UKM Interview for B. Pharmacy

Alhamdulillah. After a few works needed to be done on UKM's website, I'm finally registered as a UKM student for an undergraduate programme - Bachelor of Pharmacy with Honours!

I'm going to share with you guys on the interview I got in last June. I don't have pictures taken on that day so it's just going to be a really long,wordful post hehe. 

OK so first of, you need to fill in your UPU online form with your Uni courses up to 5 compulsory choices and 7 optional choices (12 overall). This is before you get your sem 2 finals results. Only the first 4 columns were available for interview-needed courses, the fifth one wasn't. Meaning that you have to prioritize all interviewed courses you want to apply and make them as the top 4. The fifth one is up to you. Then you wait for the dates the Unis will reveal if your iv application was accepted or not. 

I got all IV offers (not  bragging) but I attended 2 out of 3. My UKM IV was on June 13th, but I postponed it to June 14th cause I felt unwell as I just got back from my Perth trip a day before. My dad drove me to KL that Friday morning - the IV started on 10:30am so we had plenty of time to travel that morning. But of course, I had butterflies in my stomach and barely ate (and I accidentally started my morning drinking Berroca, really not a good idea) so I felt nauseous and eventually vomited a lil yikes but I got all OK after that.

10 minutes before the session started, I went to the pharmacy faculty cause I was scared if I get lost wandering around the campus lol. But I met a lady, maybe she was a lecturer, and she asked me where I wanted to head to so I told her to the IV venue. So she brought me to a senior/staff idk and he showed me and another 2 lost girls to the stairs leading to a laboratory. There were a lot of chairs lined up outside the lab and got sooo many candidates arrived already walao I thought I was early?! So I sat down and played with my phone as always. Then got a girl on my left side tegur me and asked "Awak kan yang dapat nombor satu dalam midtest haritu?". Terkejut sisturrr. So me, assuming that she was also from Dengkil and said "Aah..." shyly and gave her a smile. I'm a shy person ok! Then we started chit-chatting while waiting for our turn to enter the lab. We both shared our UPU choices and all. We got some UKM merch but one of the people in charge and then it was our turn..... Thun thun thunnnnnn.

6 of us were told to enter the lab and get our names checked for attending the IV. Then got two tables for checking our documents by another two people in charge. Lined up as always, then it was my turn then yada yada yada then I was asked to line up again next to a table with other candidates. The lab was really big and was split into two sections - the docs checking section and the stations section. Why stations? Haaaa wait lah. I waited for another 15 minutes I guess until they needed 3 new candidates (following the line we made) to enter the second section, which I was included. So I stepped into the area, took a deep breath and saw a very bright room with at least 15 lab tables - each table with 2 representatives and 1 student. I kinda drew what I saw but do NOT judge 😒

As I was saying, those beige boxes were the lab tables labelled with 1 to 5 (nearest to us to the furthest). Those were the stations we were needed to go through. I stood in front of the middle row. The clock on the TV rang(there was a whole timer ok!) and it was my (and another 2 candidates') turn to sit on the first station. Each station requires you to finish the tasks within 5 minutes. Disclaimer: Questions asked may not be repeated in the next years.

First station:The first one wasn't scary. They wanted me to introduce myself, what my parents do for a living and etc. Then they started asking questions like "Do you read newspapers or watch the news?" then they came up with a question like "There's a scenario in Malaysia where doctors do not actually favor pharmacists. Why do you think is that?" Ambik kau. Jawab lah sendiri. Then they asked me something I'd prefer this or that - clearly I forgot what they asked me that day.... Moving on.

Second station:This station needed us to answer in BM. Aha, you read that right. So the question was like "Anda telah mencipta satu alat perubatan dan ingin mengeluarkannya sebagai produk syarikat anda. Tetapi terdapat satu lagi syarikat yang telah membina alat tersebut hampir sama dengan alat yang kamu cipta dan telah menjualnya terlebih dahulu. Adakah anda akan membatalkan rancangan anda untuk menjual ciptaan kamu itu atau tetap akan mengeluarkannya? "Me: oh crap. I did my best in BM and gladly they both loved my answers! I got really happy when they went like "BAGUSSS!" Ok maybe I exaggerated but they really said that. 

Third station: This station didn't care what language we wanted to answer in. I gave my shot in both English and BM but I didn't rojak in one sentence. Just to be safe. The question: "You are a doctor. Imagine that you have a patient who's at stage 4 cancer, begs you for higher doses of pain reliever. But those higher doses may cause the patient to have kidney failure. As a doctor, what would you do?" Critical thinking uolssss. So trust your heart and instincts, answer them as you are a doctor!

Fourth station:This one was totally different from the first three stations. YOU'D HAVE TO ACT!!! We were needed to act as if we were pharmacists trying to prescribe medicine to our patients. Don't worry, they provided all the infos and instructions you needed to follow on a paper. You just needed to make your own sentences. If you manage to pull it off within seconds, they'd ask you more like "Boleh ke kalau makan ubat ni sambil driving?"Again, don't worry. The paper got everything they wanted to hear. 

Fifth station:The easiest! Only when you restudied basic skills for Chemistry 😆 There were 3 questions you needed to answer. A pencil, a calculator and an answer sheet were provided - though they mentioned earlier to prepare our own pencil case but oh well. The questions were all calculation based. Like about dilution, mass of reactant and another I forgot. But kacang je lah. Answer within 5 minutes also and then you're done!

And there you have it. I felt relieved when I finished the IV. It was more like an activity more than an interview! Compared to UM's interview I felt better in this one. One thing I wanted to stress on based on my experiences from both UM and UKM interviews - UM questions were more about usas a student.They asked questions like "What if we had enough quota and couldn't let you study in UM?"or "Why do you want to study here in UM?". Something like those. But on the other hand, UKM questions were more about usas pharmacists/doctors. They wanted to see what we would do in the future. Yall get what I mean right? Please do. I didn't write this for 2 hours for yall not to understand 😤.

Anyways, if you have any questions about this interview, feel free to comment down below. Hope this helps. Later! 💗