Family Medicine Residency Interview Questions and Answers

Family medicine residency is a 3 years training program. ACGME certified programs will train the resident to provide appropriate care in both inpatient and outpatient setting. It provides well-structured teaching rotations to ensure that the resident will master the required skills including bedside teaching and outpatient continuity care. The family medicine resident will also be trained to have an ideal doctor-patient relationship and deal with the psycho-social problems. Most residency programs curriculums will include rotations in the medicine (including ICU/CCU), pediatrics, neonatology, obstetrics, dermatology, ophthalmology, ENT, psychiatric and behavioral medicine, urology, and orthopedics departments.

This booklet will help you through your interview process. The interview questions you will encounter in any program are divided into two main groups:


1-Family Medicine interview questions. These are basics of family medicine you need to know to meet the criteria to be on the top of the PD rank list on the NRMP match algorithm. This booklet is all about these FM questions and answers, they are worthed reading them and memorizing the answers so you don’t get pushed down the rank list.

2-General questions asked by the program directors, faculty members and chief residents (already posted on our website, the link is in the last page of this book together with other helpful links)

The questions and answers present in this booklet were collected over the past couple of years from thousands of applicants we were coaching who were interviewing in various family medicine programs. We are providing you with the accurate answers so that you don’t have to go and waste your time searching for them. The importance of these questions is that during various interviews you will go to you will be asked almost the same questions which are very well known medical FM interview questions.

We strongly encourage you to study these questions and answers because answering them correctly will:

1-Give the program director and faculty a positive impression about you.

2-The more correct answers you have, the higher will be your rank in the match algorithm.

3-It will give the faculty a good impression about your medical knowledge background and hence will minimize the unnecessary further meticulous search in your profile.

4-The chief residents in turn will also recommend you to be ranked high when they do the ranking session with the faculty.

5-You will earn confidence in yourself especially when going to further residency interviews.


The first important question you will be asked is “Present a case you encountered during your clinical rotations”. It is better to be prepared ahead of time to answer this question with some degree of professionalism to show them that you are not only clinically competent but also medical knowledge wise sound!


Before proceeding to the medical questions and answers you will face during FM residency interviews let us talk a little bit about FM match statistics:

The average scores for AMGs who matched in Family Medicine in USMLE step 1 and 2 CK are 213 and 225 respectively.


For IMGs who matched in Family Medicine the average scores in USMLE step 1 and 2 CK are 204 and 208 respectively.


About 40% of positions offered in the match go to AMGs and about 60% of positions go to IMGs. About 97% of AMGs who apply do match and about 45% of IMGs who apply do successfully match , as well as 40% who apply to the post match SOAP in FM also get positions.