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
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:
- Tell me about yourself
- Tell me about your work experience
- Tell me about your recent research experience
- Tell me why PhD or why do you enjoy research?
- What are you research interest and experience?
- How
UNI
can help you achieve those goals? WhyUNI
? - Why did you choose the US?
- Why should we choose you?
- What difficulties do you expect to encounter?
- What is your biggest achievement in life?
- What are your career goals?
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Potential improvement you like to make
- Impact you want to make
- What type of articles | How many do you plan to publish | Which conferences?
- How do you plan to communicate your research
- 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:
- Are there any possibilities to help with teaching?
- 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?
- Are there any other PhD student working on similar topics?
- 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.