What kinds of interview questions were asked about your research?

[gracesalt]

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As I am preparing for my interview, I am wondering, what are some specific questions that were asked about your research?

 

[Zombiegirl]

Almost nothing honestly. I went to 6 interviews with extremely extensive research experience and never got asked about it once beyond basic “what was that like?” or “tell me more about that” I wouldn’t stress over memorizing methodology or anything like that. I would just have a general description of what you did and why it matters/how it helped shape your interest in medical school.

 

[yobo9345]

YMMV but I was actually asked pretty surprisingly specific stuff about my research. Like, discussion of the pros and cons of the cellular disease model my lab uses, specific info about my methods for one of my experiments, etc. But, research has been my full time job for several years, and the interviewer in question was a biochemistry professor, so I think it probably just depends. I think if you have a good understanding of the type of research your lab does, the level where you can have a discussion about the goals of your research and the problems that come up (like beyond just being able to say that you ran PCRs) you should be fine. Know your role in the research project but also be able to discuss the big picture.

 

[Lucca]

at MD interviews, mostly very surface level questions like what I did, what my projects were, what I got out of it, why I got into research/how I envision it fitting into my career.

at MD/PhD interviews the conversations with research faculty were obviously all about research so questions were more specific and some interviewers got pretty technical asking me hypothetical questions about how I would build a microscope to solve a particular problem (in my ballpark tho as a biophysicist who does microscopy).

 

[lalalallala]

The vast majority of my interviews I just got asked normal, easy questions like what I learned from it and whether I see myself in clinical or bench research more because I did both.

That being said in my last interview I got drilled. I had enrolled patients for about 10 different clinical research trials and had done some of the data analysis and stuff and the interviewer was like list all ten studies and their procedures and their research questions and every time I started to answer he would cut me off and ask deeper questions. It was very strange. Turns out he spent his entire career as a NIH researcher so it made a little more sense why he was so focused on one research related experience I wrote down. So my advice would be to know your research well because you never know who you are going to get (if you do genetics research for example you may end up with an interviewer who also does genetics research so you need to prepare as if this is going to be the case).

Number one thing would be to not embellish what you did or imply you know more than you do. As long as you are genuine then you will be fine.

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

I was only asked about it at one school. They wanted me to explain it to them, and neither of them were in the field. Fortunately I am used to explaining math concepts to non-mathematicians lol.

 

[freedoctor17]

At two schools that were very research focused i had to go into detail about the hypothesis and how it was tested and all that. The other schools i interviewed at just asked very basic questions like "what was your research about" and many didn't even ask about it at all.