How To PASS Your PhD Interview With Flying Colours PhD Tips Advice

Do you have a PhD interview coming up? Fear not, I'm here to help. I am going to tell you in this video what to expect at your PhD interview and how to pass with flying colours. My name is Dr Hayley Stainton and if you are new to this channel please do hit subscribe and don't forget to like this video too. I have lots of helpful content on all things PhD, academia, study skills etc that I'm sure you will find very useful. Okay so your PhD interview is coming up. Well done on getting an interview first of all, that's really great. Not everyone does but now what you've got to do is to prepare yourself and make sure that you are awesome in your interview. So I have seven tips on things that you can do in advance of your interview and during your interview to make sure that you ace it and you pass it with flying colours and you get to start your PhD ASAP. Okay so my first bit of advice is to do your research on who might be your supervisors and who might be interviewing you for your PhD. Now you might be in a position where you have no clue and there is very little information on the internet but that's probably not the case because in most cases university lecturers will have profiles on the university website. Now this makes it quite easy for you because if you've got an interview I assume that you have already done an application form, maybe a proposal, so you already know the topic area. So all you need to do is have a look through the university website, which lecturers are there or professors are there that work there and who specialises in your area. Almost every university will list their staff and they will usually have a page dedicated to that member of staff and it will say their research interests, their research areas, what they teach and what they've published. So you can get a really good gauge actually on what their specialisms are. So it should be relatively easy for you to narrow down who might be interviewing you. The chances are you will have whoever might be your supervisor to interview you. Most people will have two, sometimes three supervisors. So I would write down everybody at that university who could potentially be a supervisor because they've got experience and expertise in the area of research that you are looking into and research them. So when I say research them, my advice would be have a look at what they've published. If you can get access to their publications, read them. Get a highlighter pen, get a normal pen and highlight any noteworthy bits. If in your interview you can make quotes to their work or you express that you know about the things that they've written about, I'm sure they will be impressed. Academics like it when you recognise their research and even if you don't directly quote them, if you can show that you have a knowledge of what they have a knowledge of, you're automatically going to be able to develop some sort of bond and that's a really good thing. The relationship between the supervisors and the PhD student is absolutely integral because they are your teachers, they are your mentors, they are your guides. They will be involved in every step of your research. My first bit of advice is research your supervisors, read their publications, have a look at their LinkedIn profiles. If they have a website, lots of academics these days have websites, they have YouTube channels. Watch their videos, look at their websites, get a feel for the lecturers or the professors and learn as much about them as you can. In advance of your interview for your PhD you will probably need to put together a PhD proposal of some form. It might be a shortened form and once you are accepted onto your PhD you do the full-blown proposal or they might want the full-blown proposal in advance. So when you do this proposal you need to remember that it is a step up from degree or master's. That means more references, higher quality, more analysis and whilst you're probably not going to go into loads of detail in this proposal before you've even been given the PhD, you do need to demonstrate that you've really thought about it and in particular this would be which literature you're going to refer to and you obviously don't know all of the literature because that's a huge chunk of your PhD and you're not there yet but you need to have an idea and some good references. Tip! Have a look at some of the references that your PhD supervisors use, put them in there. Reference your PhD supervisors! Double tick! And the other bit that you will need to focus on is your research methodology. So if you have a think about what methods you will use and why. As I talk about in my video on how to do your PhD faster because I think we all want to finish as fast as we can, you don't want to make your life difficult. So right from the get-go think about where do your specialisms lie, what do you already have knowledge or an interest in and probably go with that. In my PhD proposal I said I was going to do quantitative statistical analysis. I did go ahead with that. That was a mistake because I wasn't very good at that. I think what I produced in the end was okay but it took a lot of reading in the library, it took a lot of my time, it was pretty stressful. Actually I should have just stuck with qualitative because that's what I knew. So really think carefully and be able to justify all of your decisions because you will probably be asked about them during your interview. My third piece of advice for you is to really understand your strengths and your weaknesses. And I know that a lot of us find it difficult to talk about our weaknesses but we all have them and when you are asked about what areas you might need to work on, be honest. As part of the PhD process, doing training, going to events, these sorts of things are really important. Your university will provide for that. So right from the start you can identify I think I would need some extra training in this. You don't need to say I'm really terrible at this but what you can say is I've got some knowledge but I would like to improve it. And that is a good way to say yes I'm aware that I need development but I'm not going to put myself down because you know I'm in an interview. I want to look good right? My fourth piece of advice for you is really to just demonstrate a level of confidence. Don't be arrogant. We don't want to be too confident but demonstrate actually you know I know I can do it. I might not know everything right now but that's part of the process. Part of doing a PhD is learning, is developing and that's the kind of confidence that you want to demonstrate and you want to make sure that your PhD or your potential PhD supervisors have confidence in you and if you demonstrate confidence in yourself then people can have confidence in you. That'll be a bit easier. Another thing that you will want to do during your PhD interview is demonstrate a willingness to learn. Your supervisors are there to teach you and guide you and they don't want to take somebody on as their PhD student who's going to give them a hard time. They want somebody who is receptive to what they are saying, who is going to listen to them. So you should demonstrate that straight away. If they try and teach you something or explain something during the interview, look interested and hopefully you actually genuinely are interested and that will demonstrate that you can work together because ultimately that's what you need to do. You need to be able to work together. As with any interview in any walk of life, I would always recommend that you go prepared with a set of questions to ask. Now sometimes these questions will be answered during the interview process but sometimes they will not. So what I would recommend is that you take some notes in with you. You're probably going to be taking notes in anyway, papers with your PhD proposal, reference list, that sort of stuff. So in with all your papers, put some questions and these are questions like what are the opportunities for training and development? Is there any in-house training? How many other PhD students are there? Are there any PhD student events like colloquiums and things like that? Is there access to certain software that you think you might need? Those sorts of questions. So in advance, jot lots of them down. Some of them probably will be answered during the interview but at the end you want to show that you've got questions, you are keen to learn, you have thought about everything and hopefully your PhD supervisors will give you appropriate answers and the answers that you are hoping for. And my last point that I will make is that in advance of your PhD interview, make sure that you develop a knowledge, if you don't have one already, of the research system and structure that is in place at that university and in your country. Because I know not everybody will be watching this from the UK and in different countries we do have slightly different processes. For most of you, if you are successful and you become a PhD student, there will be some requirements to produce research. That will probably be the research that you're doing as part of your PhD but there may be requirements for you to publish this, publish this in a certain place. Say for example, you may be required to get say two publications in high quality journals. In the UK these are ranked by stars so it might be say a four-star journal or a three-star or above journal, it goes from one to four. Different parts of the world, different industries may have slightly different rankings and in the UK there is something called the REF. Now I won't go into lots of details about this right now but basically a university is scored based on their research output and where this research is output. So one of the things that the university might be looking for when they do choose which PhD students to take on is actually can they contribute here, can they help us to get a higher REF score which helps in terms of the university's rankings overall, in terms of the funding that they can bring in, those sorts of things. So it might be that they could ask you questions about that. So do a little bit of research and find out in your country that you are based in and by the way leave me a comment which country are you based in because I do want to tailor my videos to whoever is watching so drop me a comment where are you? Anyway so do a bit of research, make sure you know a little bit, you're not going to be expected to be an expert straight away but by demonstrating that you do have an idea that is going to look really good. Okay so those are my seven points, on how to pass the PhD interview process with flying colours. So if you do have an interview and you have found this video helpful please do hit that like button and also come back, come back after your interview and let me know how you got on. You can leave a comment here on this video or you can send me a DM on Instagram. So good luck with your interview, I know you can do it, you definitely can do it, just take a little bit of time to prepare and you will ace it.