曾伟骏
menowarchivesnewslettersay hi

Preparing for PhD Interview

January 24th, 2024 (9 months ago) • 2 minutes

I received an invite for a PhD interview from Northwestern Uni last week. I was so excited because this is the first time I am experiencing this plus it gave a little hope that I can actually pursue graduate school.

Email from a potential PI

Email from a potential PI

I started looking into GradAdmission on reddit, scouring through GradCafe, stalking the interviewer, reading past papers and watching videos on YouTube. Tons of resources out there but I think the most important thing is to be yourself.

Based on those resources, I filtered down the most important questions to craft out a story and focused on which are most likely to be asked:

  1. Tell me about yourself
  2. Tell me about your work experience
  3. Tell me about your recent research experience
  4. Tell me why PhD or why do you enjoy research?
  5. What are you research interest and experience?
  6. How UNI can help you achieve those goals? Why UNI?
  7. Why did you choose the US?
  8. Why should we choose you?
  9. What difficulties do you expect to encounter?
  10. What is your biggest achievement in life?
  11. What are your career goals?
  12. Strengths and weaknesses
  13. Potential improvement you like to make
  14. Impact you want to make
  15. What type of articles | How many do you plan to publish | Which conferences?
  16. How do you plan to communicate your research
  17. What expectations do you have about your supervisor?

Also, likely the interviewer will dedicate some time to allow you to ask questions. Here are some questions that I think helps a lot:

  1. Are there any possibilities to help with teaching?
  2. I see that your recent work focuses on querying in an adversarial environment and for professor XXX, focusing on data structures for OLAP database - which is something I have a particular interest in, do you foresee future projects available to incoming students?
  3. Are there any other PhD student working on similar topics?
  4. What distinguishes a great grad student from a good one?

p.s I will post up my answers to these questions after the interview. Remind me if I don't.