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Questions for Students (Program Specific)

If you're talking to a student from the program you're applying to

• How long do students take to graduate?
• Are the stipends enough to live in [insert location]?
• How is living in [insert location]?
• Job prospects?

Questions for Lab Members (Lab Specific)

If you're talking to a grad student/post-doc in a potential lab

• Lab environment or culture
  • How's work life balance? How much break/vacation do you get? Does [PI] expect you to work after hours or on the weekends
• What do you not like about the lab (or PI)? 👀

Questions for PIs (Lab interview)

If you're talking to a PI trying to recruit PhD students

Questions to ask advisors What can I expect from you in terms of time and expertise? Ask them to connect you with one of their current students. Ask about the culture of the group and how that has affected their experience. How many hours per week do they work or if they work on weekends? How the group size & demographics affect things. Are students in the group tend to be more collaborative or competitive? How much do they interact with other lab mates during the day? Finally, try to get a sense of how happy they are.

• Connect with old lab students
• Mentorship style with students
• Future research directions and methods
• What's expected of PhD students in their labs (for instance, is there a required number of publications students need to publish)
• Financial support
• Lab environment or culture, work-life balance

Tips for Admission interview

Show confidence in answering each question and always remember why you’re doing this. You’ve gone so far already, this is the last step:)

What you Need to Know

• They usually want to see how well you match their criteria as well as evaluate the accuracy of your application e.g. did this person actually conduct the research project/work project they mentioned in their application?
• Follow the STAR [Situation, Task, Action, Result] method when answering situational questions

  • Situation: describe the specific situation you were in, what have YOU done

  • Task: what goal were you working toward?

  • Action: describe the actions you took to address the situation with an appropriate amount of detail and keep the focus on you. Use “I” not “we” remember they’re interested in you!

  • Result: describe the outcome of your actions and don’t be shy to give yourself the credit you deserve. Include comparisons, percentages and other numbers. Quantify your results as much as possible.

    ⭕ Sample STAR Response

    Situation: Advertising revenue was falling off for my college newspaper, The Review, and large numbers of long-term advertisers were not renewing contracts.

    Task: My goal was to generate new ideas, materials and incentives that would result in at least a 15% increase in advertisers from the year before.

    Action: I designed a new promotional packet to go with the rate sheet and compared the benefits of The Review circulation with other ad media in the area. I also set-up a special training session for the account executives with a School of Business Administration professor who discussed competitive selling strategies.

    Result: We signed contracts with 15 former advertisers for daily ads and five for special supplements. We increased our new advertisers by 20 percent over the same period last year.

Preparation

• A list of sample interview questions can be found here.