The MMI is not only for medicine: pharmacy, optometry, imaging, audiology and dietetics

Search for anything about the Auckland MMI and every result assumes you are applying to medicine. The guides say medicine. The forums say medicine. The paid courses are sold as medical interview preparation. And yet, on UoA’s own published numbers, most people sitting this interview are not applying to medicine.

For 2026 entry there were 4,283 applications across the six programmes that use the MMI. 1,718 of those were for MBChB. That leaves roughly 2,565 applications, about 60 percent of the total, from people sitting the identical interview with essentially nothing written for them.

The six programmes

Pharmacy alone drew 873 applications for 2026 entry, half as many again as it drew the year before. Optometry and medical imaging both grew by well over a third. Audiology and dietetics are much smaller and both went slightly down.

You sit one MMI, even if you applied to several

This is the fact that reframes the whole thing, and it is the reason nobody writes programme-specific interview content: there is no programme-specific interview to write about. One MMI, one set of seven scenarios, the same fixed order for everybody in the country, whichever of the six programmes you are being considered for.

Which means the seven domains and the eight attributes are your mark scheme regardless of the degree you want. They are all here.

So what does change if you are not applying to medicine?

Not the format, not the domains, not the attributes, not the clock. What changes is what you bring to two of the seven stations, and it changes more than most people expect.

Career choice

This station asks about your motivation, your goals and how you decide. If you are applying to optometry, an answer about wanting to be a doctor is not a slightly weaker answer, it is an answer to a different question. And "I want to help people" carries even less here than it does for medicine, because the obvious follow up is why this profession specifically and not one of the other five in the same room.

The good version knows what the job actually involves day to day. Pharmacy is not dispensing. Medical imaging is not pressing a button. Audiology sits with people at some of the most disorienting moments of their lives. Dietetics runs straight into food security and cost, which is a health equity conversation whether you go looking for one or not.

Healthcare issue or topic

UoA says you will be asked about a healthcare issue, often something that has been in the media, and that you are not being marked on depth of knowledge but are expected to know enough to form an opinion and express it. Nothing there restricts the topic to medicine, and nothing stops you bringing your own profession’s version of an issue to it. Access to hearing aids, the cost of glasses, waiting lists for scans and rural pharmacy closures are all real New Zealand health equity problems and all of them are better answers than a half-remembered fact about hospital funding.

One thing that is genuinely different: how your GPA is counted

The interview is common, the academic ranking is not. UoA states that final ranking GPA uses the core four courses for MBChB and BPharm, and the core seven courses for Optometry and Medical Imaging.

We are not going to print the course lists here, because UoA’s own page currently gives two different chemistry course codes depending on which entry year you read. Check the programme page for the degree you actually want, and check it against the faculty if it is going to decide an enrolment.

How to read the numbers above, and how not to

UoA also reports that in 2025 it invited more than 1,300 unique applicants and scheduled 1,224 interviews. That is interviews scheduled, not students who sat, and it is not broken down by programme.

So no interview rate for any individual programme can be calculated from it. If you see a page telling you what percentage of pharmacy or optometry applicants get an interview, that number was invented, because UoA has not published the input it would need.

The practical upshot

• Prepare for the MMI exactly as a medicine applicant would, because it is the same interview on the same day with the same mark scheme.
• Do the extra work on Career choice, where a generic health answer is most visibly not yours.
• Bring your own profession’s health issues to the healthcare topic station. They are real and they are less rehearsed.
• Check the academic ranking rules for your specific programme, because those genuinely differ.

The format itself is here, and the dates and what to have on the desk are here.