In how much depth do I need to discuss my research during an interview?

[AllDay24]

Hey everyone,

Rising junior here, and I am doing research that I currently love and will continue to do until I apply summer before senior year. I can explain everything I ever learned in this research job during an interview.

However, I did 5 months of research in a biology lab which I did not enjoy during the summer of sophomore year, and I have already forgotten most of what I have learned. The lab worked with mutagenesis in E.coli and yeast and checked to see if they would have higher or lower fitness. It's hard for me to explain it in any sort of detail. Needless to say, my memory of it is going to be even worse next year.

In how much depth in an interview would I be expected to explain five months of research done two full years before I apply? Will they instead focus on the research that I will continue to do for a total of >1.5 years, which I can easily explain in an interview?

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[Barcu]

Hey everyone,

Rising junior here, and I am doing research that I currently love and will continue to do until I apply summer before senior year. I can explain everything I ever learned in this research job during an interview.

However, I did 5 months of research in a biology lab which I did not enjoy during the summer of sophomore year, and I have already forgotten most of what I have learned. The lab worked with mutagenesis in E.coli and yeast and checked to see if they would have higher or lower fitness. It's hard for me to explain it in any sort of detail. Needless to say, my memory of it is going to be even worse next year.

In how much depth in an interview would I be expected to explain five months of research done two full years before I apply? Will they instead focus on the research that I will continue to do for a total of >1.5 years, which I can easily explain in an interview?

Ideally, you would be able to talk about both in detail, but I doubt you would ever need to.

I was in a similar situation where I had two different projects in two different labs (about 1.5 years each). I only ever needed to talk about the most recent, where I was also doing my thesis.

Before your interview, just briefly read over any reports/papers you had to write or one that your PI wrote, just to spark your memory.

 

[Nymphicus]

My advice would be to focus not on the methods and techniques and lab procedures, but rather the way you went about forming your own hypothesis and testing it, formalized into a research project. I feel that most interviewers could care less about southern blot or counting bacterial colonies, but rather how you decided to test using the methods you tested, and what you learned about how research functions in the "real world" (this includes not just science, but the academic hierarchy, funding, and the fact that scientific results, even if published, should be questioned and critiqued before using it, especially in your own work.

Exceptions would be: your research happens to be your interviewer's specialty, or you are going for MD/PhD

Of course, be familiar with all of the main methods and hypothesis/results of your independent studies. Otherwise it will probably look like you were just a bench monkey (even if you just forgot because it was so long ago.)

 

[AllDay24]

Thanks for the responses!. I still curious whether a 5 month project done 2 years before the interview would be discussed as much as a >1.5 years project going on at the same time as the interview. What do you think? I honestly can't remember much about the older project...

 

[UnclePhil]

Out of the 7 interviewers that I talked to during interviews last year, only 1 asked me about my research (though he did ask pretty in depth questions, turned out that he was also in the field that I did my research in and knew the PI that I had worked with).

 

[kpcrew]

well the way i hear it, everything is fair game. if he brings up the older project, you can steer the conversation towards the more recent one and talk about it intelligently.