Guide to Grad School Recruitment Interviews
By Zoe Getman-Pickering & Julie Davis
Note: The institution you are applying to will be referred to hereafter as Generic University
What will the process be like?
Grad school interviews are usually 2 days with travel on either side. It’s a chance for both the department to interview you, and for you to interview them. They will be trying to impress you. The grad school will pay for all travel and accommodations. Sometimes they put you up in a hotel with another prospective student, or else they will put you up on an air mattress/couch with a current student. You will get better sleep at a hotel, but you will get more time for realtalk, and a chance to see what student digs are like if you stay with them. Typically the graduate students who host prospective students are interested in getting to know you and share their perspectives on the program. Note however that it is still important to behave in a professional manner when you are hosted. The department will pay for your travel and food. Usually, you will go out to a restaurant one night and have catered takeout for other meals.
During the two days you will have 4-10 30-60minute meetings with professors, postdocs, and grad students where they will ask about your research experience, future goals etc (detailed below), and they will be answering your questions about the lab, department, and university. You will also have meetings with administrators to learn more about the school in general and logistics.
They may take you on a field trip to a cool and relevant spot.
There will likely be one evening where you will go party or dinner with the students with no professors around. This may be at a restaurant, bar, or a student’s house. This is a great chance to ask questions about which profs to avoid, what the department culture is like, and broadly what the student experience is like.
The interview experience can be exhausting so if you can arrive well rested that can be helpful. Your meals will likely be provided to you, but if you do better with your own food it is fine to bring your own. It is useful to bring a bag with a water bottle and other essentials you need to feel comfortable throughout the day (they are long days). In off time try to do activities that tame any anxious energy or allow you to recharge.
What to wear
Business casual is expected in most fields, but ask around to be sure. Dress neatly and in nice clothes and generally look presentable. A nice blouse and jeans is fine, blazers are great, a button-up shirt and slacks etc.
Be prepared for the weather. You may need to walk outside for a while in extreme heat or cold situations. If you are traveling from a warm southern state to a cold northern one, don’t underestimate how cold it can be. Bring a thick down jacket or as warm clothes as you can borrow. Bring comfortable footwear that can handle tromping in nature since many schools will take you for a field trip or at least a campus tour.
What to judge the department on (in no particular order)
How friendly and cohesive are the grad students? Do they compete with each other for professor attention and department resources?
Practice!
No one is born good at interviews, but practice makes perfect. Get some friends or family and have them ask you questions. Ask the folks in your lab (if you are in a lab) to give you a mock interview and pointers. There will be a world of difference between your first and 4tth interviews. Practicing normal job style interviews is fine as well. You should be able to find plenty of common interview questions with a quick google search. Read below for more specific graduate school interview questions.
Handling the interviews with profs
When you answer questions you want to keep in mind that the interviewer is always looking for the answer to the following questions regardless of what they actually say:
Why are you a good fit for Dr. X’s lab/the department/Generic University?
Do you have the soft skills that will make you successful here?
Do you have hard skills that will make you successful here?
Are you someone I want to work with regularly?
When people ask questions and follow up questions, think about why they are asking it and what info they are looking for.
Keep these questions in the back of your mind and think about ways to answer them while you answer their more direct question. You don’t have to slip bits into every question and don’t totally ignore their main question but make sure you sell yourself.
One of the biggest tricks to doing well in interviews is understanding that professors are nerds (in the best way) and absolutely love talking about their research. If you can muster genuine enthusiasm for the things they are enthusiastic about and ask a few good questions, most of them will like you a lot. For me, a big part of mastering this was letting go of my fear of coming across as stupid for asking questions. Once you get them talking about their research, it’s usually easy to keep the ball rolling.
*When referencing papers try to pick ones where the person you are talking to is a first author. Otherwise their answer might be “my student Skyler did that, I wasn’t really involved.”
It will help you a lot if you do a little bit of research on the professors you are going to meet. At the very least read their bio on their webpage and skim the titles/abstracts of the last 5 papers that came out of their lab. If you have time, you can also skim one of their first author papers to generate questions. If you have limited time/lots of recruitment interview meetings read/skim papers from the 2-4 profs you are most excited about.
Grad interviews can be fun, but they are also a slog. You will often have many back-to-back meetings while being jet-lagged. In Covid times, zoom may make it hard to focus. Here are some tools you can use to help things along if you are overwhelmed, your mind randomly went blank etc.
You are building a brand for these interviews. Who are you and what do you want? You need to figure this out for yourself so you can weave it into your answers. It might be useful to think of 3-5 traits (ie, resilient, creative, persistent, hard-working, goal-oriented just as examples) and try to frame your answers around those traits. If someone says “tell me about your undergraduate research project” of course you should prioritize explaining the project you did, the questions you were asking and briefly how you answered them/what you found. However, you could also work into that answer the fact that you are very hardworking and independent.
Identify your skills
Pick a few skills that you have and make sure you communicate them. Below is a non-exhaustive list of skills and how they can help you in graduate school. Many of the skills below are broadly applicable. If you have honed that skill in one context, it can be useful in other contexts even if you haven’t done those things before. For example, if you spent a lot of time learning to communicate by doing outreach, it might mean that you will do well communicating in a collaboration even if you have never been in a collaboration before.
writing/mentoring)
Identify things you enjoy
This will help you be clear when answering questions about the kind of projects you want to be involved in and why as well as future careers.
Here are some options to get you thinking, but it’s not an exhaustive list.
Questions like those below (or some variation) are likely to come up during your interviews. Definitely practice your answers to them!
Pick a project and have a prepared explanation of it and why you want to do it. You aren’t committing to actually doing it when you get here, so don’t stress it too much.
If you can’t come up with a specific project you want to do, you can give a broad area (e.g. chemical ecology of tritrophic interactions) and then talk about the specific project your future advisor wants you to work on in your first year.
Pro tip- If you study the person in advance, you can tailor the project a little to the person you are talking to. Eg I want to study how mycorrhizae affect plant-herbivore interactions. Don’t lie here, but at this stage you probably have lots of interests and project ideas, so pull out the most relevant ones.
A PhD is a lot of work and not very much pay for a long time, and it can over-qualify you from many jobs. So be prepared to be clear on what sort of job you want and why. For added bonus, make sure to drop the name of some Generic University related opportunity to show that you have done your research and Generic University is THE place for you to reach your goals.
You can also talk about previous work experiences you’ve had. “I worked/volunteered at a conservation organization. Example- Once I have PhD training I’d like to return to that field to lead a research team”
A PhD is 6 years of hard work for low pay. This is an opportunity to talk about both the things you enjoy from the list above and your future goals if you haven’t already. For extra bonus points, connect your past experience, your plans for what you will do in graduate school, and what you want to do after.
E.g. When I was working on my senior thesis research project with Dr. X, I realized I was really passionate about finding sustainable solutions to agricultural challenges. This program has a fantastic track record of connecting students with farmers and has a strong sustainability program that would set me up perfectly to get a job with an NGO developing sustainable farming practices.
Example: Not great answer
I ran an experiment testing how fertilizer affects the relationship between plants and mycorrhizal fungi. I grew 100 tomato plants in the field with low, medium, and high levels of fertilizer and with and without mycorrhizae.
Example: Much better answer
I am particularly fascinated by untangling the conditions that facilitate mutualism or parasitism in different organisms. During my senior year I independently designed an experiment to test how fertilizer changes the tomato plant-mycorrhizal symbiosis and the conditions under which mycorrhizae would actually benefit farmers in the field. I am still analyzing the results, but I predict that increasing fertilizer will push mycorrhizae from mutualism to parasitism since the plants will no longer need the mycorrhizae to meet their nutritional needs. I really loved getting to answer cool ecological questions in an applied system and communicating my results in ways that can help farmers. One of the main reasons I am interested in Generic University is that it has many opportunities to address interesting ecological questions while working in applied systems.
The above showcases your interest, some skills you learned , and tells the interviewer what areas you might be interested in doing research at Generic University.
Pro tip- If you can you can adjust your answer a bit based on the person you are talking to. Don’t lie or make things up, but cherry pick the bits that might match the interests of the person you are talking to.
At this point the interviewers will usually press you for more details about how you came up with the project, how you designed it, why you made those predictions or what projects you want to do next.
Everyone expects you to be applying to at least a few places, so don’t worry that it will make you look uncommitted. Profs want to know because they know everybody in the field and will use your answer to get a sense for what your interests are (eg are you applying to people in closely related fields of research or a wide assortment?). Grad students will ask this for the same reason above+they might warn you away from bad advisors or recommend good ones.
Graduate school is a big commitment. It’s 4-7 years of your life. You need to ask lots of questions to make sure the place fits your needs and interests. Don’t be afraid to really drill down or follow up after a question is answered.
Questions to ask the potential advisor and/or advisor’s current students
Questions to ask faculty and students:
Questions to ask students
The correct answers to these questions are up to you. Every student needs something a little different from their advisor and program, so take some time to think what you want from your advisor and program before making decisions. Make sure you look beyond matching research interests and basic niceness.
You should absolutely send a thank you email to your main professor.
Thank you email notes to other professors you talked to are uncommon and a very “above and beyond” move. You definitely don’t have to write them, but sending a few will really set you apart. Take notes either during or after each interview. If you can, write down briefly what you talked about and anything that was particularly interesting or a question you still have. Within a week of recruitment send short thank you emails.
During normal recruitment weekends it’s kind to thank any students that hosted you or drove you around and administrators who organized everything. However, those emails will help your chances less than the ones to the professors.
Dr. Smith,
It was lovely talking with you on Thursday! Thank you for explaining all the fascinating ways that flowers can signal pollinators. I never knew that catalpa flowers change color after they are pollinated! I am looking forward to reading those papers you mentioned when I have free time this weekend.
Best,
Zoe