columbia PhD explains: how to ace your phd interviews 

Aww thank you so much for the kind comment! Prepping for grad school was such a rough and anxiety inducing process for me, so I’m doing what I can to not only be as informative as possible, but hopefully reduce whatever anxiety I can! Thank you for watching ☺️

So glad that it’s helpful!! ☺️ thank you for watching and commenting!!!

Congrats on the interview!! So this is going to be very professor specific. Some will focus on skillset, while others will focus on broader concepts. Some will be fine with your well rehearsed answers, while others will ask you questions that push you to the boundaries of your knowledge so that you critically think about the science. Their intention is getting you to say "I don't know, but based on xyz, I think this is a reasonable experiment/hypothesis". Intellectual and personal maturity is shown when you are extremely confident in your work (because you're exceptional at what you do) but are also aware of the boundaries of your knowledge. It's okay to not know things, but you need to be an expert in the research that you have personally conducted. Now onto specific questions. In some interviews, I was asked about my rationale for choosing one technique verses another. In another I was asked why I developed this construct in this way, and if you changed the experiment, what would you expect as the outcome? They may ask you questions about work from other big name professors in your field and if you've considered doing xyz experiment that seems to dovetail your personal research. You'll need to know the specifics of what you did, why you did it that way, and what other big names in the field are doing that could inform current and future project directions. Some professors had my CV pulled up and asked very specific questions about every bullet point. Other interviewers didn't ask anything about techniques and mostly discussed their own research. Since I have an industry background, I was also asked a lot of questions about how I adapted biological experiments into high-throughput assays, and why that matters to academics (lol). I was also asked why I'm going back to grad school when I'm probably making a ton of money in industry (also lol). If you're an older applicant, you may be asked that question as well: why go back to grad school when you probably already have an established career at this point. But the most oddball question I've received was: if you had unlimited resources, what research question would you ask and how would you go about answering it. This question seems easy, but in fact is extraordinarily challenging since a cookie cutter answer will show that you don't know your field very well. A great answer will show that you can think about a critical question in, not only your field, but also how it impacts adjacent fields, and what old school or novel technology will specifically address that gap in the field. It should be a wild and wacky idea that has a high likelihood of failing, but the scientific rationale is solid as a rock, because it shows that you're going beyond the boundaries of known science, which is really hard. You're being creative and adapting what you know in an unconventional way, which is low key required for science that changes entire fields. It also shows that you're not afraid of failing. And in your interview, if you can't think of a good answer in the moment but something comes up to you as your chat continues, circle back to that initial question that stumped you. It's so much better to say, "so I was actually thinking about your question a bit more, and I think my earlier answer wasn't the most thoughtful. Here's what I would actually do (insert an answer that shows that you've critically thought about the scientific question)" then to just leave it at a subpar answer. The most important thing, however, is to show you're interviewers that you're critically thinking, and adapting as they ask further questions, not reading a rehearsed speech. Let me know if you have any followup questions!! good luck!!!

@@bianca.phdinprogress wow thank you so much for the thorough response! I have a few co authored publications and while I was heavily involved in data collection and analysis, I’m not sure that I can speak to exactly the rationale behind why the methods that were chosen, were chosen. So I’m wondering what the best way to approach answering a question like that would be, since I obviously want to demonstrate that I was intellectually engaged in the projects in some capacity, rather than just following instructions per se