interview questions about your support system can be tricky, because you may end up sharing more personal details about yourself than you meant to. When preparing your answers, be clear on what information they must know, and what is “too much” to share about your personal life. For example, you may want to avoid sharing anything that might trigger an unconscious (or conscious) bias against you. If you are prone to sharing too much, preparing your answers ahead of time will help you greatly.
- How well have you prepared?
- Do you have support? Is your spouse/partner fully supportive of this effort?
- What is your support system like?
- How do you feel about giving up a paying job for 2-3 years?
What financial preparations have you made to ensure that you will not have financial difficulties during anesthesia school? - What preparations have you made to prepare for the rigors of CRNA School?
- Do you foresee any barriers to your education? (Finances, time commitments)
CRNA School Interview Questions About Your Career goals
When you’re preparing your answers to the CRNA school interview questions about your career goals, remember to combine consider both logic and emotion. When you have to wake up at 4am to spend all day in clinicals after very little sleep, you’ll need to have a strong “why” to keep you going. Otherwise, you may struggle through the program, or worse yet, decide half way through that it’s not worth the effort.
- What motivates you to pursue an advanced nurse practitioner role?
- Why did you choose this career field?
- What are your short and long term career goals?
- Where do you see yourself in five or ten years from now?
- Describe personal, professional, and educational attributes that make you uniquely suitable for this career field.
- How do you feel that your background will influence your research, clinical work and areas of interest?
- What changes in your personal or professional lifestyle do you anticipate as a graduate student and as an advanced nurse practitioner?
- How have you planned for this?
- What is your single strongest personality trait that will help you in your academic and professional career as a CRNA?
- What is your most important weakness that you will struggle with during your academic and professional career?
- As a member of a small and elite profession, what obligations will you have, if any, toward this profession?
- Tell me about your clinical CRNA shadow experience? How did that influence you to pursue this profession?
- What have you done to develop or change in the last few years?
- Why did you decide to go from being a _______ to being a nurse to applying to CRNA School?
To see our full list of CRNA School Interview Questions, check out Interview Secrets, our #1 interview resource – now available through AllCRNAConnect.com.
Inside Interview Secrets, you’ll find questions on the following topics:
- Program specific questions (why this program over others)
- Educational history
- Work history
- Ethical
- Clinical
- Anesthesia profession
- Questions to ask the school
In addition to CRNA school interview questions, you will find a workbook and guidance on the practicalities of attending an interview.
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