HadiBody

Shouldn't be more difficult now to conduct research though?
 
I mean as you mentioned, a lot of PhD candidates couldn't even get to the finish line when their studies involved intense research activities.
 
I know schools don't expect students to publish, but they look very good on an application, and without any context. At my school, there was some research going on, but it was nothing worthwhile. I know many of my friends who just drew some shapes and graphs for a paper in LaTeX, got their name in a submitted paper, and wrote it as "research experience" on their applications.
 
For me, a true research experience, is one that you'd struggle to describe to someone out of your research group. The research must make you the most knowledgeable person in the whole school in that particular task of yours.
 
I really don't think this many undergrad students have been able to do that. Yet you see someone in a 4-year program with 2 years of research experience. That is pretty surprising to me.

Perhaps the POI has instructed the grad student to interview you.
 
Is this your first interview?
 
Is the grad student a "senior" at the lab?
 
Lots of post-doctoral fellows, or older PhD students, are gonna (or wanna) be professors soon, so it's not that surprising if your POI might have delegated such tasks to them.
 
That said, it won't hurt if you ask for verification from you POI after the interview. If the student is acting on his/her own, it's a major redflag that the lab policy isn't the best of the bunch. I say this based on a demoralizing experience that my female friend had last year.

That numerous applicants have strong research experience from the undergrad days. I see some applicants on here with 3- publications, which is insane even for some grad students.
 
I never thought I'd be competing against so many researchers. Isn't the whole point of grad studies to become a researcher?
 
If you're one already, then get a research job, as the majority of grad students do once they're finished.
 
Hopefully I'm good enough for at least one of my picks, but I'm not confident about it.

I recently emailed every grad student in one of selected programs a series of questions. Some 40 students in total.  Out of that number roughly 30 responded within 24 hours.  So my most recent surprise is just how helpful current grad students really are.
 
Great insights for sure.  
To be frank, this is more of a recent development and to my knowledge not one grad program excepts an undergrad to publish.  
 
I read a blog post over the summer relating to the current drop-out rate of Ph.D. students.  The author wrote that when he attended UC Berkeley in the 1960s he was joined by 100 or so other students in his same, niche, program.  That is nuts by todays standards!  According to him he was only one of five students who actually made it through to the end.   The reason why the program admitted so many students to begin with was because back then undergraduate research was relatively unheard of and it was assumed that most who drop out do so because they cannot hack it as a researcher, and as such, it was necessary to admit ~100 just to pop out ~5 graduates.  His reason for the post was that students drop out for a variety of reasons, fyi.   My reason for mentioning this is that Ph.D. programs only began looking at undergraduate research experience perhaps maybe 20 or so years ago.  As usual, the applicant pool dictates what the base-line becomes and what is considered "normal" of a typical applicant.  
 
Twenty years from now published undergrads might be more common, unfortunately, which will most likely--as with it all--begin with a few students attempting to pad their applications with a legs-up-on-you approach.