McMaster Engineering Interview Questions and How to Answer

McMaster Engineering’s supplementary application is three recorded video answers and one short written one on Kira Talent, with ten seconds to think before each recording. Here are the question themes to prepare for, practice questions written to the format, two worked STAR answers timed to two minutes, and the dates for Fall 2027 entry.

By the AcceptMe team 9 min read Updated

The format, from McMaster’s page

  • Platform: Kira Talent. You get an email invitation within about ten business days of submitting your OUAC application, and McMaster says to check your junk folder.
  • Three video questions, each with 10 seconds to prepare and 2 minutes to respond.
  • One written question, with 7 minutes in total to read and respond.
  • No redo. Once you submit an answer you cannot change it. Kira’s practice questions are available before you start, to check your camera and learn the interface.
  • One application covers Engineering 1, Computer Science, iBioMed and Bachelor of Technology. $50 CAD, paid through OUAC as a McMaster program fee.
  • Not technical. McMaster says there are no skill-testing or technical questions. It publishes the four things it assesses: engagement, collaboration, innovation and creativity, and resilience.
Dates for Fall 2027 entry. The application opens October 1, 2026; McMaster recommends submitting by November 26, 2026; the deadline is January 28, 2027 at 11:59 pm Eastern. You can complete it any time after your invitation arrives, which is why most people do it in January. Confirm on McMaster Engineering’s supplementary application page.

Who reads it: McMaster has said publicly that every applicant who meets the academic threshold completes the assessment, around 13,000 a year, that each one is scored by at least two trained raters through Kira’s reviewer service, and that scores come back by the end of February for first-round offers in March. The rubric isn’t published and individual scores aren’t released. The companion supp app guide goes deeper on the four competencies and what ten seconds does to your preparation; this guide is about the questions.

The themes to prepare for

McMaster doesn’t publish its questions and they vary between applicants, so nobody can give you the list. What can be said is that the questions track the four published competencies closely, and the themes below are the shapes they tend to take. Treat these as shapes to prepare for, not as prompts to memorise.

  • An initiative outside the classroom. The most common shape, in words close to “tell me about an initiative you took outside of school.” This is McMaster’s engagement competency in question form.
  • Working with others when it wasn’t easy. A group that stalled, a disagreement, someone who didn’t pull their weight, how you handled it. Collaboration.
  • A creative solution. A time you solved something an unusual way, or improved how something was done. Innovation and creativity.
  • Something that went wrong. A failure, a setback, feedback that stung, what you did after. Resilience.
  • Scenario questions. A short situation (a team member isn’t responding, a plan falls apart the day before) and “what would you do?” These test the same competencies from the other direction.
  • The written one is usually a reflective or values question: what you’d bring, why engineering, what you learned from something. Seven minutes, typed.

Four competencies, three video questions, and the themes map onto them almost one to one. Prepare one story per competency and you have the interview covered whichever three you draw.

Fifteen practice questions in the Mac Eng format

AcceptMe practice questions, written to the format and the four published competencies. They are not McMaster’s questions. Do them with a ten-second timer and a two-minute clock, on camera, and don’t look at the list first.

  1. Tell us about something you started outside of school that nobody asked you to start. What did it take to keep it going?
  2. Describe a time a group you were part of stopped working. What did you do, specifically, and what happened next?
  3. Tell us about a problem you solved in a way other people hadn’t thought of. Why did the obvious way not work?
  4. Describe a time you got feedback you didn’t want to hear. What changed in the following month?
  5. You’re in a four-person design group and one member has gone silent for a week with the deadline in three days. What do you do today?
  6. Tell us about a time you had to learn something quickly, on your own, to get something done.
  7. Describe a time you had a responsibility that affected other people, and a moment you nearly got it wrong.
  8. Tell us about something you built, fixed or improved with your hands. What did the first version get wrong?
  9. Describe a time you were the least experienced person in the room. How did you contribute anyway?
  10. Tell us about a commitment you kept for more than a year after it stopped being fun.
  11. Your team’s plan for a competition falls apart the night before. Walk us through your first hour.
  12. Describe a time you helped someone else succeed at something and got no credit for it.
  13. Tell us about a time you changed your mind because of something a teammate said.
  14. Describe a time you used something you learned in one setting to fix a problem in a completely different one.
  15. Written, seven minutes: what is one thing about how you work that you’d want your first-year project group to know on day one, and how do you know it’s true?

Two worked STAR answers

Two minutes is about 280 spoken words. With ten seconds of prep you can’t plan, so the structure has to be a habit: one sentence of situation, one of what you had to do, most of the time on what you actually did, a result with a number, one line you learned. The STAR method interview guide has the general shape; these are it at Mac Eng length.

Initiative outside the classroom, about 1:50

Two summers ago my street had a problem with the storm drain at the bottom of the hill: every heavy rain it clogged with leaves and the road flooded, and twice water got into my neighbour’s garage. Nobody had reported it because everyone assumed someone else had. I decided to treat it as my problem. First I reported it to the city through the app and got a ticket number, which was the easy part. Then I did the part the city wouldn’t: I knocked on the eleven houses on the hill, explained the drain, and asked if anyone would take a week each to clear the grate before a forecasted storm. Seven said yes. I made a shared calendar and a group chat, and I took the first two weeks myself so people could see it took five minutes. I also measured, with a tape and a phone, how high the water got at the curb during the next three storms, so we had something to send the city. The road didn’t flood once that summer, the garage stayed dry, and in October the city replaced the grate with a larger one, which I don’t think would have happened without the photos and the ticket number. Four of the seven neighbours are still on the rota two years on. What I learned is that the thing people call initiative is mostly the willingness to be the one who knocks on the door, and that measuring the problem is what turns a complaint into something a city engineer can act on.

Working with others when it wasn’t easy, about 1:55

In Grade 11 I was on a four-person team building a bridge for a physics competition, and two weeks before the deadline our design was failing at about half the load we needed. Two of us wanted to start over with a truss; the other two, who’d done most of the building, wanted to reinforce what we had. It turned into an argument about whose work was being thrown away, and for three days nothing got built. What I did was stop arguing about the design and propose a test: we’d build a small section of each approach on Saturday, load them to failure, and go with whichever held more per gram. Everyone could agree to that because it wasn’t anyone’s opinion. The truss section held about 40 percent more, but the test also showed the original joints were failing before the members, which was a gluing problem, not a design problem. So we built the truss, but with the joint technique the other two had worked out, which meant their work wasn’t wasted after all. The final bridge held 31 kilograms at 22 grams, which put us fourth of nineteen, up from a design that was on track to fail the minimum. The thing I’d point to is that the disagreement wasn’t really about trusses; it was about people feeling their work was being thrown out. Finding a test we could all accept fixed both, and I’ve used the same move on group projects since: when two people are sure, ask what would prove it.

Both answers name the situation in one sentence, spend most of the time on decisions, give numbers, and end on something learned that isn’t “teamwork is important.” The second one also credits the other side, which reviewers scoring collaboration are listening for.

The written question at seven minutes

Seven minutes to read and type is about 150 to 200 words if you don’t stall. Decide the point in the first thirty seconds, write it as your first sentence, spend four minutes on one concrete example, and use the last minute to end on a sentence rather than mid-thought. There is no word limit, and length is not the goal; a clear 160 words beats a rushed 300. Do not open a document elsewhere to draft; the clock doesn’t stop and Kira is recording that you’re there.

Mistakes specific to the Mac Eng interview

  • Using the ten seconds to choose a story. You don’t have time to choose; you have time to recognise which of your four prepared stories fits. Choosing happens in December.
  • Answering the competency instead of the question. “I’m very resilient” is not a story. The reviewers score what you did.
  • A two-minute answer that ends at 50 seconds. Reviewers notice a minute of silence. If you run short, add the result and what you’d do differently.
  • Reading Kira’s practice questions as a preview. They teach the interface. The Kira Talent interview guide explains what they do and don’t tell you.
  • Doing it the night of January 28. Invitations can take ten business days and the platform doesn’t care about your Wi-Fi. McMaster’s recommended date is November 26 for a reason.

The next thing to do

If your initiative story is thin, the initiative question guide shows how to find one in a part-time job or a thing you fixed at home, and why the story doesn’t need to be big to score. If Waterloo is also on your list, its AIF and video interview guide covers a single video question with a longer prep window, which is a different skill from Mac’s ten seconds, and both are due within four days of each other. And if you want to know how much this interview can move an application against your top 6, the how-much-does-it-matter guide lays out what McMaster and the others have actually said about weighting. Then put the storm drain story on a clock: AcceptMe’s custom interviews will hand you an unseen Mac-style question with a ten-second prep window and a two-minute answer, three in a row plus a seven-minute write, and the transcript will show you whether your first sentence arrived before the timer did.

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