Video: How To Prepare For Your PhD Interview

Maria Faleeva is our current Student Ambassador and the recipient of the 2020-21 FindAPhD Scholarship. Listen to her share her tips that will help you prepare for your own PhD interview.

PhD interviews can seem scary, so here's some advice to help you prepare for yours from not only myself, but also one of my PhD colleagues and my current PhD supervisor!

Video transcript

Hey guys it's Maria here and welcome back to my final video as your FindAPhD ambassador. So today I thought we'd talk a little bit about PhD interviews and this is obviously a really critical step as this is the final kind of stage in your journey and it's really critical to get it right. So let's get into it!

So I have invited back Marco from my old previous PhD video. Hello Marco, thank you for joining me. So how was your interview process, because you are doing the four-year PhD am I correct? Yeah, so my interview process was comprised of a series of steps. The first one was to read an article in 15 minutes and then I had to show what I have understood about that and I had also some questions regarding my previous experience in a laboratory, for instance, which kind of techniques that I had to use during my previous Masters and basically what my project was about. How did you prepare for the reading part of your interview because that seems a bit challenging? I read a lot of papers with a timer and with a friend of mine. I tried to you know, mock an interview. Okay, do you have any advice for people? I advise people to be even calmer than they expect to be because it's an interview and the people who are interviewing you have no reason to make you like, in an anxious state, so just be calm and you will succeed guys.

More likely than not you're going to be asked to do a presentation. This may last from anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes on your previous work and the advice that I can give for this is to obviously practice it beforehand but also do realise that the people who are going to be interviewing you might not be familiar with your previous work that you have done in your undergraduate or your Masters so the important thing to show here is that you understand the progression of the project. So even if you didn't design it yourself you tell them that you understand why you first did step A, step B, step C.

So some of the questions that I got...they love to ask how you are going to overcome defeat. They really tell you like "oh,a PhD is really hard it might not always work out so how can you essentially guarantee us that you're not going to quit halfway?" So that's a really important question. Make sure that you have a solid answer set up for that.

I think the most difficult question I was asked in my PhD interviews was, okay, so they told me "you finished your PhD, fine, but suddenly you're awarded a grant to extend it by three months. What do you do?" and I didn't really have any clue and so I composed this elaborate answer which I don't think is what they were looking for. So my idea is that if you're completely caught off guard just keep it to the basics and that will serve you better than trying to reinvent the wheel.

So something that I found to be really helpful was that I actually started to save the project outlines as I was applying for them in a separate word document because the thing is, is after the project deadline passes those abstracts and the outlines are going to be taken down and if your interview is a month or two months after you're gonna have a really hard time remembering what you're going to even talk about so having that reference to go back to before your interview will prove really helpful.

So at the beginning, I was not so great at interviews and I decided to go to my university's interview courses that they offered to figure out how to actually do them and this is where I was introduced to the STAR technique. Essentially the idea behind this is that you are going to explain a previous situation that you were in that was a little bit challenging but through your actions, you ended up making a good situation out of a bad one and led to a positive result. And structuring your answers by this method can be really good to the vague questions that they're going to ask you like "how have you overcome difficulties?" "are you a team player?" all of that, and it will stop you from rambling and ensure that you are delivering a clear and concise response to them.

My other piece of advice would be for you to really read the room. There is this one interview where the supervisor goes like "are you a good team player?" and I don't know what prompted me to say this but I was like "does anybody ever say that they're a bad team player? Of course, I'm gonna say I'm a good team player in an interview." And you can guess I didn't get the position which is totally fair enough but honestly, don't show off. Just keep it simple and just be realistic and you yourself, you are your own worst critic. I remember after my PhD interview for the position I currently have, I thought it just went horribly. I mean, I was calling the liver, the kidneys, the kidneys, the liver, but two weeks later I got an offer from her which was just such a great opportunity and really amazing. And so, you know, in the spirit of trying to show that the interview as you see it and from the supervisor's perspective may be two completely different worlds, I invited my lovely professor Cathie Shanahan to join me in this just to discuss about how she found my interview from her point of view and also just her general takes on interviews. So without further ado...So what do you essentially believe is the most important thing in an interview process?

So I think people come to interviews really nervous because they think that they don't know everything about the science that they think they're going to be asked about but actually interviews are really set up to try and get to know the person that is coming in front of you and to actually try and understand their passions about science and why they're interested in the particular project or pathway that they're actually applied to and coming to actually convince us that they are the right person for that. Okay, I see. Do you have any one specific question that you typically ask in an interview?

So some of the killer questions really are: "why did you choose this project?" and if the student hasn't bothered to do any sort of homework on the area or they can't give a really logical reason why something they've done previously made them excited when they read about what this project was about then you kind of question what their motivation is to come to the interview and whether they're just applying for everything they see. And then in some interviews, we do ask off the wall questions just to see if people can think on their feet and some of those questions might be: "tell us about something you read recently that really excited you about science" and we're looking for things that are really general. Like, you know, in this time people had read a lot about covid and so they might have had something really that had pricked their imagination about covid research.

Do you ever yourself get nervous for interviews? Yeah. So I'm slightly nervous for interviews just because you have to concentrate for so long and I don't want to say something wrong but in the context of people being nervous that is a really difficult thing to overcome because I think on the interview panel you are aware if someone is really nervous and the interview panel is trying really hard to get that person to relax and not be nervous. For those students, it's really important to keep in mind that it's not a test. That it's a conversation. Yeah, it's a conversation and the worst thing you can do is just say be nervous and say "I don't know" because you're afraid to make a mistake. Actually better you make a mistake and the conversation starts than you say "I don't know" and there's no conversation. Yeah, and do you remember any like, positives and negatives from my interview? I mean I know that it was a while but I mean because I remember I left that interview and I just thought it had gone horribly wrong.

Your interview was actually really good Maria because you showed exactly the things that we wanted and that was a passion for science, a passion for an aspect of science like you had you really liked microscopy and that came through even though what you'd worked on had nothing to do with what the two supervisors knew about and also the other thing that really was strong about your application is because you were stuck at home you'd taken on a Bioinformatics project and that was really outside your comfort zone. And that's another thing about science, that people have to be prepared to go outside their comfort zone to actually take the next step in a project. I mean I think you talked a lot in your interview which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But not necessarily a good...I ramble when I'm nervous! Alright, Cathie, well thanks so much for chatting with me about this today and I'll see you soon. Okay, thanks, Maria. Bye!

So there you guys have it those are my tips for increasing your chances at doing better at a PhD interview. I mean, I know how horrible this whole process is, I mean I think it has been the most horrible thing that I've had to do in my whole professional career. I hated every last minute of it but it will just soon end. I promise there is an end to this whole thing even though it does seem endless and you guys will be fine! I wish you guys the best of luck. Keep moving forward and I'll see you later. Bye for now!

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