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As the grad school interviewing season begins, it can become overwhelming. When I was going through the process in 2019, I did not know what to expect. Luckily my undergraduate mentors helped guide me through the process. I have been mentoring other kids through the application process and have helped during interview weekends every year since I started grad school. Here’s some advice I’ve learned to help you with your grad school interview.
Highlight different techniques you have learned and emphasize why you learned them
Instead of listing off the different techniques you have learned over your research experience, connect the technique to your experiment. For example, instead of saying “I learned how to western blot in this project” say something along the lines of “I studied changes in protein expression in response to drug treatment through western blotting”.
Know your experiments and contribution to other projects enough to talk about them in simple terms
My undergraduate research professor would always say you should be comfortable explaining your work to anyone from any background. This means trying to avoid using a lot of complex terminology referred to as jargon, and keeping everything simple. In my experience, most of the professors interviewing me did not ask too many questions about my experiments. However, there were one or two that would ask me to go into detail about my project design and ask about specific components of my findings. What I found to be helpful to prepare for these types of questions is to make a simple outline of your projects. Write down the main purpose of the project, assays or tests that you performed, and any results that you have found. Go through the assay/experiments and see if you can explain them. If you don’t know how some assays work, make sure to read some papers on how the assay was developed. There are also a lot of helpful videos on YouTube that explain assays.
Review program guidelines
I just learned that my program is now doing pre-interview screenings of applicants. This means that some of the people they are interested in have to prepare a 5-min presentation. If your program of interest is doing something like that, make sure to stick to any guidelines that were given and don’t hesitate to reach out to the admissions committee to ask any questions. As a rule of thumb, a 5-min presentation should be no more than 3 slides. You might take more time during the interview session because of the questions. However, it is important that when you practice, your presentation does not go over 5 min.
Have an idea about what you would like to study while you are in grad school
You don’t have to commit to a topic you would like to study at this time but it is good to have some sort of idea. If you would like to continue research in a particular field, look at what the professors are doing. When I was applying to graduate school, I knew I wanted to continue doing cancer research. I went through the list of professors who had cancer biology labs and looked at their lab websites to get more information. I read a couple of paper abstracts to see if I would be interested in doing similar projects. I narrowed down a list of three professors who I would like to work with. Additionally, there were things that I wanted to continue to explore from my undergraduate research project. I read review articles to see if there were more developments in the field. Doing so allowed me to become more familiar with my research field and helped me brainstorm basic questions I could build a project on.
Remember to relax
If you have received an invitation to interview, your chances of getting into the project are good. About 30% of the people who visit my school during interview weekend join. This does not take into consideration the people who rejected admission offers. So prepare for your interviews but make sure to have fun while you are going through the process.
Science is Pretty Alright 