Asking questions during interviews?

[rcon]

I’m wondering if there’s any good strategies that anybody has for how to ask good questions when PI’s talk about their research during an interview/open house. I always seem to freeze up when they talk about what their lab does and I overthink about how I should have questions, but I’m so busy doing that so then I come up with nothing. I’m not super knowledgeable in the field I’m applying for since it’s outside of what my research so far has been - so lots of the people interviewing me are doing research on things I’m unfamiliar with. I don’t want to ask super duper basic methods questions, but I’m also worried about being too overwhelmed to ask anything at all.

 

Does anyone have strategies they use to come up with meaningful questions while they tell you about their research? Or questions you use often to ask about research that can apply to a lot of topics or projects?

[BabyScientist]

You're over thinking it. You don't have to ask questions about their research. If questions didn't just come to me, I tried to relate their work to mine, or to things I'd heard of. If pipe in with like "oh I read something about that technique" or "oh my lab was exploring that".

More important than asking questions about their research is asking questions about the program and the logistics of their lab. 

If you actually want to work with them, absolutely ask if they're taking students.

Other good questions to ask:

How big is your lab? Where is your funding from? Do you think the coursework in this program is valuable. Do students in your lab go to conferences? What do your students go on to do after graduating? 

[Yas-man]

Ask them what they work on in their lab and then just ask them to explain in general terms a concept If you don’t understand it. They’re generally not going to expect you to know much or even anything at all about what they do. 
 

so, for example, one lab works with cryo-em and I know little about it so I asked for some basics on how it works and what types of things one can do with it  and what they do with it.  Getting them to talk about things like that takes up a lot of the time in 30 min interviews  

They are evaluating you for other things, such as how you present yourself, interest in the school or in science, enthusiasm and so on. 

[CaryHall]

Come up with some good questions before your interviews and write them down somewhere. Then if you do happen to freeze up at least you have something to refer back to. I find that just having that safety net makes me feel a lot less nervous going in, and then I usually don't even need to rely on my notes. 

I'm interested in bioinformatics/comp bio too btw. This is actually my second application cycle - when I applied last year, I had zero relevant research experience (all of my undergrad research was wet lab stuff). Your interviewers aren't going to expect you to be super knowledgeable about their work, especially since you don't have much experience in the field. What they will care about (and what I totally botched during my interviews last year) is that you can articulate why it is you want to do computational biology research.

Feel free to pm me if you have any other questions, and good luck!

[MolaMola]

My PI and I discussed the best approaches to the faculty interview portion of admissions and he was of the opinion that having notes for each interview would be looked up favorably. That way even if you don't have a lot of overlap with a particular professor you are at least demonstrating that you have cared enough to read some of their work and can show that you are capable of thoughtfully engaging. Plus then you have notes right there in front of you! 

[DRMF]

First of all, you are a student, and the point of a PhD is to learn, so it's absolutely fine if you don't know things. Some faculty will even be excited that you're bringing in insights from a different field. If you don't know about their research area, read up a few of their recent papers (or better yet, interviews/news reports/videos of them explaining their own research) and note down things that you didn't understand. Google those, see if there's anything that's not common practice in the field, and when they mention it you could ask things like "right, I saw that term in the paper but I didn't quite understand how it works - could you explain that a bit more?" There was one interview I had with a faculty member who happened to have given a talk at a retreat I went to. So I started the interview by saying "I have these 2 pages of notes from your talk last year and honestly I don't understand anything after the 3rd line." and he was absolutely delighted to explain the whole thing again.

Sometimes they finish a story by saying "the only question left now is..." or "if only we could just figure out..." and that could be a good point for asking "so do you think our current approaches are not sufficient to solve this question? Do you predict that such technology will become available in the next say 5 years?" I've also asked general questions like "Why did you choose to come to this school as a faculty member?" "Having been at XX institute for your postdoc and now at YY as faculty, what would you say is the biggest difference between these two places? Culture? Scientific approaches?" "How did you enter this field?" "What would you say is something you wish you had known when you were a student?" "How has your experience been as a woman/ethnic minority?"

BTW this post reminds me of the following anecdote; perhaps someone well-versed in bioinformatics may be able to come up with "fundamental" questions similar in spirit to these: [[A certain well-known pure mathematician had a wife who, while intelligent, was not into mathematics. However, by continued practice, she learnt to distinguish between the conversations of algebraists and analysts. So when he had guests to dinner who were talking about mathematics, if they were analysts, she would introduce at a suitable pause in the conversation: "But what happens at the boundary?" Whereas, if they were algebraists, she would say: "But do the roots lie in the field?" By this means she was always able to impress his visitors by her knowledge of mathematics.]]