Learning to Talk Like a Surgeon - Sorena Afshar on Communication in Surgery and Job Interview Prep

How can we better prepare ourselves and our trainees for sitting the oral exam? By this point, residents have typically already passed their written exam. And so they have the book knowledge, but how do you get that book knowledge from inside your brain to your mouth and obvious obviously, onto your examiner and onto their page? To answer that question, I invited Dr. Sorena Afshar onto the podcast this week.

Dr. Afshar is a colorectal surgeon in the UK and has a keen interest in communication and surgery. He's also the founder of Surgical Minds, which is a website where you can actually use an AI model to practice your oral exams. We have a fascinating discussion in this episode about language and the nature of learning a new language, what it means to be an immigrant, and how you see your non-native language. But then we really get into the idea of the oral exam, or the Viva.

What is the point of the oral exam? How can we best prepare for it? And what are some of Dr. Afshar's tips and tricks for bringing the best of yourself to the oral exam? We also talk about his attempts to use AI to actually examine something quite difficult to tell a computer to understand.

 Links:

1. https://surgicalminds.com
2. Sorena Afshar - The Pears Cumbria School of Medicine