May I Drink Coffee?

 Student Perspective 

Interviewing in the COVID-19 Era

May I Drink Coffee?

Olivia Davies – MCW-Milwaukee medical student Class of 2021

I’ve tried three different zoom set ups, four if you count the one from my couch that I joke about. One of my friends has a bouquet of flowers set stage left on her screen, just in sight. I play with the tilt of my monitor to see if I can show the top leaves of my split leaf philodendron which sits on the floor next to me. Staring at the white wall behind me through the screen monitor I catch a glisten – is that grease? I turn around to examine it in real time, yup, grease. How did that even get there? To be fair, I am sitting next to the wall where our dinner table was just a mere two days ago before I declared it my new interview spot.

“Do you have the Milk Street Cookbook?” my fiancé calls from the other room. I sigh, removing it from the stack underneath my laptop. I know I should be grateful he’s making the grocery list this week (like he does almost every week), but doesn’t he understand we only have so many laptop-sized books in this apartment to elevate the built-in camera? I realize using Milk Street as my laptop prop probably won’t be sustainable.

One of my friends asked if I was planning to wear heels ... I guess I hadn’t thought of that. She smiles matter-of-factly and says, “I am, they make me feel put together, even if no one will see them.” She has a point, I think. I stand up shimmying out of the screen to go look for my suit jacket. Finally unearthing it from my closet I gasp at how dated it looks, were flashy gold buttons “in” five years ago? This won’t play well on camera. I sit back down and start to look for a simple suit jacket online.

Reaching for my phone to text my friend back, I glimpse my half hunched over frame in the monitor. “I think I’ll wear heels, too,” I say, un-pretzel-ing my feet from beneath me and placing them firmly on the ground. Before setting down my phone, I fire off one more text, “Do you think it’s OK to drink coffee?”

Olivia Davies is a fourth-year medical student at MCW-Milwaukee who is in the midst of applying for her dermatology residency. She is an associate editor of the Transformational Times. Follow her at @oliviamtdavies.