An interview from a PhD Program of Neurobiology—the lesson I have learnt
By Raymond on Feb 28, 2009 in Application to Graduate School
Just before the Chinese Lunar New Year, I received a telephone interview from Duke’s Neurobiology PhD Program. My performance was not satisfactory, but the talk was enjoyable, and I was excited that I have learnt a lot from the discussions with the two professors. Actually I requested to deliver my first question at the very beginning of the interview, “How to pronounce your family name Raghavachari?” It would be strange if I did not even know how to read the name of the person I was talking to.
They first asked me why I decided to study in Beijing. I should be the first Tsinghua/Peking University Hong Kong student who applies for a biology PhD program since the return of HK to China. I was not very sure whether foreign people could understand the difference in education systems between HK and mainland China. Perhaps some people may feel strange that HK students, as Chinese people, have difficulty in learning in Chinese. I explained to them my challenges and the goal of studying in Tsinghua, similar to what I wrote in About Myself in this website.
Very soon we got to the research part. To me, it was very similar to a debate. After I described my research projects briefly to them, they grabbed the holes in my description immediately and challenged them. They did not focus on the conclusion of the experiment, but how we discovered the phenomenon and reached the conclusion. For example, when I talked about a fruitfly dominant negative mutant which possesses prolonged early phase memory, they asked me how we found out the gene and why we did not use SNP/null mutant instead of dominant negative mutant. These questions are fundamental, but I was not aware of them when I prepared for the interview. Of course I have asked the graduate students in my lab about these questions very long time ago. The answer was reasonable and not surprising, so I did not remember it very clearly.
The professors also asked me my own point of view of an issue, such as Alzheimer’s Disease as I have done some research on it. I realized that what seems true to me may not be true to the professors, and vice versa. Most of the time there won’t be a definite answer to a question, but it would be better to read more papers and consider the ups and downs of each opinion thoroughly, so that we can defend our own belief bravely, powerfully and logically.
The interview exposed my problem of lack of discussion of my own research with students and professors outside my lab. In lab meetings, all the lab members are familiar with the projects of each other and they may take some assumptions or procedures for granted. Talking with scholars who are unfamiliar with our research may help to break the frame we unconsciously set for ourselves and bring us new sparks of ideas. In symposiums, I tend to talk merely about the projects of the speakers, but rarely share my research experience with the audience who sit beside me. These are actually great chances to exchange for ideas I have never thought of, and pick up the holes in my own research I have not yet discovered. We get more when we share more.
The instructor in my lab is always busy. This interview should be one of the few chances I have to talk about my research with very talented professors seriously. Indeed, they have strong logic in their mind, shown in their ability to find out the seams in my first brief description of a project. They also possess very broad knowledge base. Although Alzheimer’s Disease is not their research area, they know quite a lot about it, at least their knowledge is enough for a mini debate. The interview serves as a beacon which leads me to the destination of a great scholar.
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