ST3 & CST interview preparation: every option compared (2027 cycle)

There are five ways UK surgical trainees actually prepare for selection interviews, and none of them is sufficient alone. This page maps all five — paid and free, including the categories that compete with our own tool — because the honest answer to “what should I use?” is a combination, and the right combination depends on how you learn, what you can spend, and how much time remains before your interview.

Live courses and mock interview days

One-day (sometimes half-day) taught courses with mock circuits, offered by several established medical-interview education providers for both CST and ST3 specialties — a search for your specialty plus “interview course” will surface the current options. Strengths: a structured curriculum delivered in one sitting, human examiners who can probe your reasoning, and the focus that comes from having paid for a date in the diary. Limits: it happens once, cohort sizes constrain your individual mock time, and a single mock per station is calibration, not rehearsal.

Question banks and written resources

Subscription banks of interview questions, model answer structures, and portfolio guidance — several well-established ones exist for CST in particular. Strengths: cheap, comprehensive coverage of what has come up before, good for building answer frameworks. Limits: reading model answers is input, not output — the interview marks what comes out of your mouth under a timer, and banks don’t test that.

Free community resources

Genuinely good and genuinely free: Mind the Bleep for application and interview overviews, specialty-run resources like ThePlasticsSHO for plastics applicants, trainee-association events (PLASTA, ASiT, BOTA), deanery mock circuits where offered, and our own free station-by-station guides. If your budget is zero, a disciplined combination of free guides plus peer mocks covers a great deal of the ground.

Peer and senior mock interviews

The traditional core of preparation: a colleague reads the brief, times you, and pushes back; a registrar or consultant who has sat on panels calibrates you against the real standard. Nothing replaces senior judgement — if you can get two or three senior mocks, take them. The practical failure mode is logistics: rota gaps, seniors’ time, and the awkward truth that most candidates get far fewer spoken repetitions than they need because arranging each one costs more effort than doing it.

AI interview practice tools

The newest category: software that plays the examiner so you can rehearse out loud on demand. A small number of tools now cover UK specialty interviews, with different specialty ranges and formats — Reviva is ours. What distinguishes Reviva within the category: interviews are voice-based and timed to the real station formats, the examiner interrupts and probes the way a panel does, and every attempt is marked on the official national scales (0–5 for plastics, 0–6 for CST) with a structured spoken debrief. The library is 180+ hand-crafted scenarios across CST and ST3 plastic surgery, anchored to published guidance. Every specialty includes free sample stations, so you can judge the examiner yourself before paying anything — pricing is here. Whichever tool you consider, apply the same test: does it make you speak under a timer, and does it mark you the way the real panel will?

How to combine them

• Learn the format — free guides (ours or others’) plus the official person specification and applicant guidance. Know the stations and the marking scale before anything else.
• Build structures — a question bank or course gives you frameworks for each scenario family; so does studying worked examples.
• Rehearse aloud, repeatedly, against the clock — this is where most preparation actually fails. Peers, seniors, or an AI examiner; ideally more than one of those.
• Calibrate with seniors near the end — one or two senior mocks in the final fortnight tell you whether your rehearsed answers land at the level the panel expects.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best way to prepare for a CST or ST3 interview?

Combine three things: learn the station formats and marking criteria (free guides and official documents), build answer structures for common scenario types, and rehearse out loud under time pressure — repeatedly. Most candidates over-invest in reading and under-invest in spoken rehearsal, which is what the interview actually tests.

Are interview courses worth it?

A good course gives structured teaching and human feedback in a single day, which suits candidates who want a curriculum and a deadline. The limitation is volume: one day of teaching is not the same as the dozens of spoken repetitions most candidates need. Courses pair well with ongoing rehearsal, whether with peers or a practice tool.

Can AI interview tools replace mock interviews with seniors?

No — a registrar or consultant who has sat on panels brings judgement no tool replicates. AI practice tools solve a different problem: unlimited timed repetitions without needing to coordinate anyone else’s diary. Use seniors for calibration and AI or peers for volume.

When should I start preparing for the 2027 interviews?

CST applications typically open in late October with interviews from January; ST3 plastic surgery applications typically open in late November with interviews in February–March. Working back from a January–March interview, starting structured preparation in the autumn is comfortable; starting after shortlisting is a sprint.

Disclosure. This page is written and maintained by Reviva, which makes one of the tools in the AI-practice category — we’ve declared that bias and kept the descriptions factual. We deliberately don’t name commercial providers in other categories: offerings and pricing change quickly, so search the category and judge the current options yourself. Interview formats should be confirmed against the official national recruitment pages on Oriel / NHS England.