Preparing for interviews

[persimmony]

Sorry if this has been asked before, but how do I prepare for these interviews and what kind of questions/atmosphere/structure can I expect?

 

Currently I'm just looking forward to them and have prepared a binder with tabs for each school. I've printed out the summary of the program from their websites as well as the research interests of each professor I listed as a potential interviewer. Should I bother with reading their papers?

 

Will they be asking me about every detail of my research? Some things like mouse strains and the details of manipulating their genetic expression is a bit over my head..

 

For one school, I was told there would be an admission committee interview, while other schools I would interview one on one with professors of interest. Tips on either of these interview structures?

Edited December 27, 2013 by persimmony

[mrmolecularbiology]

Sorry if this has been asked before, but how do I prepare for these interviews and what kind of questions/atmosphere/structure can I expect?

 

Currently I'm just looking forward to them and have prepared a binder with tabs for each school. I've printed out the summary of the program from their websites as well as the research interests of each professor I listed as a potential interviewer. Should I bother with reading their papers?

 

Will they be asking me about every detail of my research? Some things like mouse strains and the details of manipulating their genetic expression is a bit over my head..

 

For one school, I was told there would be an admission committee interview, while other schools I would interview one on one with professors of interest. Tips on either of these interview structures?

You don't need to know every detail of the research you have been doing, but you should be able to talk about it intelligently. The structure of most interviews is several (5 or so) one on one interviews, where half the time they talk about their research and half you talk about yours. I don't know why you have a summary from the program website that will not help you in anyway. As for reading papers: skim them so you are able to ask intelligent questions when you are interviewing, but the questions need to be pertinent to what the interviewer has been talking about. Memorizing something  and then spouting it randomly is not impressive.  

Edited December 27, 2013 by mrmolecularbiology

[persimmony]

Did you bring anything to your interviews?

 

I'm thinking of bringing a nice folder that has a notepad in it in case I want to jot something down. I might bring a copy of my poster presentation (with permission from my PI of course) and probably notes about the interviewers.

[mrmolecularbiology]

Did you bring anything to your interviews?

 

I'm thinking of bringing a nice folder that has a notepad in it in case I want to jot something down. I might bring a copy of my poster presentation (with permission from my PI of course) and probably notes about the interviewers.

I brought a notepad. I used it twice over five interview weekends. You could bring notes I suppose, but are you going to look at them while you're talking to an interviewer?  Copy of your poster is not a bad idea it will make talking about your research easier.

Edited December 27, 2013 by mrmolecularbiology

[ion_exchanger]

Sorry that I am copying an pasting, for some reason the quote feature isn't working for me...

 

WIll they be asking me about every detail of my research?

They will ask you about general things, not every single aspect of it. You should be able to talk intelligently about it, as mrmolecularbiology said. Unless you are at a particularly competitive school with very hard interviewers, no one will grill you about specific techniques such as ion-exchange chromatography. They will ask you questions that they feel like you should know anyway. A lot of times the researchers will not know about your particular research/disease/techniques.

 

For one school, I was told there would be an admission committee interview, while other schools I would interview one on one with professor of interest. Tips on either of these interview structures?

 

I had both of these interviews. The one on one with professors are nice. I wrote a long entry on my first interview experience last year in the 2013 cycle around January 20th or so, it's buried somewhere in there if anyone is interested in reading it. For the one on one with professors, I just took wrote down a brief summary of their research and read it on the train to interviews, so that when they started talking about their research it wasn't so foreign. These professors love to talk. The most common structure of these interviews for me was talking about my research, them talking about their research, and any time left was spent answering your questions or talking about the school. These interviews tend to go by really quickly. Sometimes they will take you around their lab if there is time.

 

For the admissions committee, my committee meeting was two people who had my complete application in front of them, with my transcript and SOP. They had looked through it before hand, and asked me any questions about it. They asked about what I wanted to study and my future goals, which were listed in my SOP. They asked me general questions about graduate school and asked me what if questions about various scenarios that may come up in graduate school. I would say for these interviews, review your SOP and try to anticipate any questions that they may ask about it, or your application, such as grades. I was expecting someone to ask questions about my horrible freshman year, but no one did. Someone else might, so just review your file and anticipate questions.

 

Did you bring anything to your interviews?

 

I went to staples and bought a nice professional fold notepad that had notebook paper and a pocket for my extra CVs and notes about the interviewers, and it also had a calculator, which was neat. It is a good investment and I have used it a lot. This is not necessary though, because all of my interviews had a "swag bag" that was filled with a small notebook, pens, paper, and folders about the school, so even if you came with nothing, you would get this. I advise people to get a nice folder like I had, its not terribly expensive. As far as a presentation or anything, I didn't bring that and I don't know of anyone who did. I guess it couldn't hurt, but for most people just talking was enough, especially when the interviewer pulls you up to their computer and shows you their most recent slide presentation.

[dstock]

Be prepared to talk about your research.   Start with the big picture of the research (eg Disease X using Mouse models) then a few statements getting into more details and finally what your own role is.  It really helped me to practice this little speech (not word-for-word memorization or anything) so I didn't get jumbled and look like I didn't know what I was talking about.

 

They might ask you why you want to go to that school so be prepared to answer that.

 

They might ask you about your future goals so be prepared to answer that.

 

 

If you know who is interviewing you- then looking up their pictures helps me mentally prepare and de-stress . 

[username1824]

If you've had multiple research projects, are they going to ask you about all of them?

[katethekitcat]

If you've had multiple research projects, are they going to ask you about all of them?

 

If you've done a research project, you should know it inside and out. You never know what one professor is going to be interested in that another isn't. If your CV claims you've done the work but you can't talk about it, you're going to be in trouble.

[ion_exchanger]

I had a research project for undergrad, and I had one for post-grad. I always started with my most recent experience, which happened to be the one I was working on the longest. If there was time, which usually there wasn't, they asked about my undergrad project. It happened to be company confidential, so I couldn't talk about it anyway. Katethekitcat is correct, you don't know which project a professor will be interested in. There was one professor that I spoke with who only read my undergrad project, he didn't get past that because that one grabbed his attention. Be able to speak about it. If you only worked on a project for a short period of time, like 3 months over the summer, know enough about it to speak intelligently about it. I have always been told, once they stop asking you questions about it, they are satisfied that you know what you are talking about.

 

Other questions I was asked include: Where do you see yourself in five years? (probably still at this school! lol) What are your biggest strength and weakness.

 

Another bit of advice, I agree with the above poster of having your research speech prepared, but be careful of being over prepared. You don't want your statement to come off robotic. For these interviews, as well as job interviews, I tend to prepare less, just so that they answers will feel more natural, and it looks like I'm not giving a textbook answer.

[scienceowl]

One of my mentors once told me you should have an "elevator spiel". This means you should know how to outline your research in two sentences if someone asked you what you work on in the elevator (as far as I can remember, in his case, this happened when one of our institution's Nobel laureates asked this question to him on the elevator, LOL). I'm not saying you should memorize two sentences and shoot them off, but be prepared to briefly outline your project(s) ie. why you did it, what you did, and what important research question you were able to answer/the impact of your research. Then, if you are prompted, you can delve further into details of your work.

 

I worked on several things during my time as a tech and knew pretty much all my projects inside out. One of those resulted in a first author publication, the other I was helping someone else with - but I still made sure I was able to discuss it. This is the most important thing - you should be able to give off the impression that you have the potential to think like a scientist. It's less important to describe how you do a western blot compared to being able to explain why you did that western blot and what purpose it served in advancing your hypothesis (or not). Of course, some people may still ask you technical questions - but in my experience, this is because a) they are trying to understand if you really did the work described in your CV yourself and/or b: the questions are born out of genuine curiosity on how the experiment was done (these are, after all, scientists, it's in their nature to be curious). For instance, I had developed an in vitro assay for my project that one faculty was really curious about and asked me to describe in excruciating detail, because they were looking to do something similar. And if you really have no idea about something, just say it's a great question but you don't know, honesty always works out

 

what else...I didn't take a poster handout with me, though that seems like a good idea. What I did was to take the figures from my paper with me, and go over them briefly if someone wanted to know more about the specifics of my research. As previous posters have pointed out, my advice is to know what you're going to say beforehand, but not memorize it so it sounds robotic and rehearsed. Think of it as a more conversational form of poster presentation.

 

And finally, relax! Faculty love talking about science, and are always happy to engage with applicants who are also excited about science, so everything will work out. Good luck

Edited December 31, 2013 by scienceowl

[SysEvo]

is that ok to bring an iPad to show the PIs the data?

[devneuro18]

Does anyone have any more advice about prepping for interviews? I'm the only one from my friend group applying so I'm a bit lost. I work in a lab full of postdocs who don't remember much from their graduate school interviews (many of them are international and didn't even interview).

 

Also, ditto on the iPad, would that be considered pretentious?

[dstock]

My opinion is that bringing an iPad to show data is unnecessary and would seem weird.  My faculty interviews were pretty short so definitely no time to get into the data. 

[ion_exchanger]

It's so hard to give someone textbook advice for interviews, because interviews at schools vary greatly. I interviewed at three different schools and had completely different interview experiences at all three. One was one on one faculty interviews, one was an admissions committee, and one involved sometimes three other students scheduled at the same time only listening to a professor talk about their research for 30 minutes and them asking you to say two sentences about yourself in the beginning to the rest of the group (my fav!). The best thing you can do is focus on your research, knowing it inside and out. Ask your mentors to practice asking you questions, or give your speech to science and non-science friends. Try to find someone on here that interviewed at the school where you are interviewing, for a more personalized answer. Also, if on the day of the interview you are still nervous, there is usually, but not always, some sort of dinner or get together before the actual interviews, so try to talk to current students and casually ask who they are currently rotating/working with, and any advice they have about that person. At one of my interviews at the dinner the night before, the students asked me who I was interviewing with and gave me a brief synopsis about the ones that they were familiar with, so i had a heads up. 

 

As far as bringing the iPad to show data, I really don't think it's necessary. Talking about it is enough. Unless you are at a completely competitive interview, or have a nutty interviewer, they will talk to you about your research for a while, then pull up their latest presentation on THEIR iMac. 

Edited January 9, 2014 by ion_exchanger

[devneuro18]

Thanks ion_exchanger and others!

[SysEvo]

is that ok to bring an iPad to show the PIs the data?

Just finished my interview at Harvard and iPad worked pretty well! When asked about my research, I showed them the data from thesis presentation, which made communication very efficient. They showed me their data on their computer too. Just to make sure to ask the faculty if that's OK to use the iPad.

[SysEvo]

My opinion is that bringing an iPad to show data is unnecessary and would seem weird.  My faculty interviews were pretty short so definitely no time to get into the data.

Mine is 45 min each and showing the data instead of describing them in words definitely saved a lot of time.

[dstock]

Mine is 45 min each and showing the data instead of describing them in words definitely saved a lot of time.

 

I'm glad the approach worked well for you. 

[tuckbro]

For MIT BE, I have to do a full poster presentation and then we are all going to "talk about science". I'm kinda nervous.