Phone Interview

[DamianD]

F**K YEAH! Just received an email to schedule a phone interview tomorrow :-) lolwut? Since when do they have phone interviews for CS? Never heard of it before!

But anyway sounds like fun (even though Rice doesn't top my list).

Does anybody have any experience with phone interviews for CS? What could they ask or want to talk about, besides my poor gre performance or my ridiculous SoP?

[UFGator]

Congratulations! Very exciting news.

[newms]

Excellent news! Be sure to add this to the survey and all the best for the interview!

Some schools do phone or skype interviews for CS and they seem to be the same kind of thing that most interviews are about. They'll likely want to get a feel for how well your interests fit with their research, so be prepared to answer questions about things on your SoP and on other parts of your applications as well as to briefly describe your research experience and interests. It would also be good if you had questions prepared to ask them. You never know though, as sometimes they seem to ask questions out of left field - almost literally - I read where one guy ended up talking about baseball during his interview!

In any case, it's definitely a good sign and it means that they are interested in you. Good luck!

Edited January 27, 2011 by newms

[DamianD]

@newms Thanks for the info :-)

They'll likely want to get a feel for how well your interests fit with their research

Well that is the odd thing, during the application you had to give two preferences for research groups of the uni and of course I googled the prof however he is from a different group than either of my preferred groups. So, I don't know much about his field or anything bio stuff. Weird right?

In any case, it's definitely a good sign and it means that they are interested in you. Good luck!

Definitely :-)

Edited January 27, 2011 by DamianD

[newms]

@newms Thanks for the info :-)

Well that is the odd thing, during the application you had to give two preferences for research groups of the uni and of course I googled the prof however he is from a different group than either of my preferred groups. So, I don't know much about his field or anything bio stuff. Weird right?

Yeah that's odd. Perhaps the other 2 groups didn't have spaces, but this prof likes your application - is he in bioinformatics? If so, that field has a lot of overlap with machine learning/data mining, so maybe he's interested in you for that purpose. Or, it could be that he's just interviewing you on behalf of the adcomm and then the adcomm makes a decision based on his input - that's just a guess really. In either case, all the best!