.png)
An Unorthodox Approach to the Fellowship Process: Part 3 – Don't Be a STAR Robot
- Ravi Parekh, PharmD
- Jul 9
- 2 min read
Author: Ravi Parekh
Views are my own and do not reflect my employer.
The behavioral question prep was something I started in the summer and treated with the same seriousness as the LOI. I built a dedicated document with a list of common behavioral questions, the kind that come up in every fellowship interview without exception: tell me about a time you had a conflict with a colleague, a time you failed, a time you had to deliver difficult feedback, a time you were working under pressure with competing deadlines.
For each question, I did not just write a canned answer. I went back through my experiences from rotations, internships, leadership roles, and research projects and mapped out which specific stories I wanted to pull for each one. The document became a living reference. I added to it all summer as new experiences accumulated and as I got better at identifying which stories were actually compelling versus which ones just felt safe.
The format I used for each answer was STAR, situation, task, action, result. But I was intentional about not letting it sound like STAR. The method is a framework, not a script, and the candidates who over-index on it end up sounding robotic and rehearsed in a way that is immediately obvious to anyone who has conducted more than ten interviews. What I worked on was using STAR as the underlying structure while humanizing every single story on top of it. That meant making sure each answer had a moment that felt real, a detail that was specific to me, a reflection that showed I actually thought about what happened rather than just recounting it.
The goal was for every answer to sound like something I was telling a colleague over coffee, not something I had rehearsed in front of a mirror. Fellowship interviewers are not just evaluating whether your answer hits the right checkboxes. They are evaluating whether they want to work with you for the next two years. The version of you that comes through in a humanized story is a much better pitch than the version that sounds like it came out of a career services handout.
Comments