Interviewing with someone other than your POI(s)

[FeelTheBern]

Maybe this should be placed in the interview section, however, I specifically would like psych people to respond, which is why I posted it here.

So with a few interviews just around the corner, I am wondering if anyone can give some pointers about interviewing with professors who you are not interested in working with. I know that every school that my SO is interviewing at has applicants interview with many different faculty members. He has been preparing as much as he can for his interview with his POI, however, how do you really prepare for an interview with random faculty members (grad school head, department chair, etc.) and what questions can he expect? Any help would be much appreciated! Also, anyone who has gone through this process already, I would love to hear what happened/what questions were asked by non-POIs?

Thanks

[Timemachines]

Great question! Would appreciate this feedback as I've been told that I'll be interviewing with a graduate student and a faculty member other than my PoI too!

[Applicant 1746]

I've found that a lot of faculty are prepared with general, structured interview-type questions for you that you wouldn't really need to "prep" extra for (Can you tell me about some of the research you've done, and how that connects to the research trajectory you see for yourself going forward? What are your career goals? What drew you to this program?). Others will treat it more like an information session for you, and will give you the opportunity to ask program-general questions. I've asked about things like department culture in terms of cross-lab collaborations, whether a lot of grad students in the program plan to enter academia and how the program prepares them for it, how people across labs keep up-to-date on each other's work (e.g. one of my programs has a weekly lunch seminar where a grad student gives a talk about their recent work each week), etc. I've also asked these faculty members about their perceptions of current trends and future directions in the department -- this may be more specific to the kinds of programs I'm applying to, but I've asked about whether there seems to be a move towards more applied work among the faculty, for example.