Outline:
- 1 Background
- 2 Motivation
- 3 Research experience
- 4 Examiner's profile
- 5 Question list
- 6 Tips and resources
Hello everyone, welcome to my channel. Today I am going to share my experience in preparing PhD interviews for the Biostats program and Stats program in the United States. I applied for 8 PhD programs. The program starts from the autumn quarter in the year 2021. Finally, I got two offers with full scholarship. One is Biostatistics PhD, at the University of Pennsylvania. The other is Statistics PhD, at the University of Chicago. I also received the interview invitation from the Biostatistics Program from University of Washington. But unfortunately, it fell through. Next, I will share what I have prepared for the interview and some tips that I feel extremely useful. The video is organized into six parts, you can directly go to the part you want according to the timeline at the bottom. But I highly recommend you keep watching because these tips came from blood, sweat, and tears. (1 minute)
There are several questions you could think about to introduce yourself and demonstrate your motivation. The most basic ones could be,
- Tell me about yourself,
- What are your research interests,
- Why a PhD, why Biostats/Stats,
- Why this program, and
- What challenges do you expect to encounter during your PhD.
You can paraphrase what you wrote in your statement of purpose but in a conversational manner. I think each question should be shorter than 2 minutes. Because when I playback my own recorded responses, I will lose my focus if the response is too long. For each question, I summarize the points you can talk about. Hope it can give you some inspiration.
So, for the first question, you can talk about, for example where you come from, your research experience in your undergraduate study or graduate study. I think the mAIn message to convey is to describe how your past experiences shape you as a researcher and how these experiences make you interested in certain topics in biostatistics or stats, which you would like to explore more in your future study. I think the third question why you want a PhD is really personal. There is no right or wrong answer. You may just talk about your own motivation, but use examples to demonstrate. For example, in my interview, I approached it in this way.
Currently I am working as a research assistant at somewhere. I am trying to estimate the case-fatality ratio for certain disease. However, the number of my data points is not much greater than the number of features, it is hard to do model selection and make statistical inferences upon it. This makes me interested in high-dimensional statistics. Nowadays we are able to generate and store tons of data and I hope to devote myself to developing appropriate methodologies to analyze these high dimensional data, to transfer data into knowledge. Therefore, I want to pursue a PhD in stats/biostats. I hope to establish a solid theoretical foundation during the study, because I believe it will be extremely useful to solve complex problems. I encountered the first three questions both at Upenn and UW.
The fourth and fifth questions were asked during interview at Upenn. For why I want to study biostats, I said I really love its biological applications. The development of methodology was motivated by the real problem, which makes me excited. For the question why you want this program, you can answer from these aspects, like faculty’s research interests, rich resources you can have access, specialties of the program, for example, whether it has research rotation opportunity, or whether it has biostats consultation project, or whether it has flexible supervision structures. You can also talk about school, and school location, like the city of Seattle, and the city of Philly.
I was asked what challenges I expected to encounter at the interview at UW. I said I might have difficulties in learning measure theory. But I don't think it is a good answer. Some of the other applicants have already had experience in learning measure theories. Also, I think the interviewers may doubt whether you could survive if you show you are not confident in learning advanced mathematics.
Next, I will share how to describe research experiences. My structure is like this,
- Firstly introduce my research question, for example, whether it is an estimation problem or I want to do prediction.
- Next, I will briefly discuss the significance of my project or why it is important to study this problem.
- Secondly, I will summarize my main contributions, for example, I want to do this, however, I encounter this problem, then I tried methods A, B, C but they did not work. After doing research, I realized method D could work. Then I learned the advanced method D by myself and applied it to my problem. It turns out to work very well.
- Finally, you can say what is your result and it answers your research questions.
During the interview, the interviewers may stop you when you describe the methodology you use. They may want you to provide my details or challenge you by pointing out problems in your approach. For example, during the interview at UW, Dr. Rice asked how to analyze data points when they come from different study designs or how to deal with the problem of underreporting in surveillance data. I did not realize these problems until they were asked during the interview. Till now I still have no idea of addressing these problems and I did not provide a good answer during the interview as well. I guess this was the reason why I did not stand out and got rejection from the UW's program. So my suggestion is spending most of your time preparing your research experiences. They could demonstrate your ability in doing research.
In the following, I will talk about the interviewer's profile research. Usually you will know your interviewers in advance. Most likely they will be the professors that you mentioned in your statement of purpose. I feel it could be useful to know more about your interviewers, for example, their research areas and research interests. It may facilitate your conversation.
So you can search google scholars, but pay more attention to their publications at the big 4 journals.
You may also look at their research collaborators, especially when the first or second author is his/her current PhD student. Then you may have a taste of what project they are currently working on. You may have a look at this project, to see whether you like it, and you can discuss the details that make you excited during the interview. You may also have a look at your interviewer's Twitter accounts. Most likely you can find their most influential work there. You can also see their research networks and their influential areas.
When I prepare my PhD interviews, I asked several people for advice. Interestingly, they all gave me the same suggestion, asking a lot of questions. One of my seniors said the worst thing that happened in the interview was the awkward silence. So I prepare a list of questions you may ask during the interview. You can ask about their advising styles, how do they view their research in the next few years, and so on. One of the admitted students at UChicago asked Rina Barber What quality do you think the most important for a PhD student during the faculty research sharing session. I really like her answer. She said she thought the ability to see the big picture was very important, like having a high-level understanding of using what method to solve what problem. Personally, I really enjoy asking questions. I feel it is a great chance to learn from these distinguished researchers.
There are some tips that I feel very useful. You can make connections with the current PhD students and ask them how their interviews looked like. And make a lot of practice, do mock interviews with different people, because you can receive feedback from different perspectives. Also, record your response and make your answer clear and concise. Finally, congratulations to you to receive an interview invitation. You should be proud that you are one of the top applicants and the PhD interview is a great chance to demonstrate your ability, enthusiasm, and curiosity. These are useful websites for your application. There are many good videos, articles, and tutorials there to help you prepare for your interviews!
最后如果这个视频对你有帮助，求求观众老爷给个一键三连！你的喜爱就是对我创作的最大支持！大家如果有问题也可以在视频下方留言！我都会回复的！热门问题我也可以再来个答疑视频！有建议也可以给我留言呀！
2021年11月12日
作者:静靖瑾言
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