PhD interviews are part of almost every PhD application process, and they are an opportunity for you to get to know the faculty of the institution/university you’re applying to, and to demonstrate your potential to embark on a research project. This blog post provides examples of some of the most common interview questions, and advice on how to prepare a presentation on either a research project you’ve done (e.g. during an internship, bachelor’s thesis, or a master’s programme). I am currently doing a PhD at Oxford in Genomic Medicine and Statistics, and I applied to several biomedical science, biochemistry, and genetics PhD programmes in the UK in 2022 - below are questions taken from interviews at Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial College.

At the start of the interview, you will often be asked warm-up questions such as “tell us about yourself in 2 minutes”, “why do you want to do a PhD?”, “what experiences have you had that could help you during a PhD?”, and “what makes you different compared to other candidates?”. It’s a good idea to brainstorm answers to these questions in advance, which should help to calm your nerves, and help you communicate to the panel why you’d make a great PhD student on their programme.

Often PhD programmes will ask you to present a previous research project for 5-10 minutes, either with or without slides. If they ask you to make slides, they will often specify the maximum number of slides: keep to the slide count, but you can use animations. Your slides should be simple and uncluttered and don’t have anything on your slides that you don’t talk about. Make sure you explain enough background so that someone from a general science background can understand you - your interviewers are very unlikely to have experience in your current field. Furthermore, explain why you are doing/did specific experiments or made particular choices - this needs to come before the “how”. You can end with the implications of your findings and why they are important, along with possible future directions for your work. Practice the presentation in front of friends, family, and members of your current research group if you have the opportunity, and if your interview is over Zoom, it’s a good idea to have a rehearsal with a friend to make sure you’re as confident as possible for the real thing.

Your interviewers are very likely to ask you some questions about this presentation. They may ask why your experimental setup is a good model for what you’re investigating, what previous findings your work relies on, what other labs are doing research in your current field, or what is new in your current/previous research field(s). They may also ask how you ensure that you generate high-quality data, what your controls were (positive and negative), or how a particular technique you used works. Another interesting question I was asked at one of my PhD interviews was “what would you include in a grant based on your current findings?”. Alongside these technical questions, your interviewers may ask what you found challenging in your project, and what you enjoyed the most. One of the best things to get across in your answers to these questions is how they have prepared you for a PhD - how did they help you become more resilient, acquire problem-solving skills, or learn a particularly useful technique?

Aside from your scientific abilities, they may also want to know what you do outside the lab for work-life balance, how you deal with any conflict in the lab, and what you’re looking for in an ideal PhD supervisor. The interviewers also often ask students to tell them about a time you failed or troubleshooted, alongside “what are you doing to work on your weaknesses?”. The purpose of these questions is to find out whether you’re prepared for the challenges that arise during a PhD.

Some PhD programmes will send you a paper in advance of the interview to present to them. If this is the case for you, it’s a good idea to present the knowledge gap this paper was trying to fill, how they solved it, and what this means. They may also ask what you liked/didn’t like about the paper, whether the authors make unsupported claims in the discussion, and what further work could be done to build on the findings.

Interviews often end with the panel asking whether you have any questions for them - remember, this is your opportunity to see if the programme is a good fit for you! Examples of questions you could ask are: “what surprises PhD students when they start a PhD?”, “are there opportunities for teaching?”, and “what do you like about working here as a group leader?”.

I hope this information was useful, and further information can be found on the Find a PhD website 🔗 and the YouTube channels of Dr Andy Stapleton 🔗, Hira Javaid 🔗 and Dr Amina Yonis 🔗.