Interview with Penn Researcher next week. Recommendations?

[sb1003]

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I come home for spring break this weekend and I will be meeting with a researcher at Penn for a potential research opportunity this summer. I do not have extensive research experience, but am currently conducting research with my advisor. However, I am a freshman, and I want to be fully prepared to explain anything and ask the interviewer any questions that would help me.

Have any of you had experience getting interviewed by a researcher, and have not had extensive research experience? What helped you? Were they mainly looking for interested students who were willing to do work? What were the tricky questions they asked?

What kinds of responsibilities do undergraduates have at research labs, for example, at big research institutions?

P.S. I wrote a cover letter to him a few months back explaining my interest and provided him a CV/resume. He seemed interested and asked me to come to his lab to learn more.

Thanks!

 

[richse]

I come home for spring break this weekend and I will be meeting with a researcher at Penn for a potential research opportunity this summer. I do not have extensive research experience, but am currently conducting research with my advisor. However, I am a freshman, and I want to be fully prepared to explain anything and ask the interviewer any questions that would help me.

Have any of you had experience getting interviewed by a researcher, and have not had extensive research experience? What helped you? Were they mainly looking for interested students who were willing to do work? What were the tricky questions they asked?

What kinds of responsibilities do undergraduates have at research labs, for example, at big research institutions?

P.S. I wrote a cover letter to him a few months back explaining my interest and provided him a CV/resume. He seemed interested and asked me to come to his lab to learn more.

Thanks!

Ask specifically about what projects he has available for you to work on. What kind of techniques are involved in the studies. Human studies may involve recruitment, informed consent, and running the experiments. If they do animal studies there might be surgeries and behavioral testing. If they do more with cell/protein/dna then you can learn things like histo,westerns, pcr, FACS. All of the above generally include data analysis and statistics once you finish the experiment. Ask what he is willing to let you learn and what seems reasonable in the time that you will be in the lab. If he gives you choices don't be afraid to let him know that you think one project is more interesting than another. You can also ask about opportunities for writing/publishing.

In my experience, undergrads have extremely variable responsibilities at Penn depending on the lab they join. It also varies based on their time, goals, and ability. I worked in a psychiatry lab at Penn during my post-bac and we would normally have a few undergrads at a time. Some just helped a little with experiments while some ended up with first author papers. The summer students that wrote papers generally gathered all the data over the summer and spent a good portion of the following semester working on the paper even if it was just through email with the PI.

 

[Morsetlis]

If you're a freshman, you know jack ****. Don't pretend like you do.

Express interest, enthusiasm, and have a goal in mind.