Why do you want to study this/what's the big picture of what you want to study?

[CactusWoman]

I've got an interview for an ecology and evolution project coming up, and the number one thing I'm worried about is answering this big, open-ended, and very important question. If I were to answer this, I would say that the topic I'm most interested in is species interactions. I'm interested in species interactions because of how they can influence the evolution and diversification of both interactors. However, I feel like that answer is just a pile of word mush and basically boils down to "I want to do this 'cause it's cool". How do you eloquently answer this kind of question? I do have a passion for these topics, I just can't explain why.

 

 

It would help me to know what other people's answers are to this question, so my question to you all is: why do you want to study what it is that you're studying?

[BiochemMom]

In my opinion, it should boil down to "this is cool" only I would say--because this excites me. You have to love what you research to spend hours upon hours chasing that elusive answer to your question--and then want to know more when you find it.

[CactusWoman]

Somehow, though, I feel they want an answer with a bit more substance to it. Anyone can say that biology excites them, I'm pretty sure interviewers want to hear why. Like, you have to prove this is really what you want to do for the rest of your life.

[MidwesternAloha]

I disagree. They will see through a pretentious, lofty response. Just be honest. Nobody knows what they want to do the rest of their life. One of my interviewers even said that during my last interview- most of his students' goals change about halfway through, and that's okay.

[Elizabeth Reed]

I think your answer is less of a non-answer than you think it is. For someone like me, who doesn't have a particularly strong background in biology, your answer sounds pretty sophisticated. I suspect it's hard for you to see it that way because you understand the subject on a waaaaaay deeper level than I do. It's hard to evaluate how much knowledge/understanding is built into an answer when it's something within your own field -- we lose perspective on how much we've learned because we recognize just how much there is to know about a particular area. My guess is that one's perspective on this just keeps getting further out of touch (in this particular way) the longer one studies something. When we first begin to learn about something, we gain a little knowledge and start thinking we know a lot -- by the time we've been at it for years, decades, a whole career, we see that there's way more to know than any one person ever could! 

 

I digress, but my point is that your answer probably isn't anywhere near as shallow or superficial as it seems to you. I also think it's a *good thing* you see it as less sophisticated than I do because, if that weren't the case, you probably wouldn't be a good candidate for graduate study in biology (someone with my perspective on the field definitely isn't prepared for it!) 

 

Also, I don't think even the foremost expert of X can say why he finds X so exciting if 'why' means something like, "what profound meaning does X have that explains your fascination with it?" Unless the aforementioned expert is a religious man, he can only offer reasons along the lines of what you've said. Sure, as THE expert, his answer might be more nuanced or deeply informed, but if you just kept asking him "so what?" after every reason he gave for his interest in X...there would eventually be an impasse at which point the expert would give an exasperated response. He'd say something like, "So!? That's an extraordinary phenomenon! How do you not see that, person who doesn't find X interesting!?" (At which point you'd shrug and say, "meh, different strokes for different folks. I didn't mean to upset you." That's how I knew I shouldn't pursue a career in my undergrad major -- I found it really interesting (interesting enough to happily major in it), but at some point, I started to find myself wondering who cares enough to keep arguing about this? Other people do care enough to argue about it for decades; they have a good answer to the question why do you want to study this? -- their answer is, "because it's so cool!"