About The Schema
Why I built it
Hey, it’s Dev, you may know me as Doctor Devify online! I’m an internal medicine resident doctor in the NHS. Preparing for my own specialty training interviews, I found it a struggle to get a one-to-one mock interview: most were run one interviewer to four candidates, and the platforms I found bundled them into courses that cost hundreds of pounds. There was nowhere to simply book one mock with someone who had done the interview well and ranked highly, at least nowhere I could find. Plus, not everyone who did well wants to build a following on social media, but they do want to teach!
So The Schema handles all of it, end to end: finding the right interviewer, booking, the payment, all the boring admin basically, and the interview itself, held here in your browser, so nobody pays for Zoom, Teams or any other subscription. It’s safe for interviewers too: a doctor running a mock for someone they’ve never met shouldn’t have to worry about being paid, so The Schema takes that risk on. And because The Schema is independent, so are its reviews: only a candidate who had a paid session can leave one.
Doctor Devify
The Schema is part of the Doctor Devify suite. I started Doctor Devify in 2023 to put NHS policy, workforce reform and system change into plain language for the people they land on. It has taken me from the ward round to national government campaigns and to 10 Downing Street, and it now includes the Doctor Devify Hub, resources for doctors at every stage. More of that story is on doctordevify.com.
The name and the mark
A schema is a structure the mind builds from experience, so it can make sense of something new. A specialty interview tests both sides of that. The clinical stations need real knowledge, and the frameworks for working through a scenario. Then the panel wants to see how you use them when the question is one you have not met before, rather than a script you have learned. The nearest thing to that experience is practising with a doctor who has already been through the interview. That is why the platform carries the name.
The S is two quotation marks, one opening and one closing. However much you know, it reaches the panel as speech: the words you choose, the order you put them in, the way you hold a pause. The marks stand for that moment, when what you think becomes what you say.
