Interviews: shine during your postdoc or PhD student interview. #jobinterview #postdoc #PhD #phdlife

congratulations you've made it to the interview stage of the postdoc of your dreams in the lab where you want to be with the pi you want to be at the university in the city that you want to be so now you got to realize that many of the people that are going to be invited for this interview will have very similar skills and qualifications and so therefore this interview is going to be actually quite important in determining who will get hired so i'm going to go over some general points and then also some specific questions

as examples to help you master your postdoc interview and we're starting right now the details now of course depend a lot on what kind of situation what kind of a position it is this is a fellowship is it a grand funded postdoc position is it more like an open position is it a position that also entails teaching well the most common case is going to be grand funded positions for postdocs at least in our case so i will mostly focus on those but things really will not be that different if the situation is slightly different

and also the situation will not be radically different if you're interviewing for a phd position either so first of all four general points for how to basically act during the interview the first one is keep your answers concise and to the point don't ramble on forever it's fine to first think a little bit about the question not half a minute but you know collect your thoughts but then deliver a well-formulated answer don't drone on forever nobody is that interesting that they can keep on talking and not lose interest on the other side so keep your

answers short and precise and to the point this is the first general point if you weren't quite sure what a question meant then it's completely fine to ask did i understand it correctly that you meant like this experience with statistics let's say or this experience with high throughput sequencing so if you were not quite sure what the question really meant or what the background is or what they were really getting at rather than rambling on randomly just ask specifically what the point was third point even though the situation can seem very relaxed very laid back

we for example trying to have always a very friendly atmosphere during the interview make no mistake you are being watched at every single moment during this interview is a fact right because we try to also find out what is your personality not just what are your qualifications because a lot of the qualifications will be already evident from your cv and that's why you were selected in the first place so now it's very important to figure out you know are you a good team player what would it be like to work with you are you funny

or whatever i mean whatever is of importance to the lab that hires you your personality traits so even when there are questions that are you know they seem like they're just for entertainment purposes they are not i mean everything in the interview pretty much has a purpose so make sure you basically don't let your guard down during the interview right and um yeah take it seriously and stay stay focused the fourth point is do your research on the place nothing is worse than like you don't even know what the exact project description was from the

ad or if there was an information additional information given in the ad like a link to a project website if you didn't visit it and will become obvious it will just reflect very badly on you right from the very beginning and so try to avoid that nothing is worse than a very ill informed candidate basically so don't do that spend the extra 10 15 minutes to find out about the place find out about the lab find out what they've recently published this is time well spent if you want that position well now some common questions

and examples of questions that for example we have asked the most common one is please summarize your phd or if you're interviewing for a phd your master's research in just a few sentences usually giving a time limit of like two minutes or something like this and so you know you should be prepared for that one as an obvious question to ask you at this stage and the aim of that question is can you really put your work in context or do you just ramble on forever right i mean we've had all of these or can

you very concisely state what was the importance of what you did what you find and how it fits into the bigger body of literature or research on this topic this is what we're looking for can you basically place your research in context do you know what hypotheses you have asked and what your results really mean so be prepared with that statement well the second obvious question that virtually anybody will ask is you why do you want to come here or why do you want to particularly work in this job and then of course you should

know about this job and you should know about the lab what they're interested in otherwise you know if you don't know why you're coming here why should we hire you so i think this is also an obvious question to be prepared for make sure you make it as specific to the situation as possible not just general stuff from your perspective but also what specifically you makes you a good candidate for this particular position and the other obvious question connected to that is what are your what would you bring to the table what can you really

contribute and there it's also important to say well i have i see your project is about this and that and i have already experienced with this and therefore i can bring this entire skill set uh to help with this project or i know the statistical method and i think you will be needing it because of such and such and the more thought you put into this you know from the perspective of the interviewer this person has already thought about how they could really contribute to our lab and how they would fit in it shows that

they are well informed and they've also taken the next step to think about what they can really specifically contribute to this project or lab very often questions are asked that are specific to the postdoctoral position like what is your experience with bioinformatics or what is your experience with high throughput sequencing then it's very important especially if this thing that you're being asked about has many many many different steps that you say well you know in terms of high throughput sequencing i've done the entire thing from extracting dna to doing pcrs to sending up for sequencing

to getting the sequences back to doing the bioinformatics with this and this pipeline and that and that are packaged all the way to the data can then be used for multivariate statistics and so be as detailed and specific about your skills don't say uh well i'm very good with high throughput sequencing and so you know make it very specific in this case and if you're not sure the level of specificity that is required you know then just ask the interviewer as we said before the interviewer as we said before um what exactly do you mean

do you mean like which of the steps i've done myself versus what accompanied it or whatever so you know be very specific about what you can do state which are packages that you have used for example if they ask you how good are you with statistics they're like i'm very good with statistics say like i've used r and i've used this package in that package in that package for this purpose in this paper so be very specific when the question is about methods about what it really is that you did yourself and the level of

command of basically these different skills that you have another question is like where do you see yourself in five years so this can be asked for phd or it can be asked for a postdoc and we're just trying to find out what what would you like to do later on do you plan a career in academia do you see yourself as somebody who is a pi writes their own proposal what is your level of ambition um so just give the answer that's an honest answer of course where do you see yourself in a couple of

years after this appointment for example is over what is your longer term perspective in the sciences the classic in the end is like of course do you have any questions of us this will always be asked now don't say i don't have any questions um because it means well you're not that interested right is the signal that you're sending don't think about like you're bothering them with questions of course don't go overboard with asking like a huge list of questions don't do that just come prepared with like some things that are really important to you

that are related to this job um i don't know it could be anything it's like will i be able to also mentor undergrad students or phd students or something like this don't ask super specific questions like about the starting date or anything like this this is the stuff that you talk about and negotiate for the most part after you've made the offer so i think this is also very important to keep straight during the interview it's not the place to answer all the questions that you have to signal that you're interested in this position by

asking a well-informed good question about this and at best about the science that you're supposed to do but then leave out all the detail like uh what visa will i need and whatever so this is this is not the right place to ask these kinds of questions so come prepared with a bunch of pertinent questions for the science not about like the administrative detail or things like that and of course ask something positive right don't ask something negative i don't know but examples of that but i'm sure we've had some of those in the past

but you know oh i've heard whether in germany is terrible will i be able to deal with it or i don't know you know it has something that's positive so because this is the last thing from the interview it um creates sort of the the final impression uh from that conversation it's like oh the final conver the final impression from that conversation you want to be something positive and you want to have it signal your interest in the science and this position and that's it as i said i think this will be um probably relevant

not only for postdocs but also for phd students with probably a slightly different focus and i hope it will be useful to you good luck with getting the postdoc of your dreams thanks for watching see you in the next video