Question about Research Interest Interviews

[bunnyluvr]

So I've got my first interview coming up and I just received the schedule for it. It turns out that I won't be meeting with any of the people that I indicated on my secondary application that I'd like to meet with, but instead will be meeting with people that are very loosely affiliated with the type of work that I'm interested in (I'm even scheduled to meet with someone who mathematically models cardiac circuitry even though I'm strictly a neuro person).

So I guess my question is how much it matters in the long run *who* precisely you interview with. I imagine these research interviews are mostly about whether the applicant can talk about their research effectively and aren't really meant for matching applicants to potential mentors, right? So should I just not really worry about the fact that I won't be speaking to experts in the field that I research in?

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[starfun21]

Hi there! Congratulations on your interview (first one, wooooo!). I can gladly share my thoughts based on my experience two years ago. I can also tell you now that the tl;dr is basically you are correct: you'll likely meet with several people outside of your field or barely inside of your field, and it shouldn't be a problem!

If you had the chance to request a meeting with some folks but didn't receive it, I definitely wouldn't worry. It is likely that those individual researchers were simply not available during your interview, and the school did their best to help you meet with folks who are generally in your field. What I'm trying to convey here is that there really is nothing you can do anyway -- I don't think it's worth pushing the school at all to see if they can do "better", and I wouldn't advise emailing the PIs directly at this point. You requested to meet with them, and unfortunately it wasn't possible, so the school gave you the best they could.

BUT the good news -- It really doesn't matter. If you become truly interested in that school, and if they accept you, you will have another chance to visit! Many programs may not be able to match you with your preferred mentors during interview season, but you should almost certainly be able to meet with some of them during a second visit to see how interested you are in their work specifically. I always tried to view it as the interview being more about you and how you can succeed as a physician scientist overall, and then the second look (if you get one, ideally!) really trying to help you envision where you'd fit in.

Again, as a personal note, I definitely interviewed with many people who were far outside of my specialty, and then a few who I would have been interested to potentially work alongside. Scientists of all disciplines will certainly be able to discuss your research with you and evaluate you even if they don't specialize in your field. In fact, one of my interviews was near Christmas, so most faculty were gone for the holiday and I met with people in fields I didn't even know existed! It was just all the school had to offer me at the time, but I still had a great experience learning about their program and their general resources, and the researchers and I both seemed to enjoy learning about each other's work.

I think I've rambled a lot (sorry), but I hope this helps!

 

[bunnyluvr]

Thanks so much!! This was definitely super helpful and allayed a lot of my concerns. One quick follow up though if you don't mind: I've heard that a lot of interviewers expect that you've read their research. I've been trying to do this with the interviewers I've been assigned, but I'm definitely concerned that I don't know enough about computational modeling of myocytes or even about molecular neuroscience (I'm strictly a computational neuroscience person) to be able to critique their methodologies or offer suggestions like I would be able to do with PIs in my field. Did you ever have an interview where you were asked to critique or discuss the PI's research even though it wasn't in your field?

 

[starfun21]

Nope, that never came up during my interviews. Honestly, almost all of my interviews involved the PIs very excitedly telling me about what they do.

It sometimes still helped for me to read a tiny bit about their background in advance, just so I was more prepared to hear the details and also so that I would have sort of an idea of the perspective they might have on certain issues (ex: if you're interviewing with someone with a computational background, definitely make sure you know about any computational work done in the course of your own research... and don't diss/downplay the computations LOL). I also sometimes would ask questions about their work by saying that my understanding was that the PI studies XYZ and I'm interested in this part so I'd love to learn more, etc. So it can't hurt to know a little bit about what the researcher does, but honestly I think there are diminishing returns on it; you only get so long with the researcher, and most of the interview will still focus on your own accomplishments. No PI ever just flat-out asked me to describe their work or anything like that.

Good luck!