Graduate school interviews have become more popular in recent years as the world has become virtual and graduate admissions have become more competitive.
This blog post will cover three of the most challenging graduate school interview questions and give you some tips to think through how to answer them.
These questions aren’t necessarily the most complicated because of their content. But these are the trickiest questions to answer because you really need to think about how you respond to them.
Where else are you applying?
If you’re applying to graduate school, you are most likely applying to more than one school. But you want each school to know why they would be a great school for you and why you would be a great student for them.
You can’t go around and tell every single school that they’re your top choice. You don’t want to be disingenuous, but you want to be strategic about how you respond to this question.
If you’re applying to more than one school, you need to be honest about that, and you need to let them know. But for each school with which you apply, to which you apply with which you interview, you want to know why their program would be a good match for you and vice-versa.
So before you go for an interview at any school, look at their curriculum, program, advising structure, graduate student support, funding, or even the department’s statement of mission, vision, and values.
Utilize all of these to develop a comprehensive response that allows you to say,
“Yes, I am applying it to other schools; here’s what those schools and programs are. But this is why this particular school, this specific program, will help me meet the specific goals that I have. And here’s why I would be an excellent complement to this school.”
Not every graduate program in a discipline is the same, and this is something that a lot of students simply don’t know when they’re making the undergraduate to a graduate transition.
Students might think that a program in X will be the same no matter where you go .that is absolutely not the case, so you need to look into the professors who work in that program and what they are studying specifically.
If you have someone in mind as a potential supervisor for your graduate studies, if possible, reach out to them before the interview.
Let them know a little bit about who you are and what you’re interested in, what you think you might want to research and see if they’re open to considering supervising you.
That’s a lot of work to do if you’re applying to many different schools, but it’s important that you do this work. Not all graduate programs are the same. So doing this little bit of homework ahead of time will allow you at each school where you interview to demonstrate why they should consider your candidacy seriously.
How will you handle the stress in graduate school?
Again, this question is tricky and one that you should consider as part of your professional development and just as part of protecting yourself.
This question has been asked frequently and is considered one of the most challenging graduate school interview questions because it is merely subjective to your personality.
If you’re applying to graduate school, obviously, you’ve gone through undergrad, and you understand that academia is incredibly stressful.
You are entering a world with a kind of pressure, a kind of analysis and reasoning and questioning that you simply can’t grasp yet because you’re just planning to enter this new world.
It’s exciting, and you will be constantly thrilled by the kinds of questions that you’re able to ask that others have asked before you.
But, with that comes an incredible amount of pressure as you enter graduate school.
You’re not just a student anymore. You’re beginning to develop an identity as an academic, as a budding scholar, and that means that the line between who you are and what you do gets very blurry very quickly.
But this also means that critiques of your work can start feeling like critiques of yourself.
You will also form strong bonds with the other people in your cohort, the people who enter at the same year as you.
At the same time, you’re going to be in intense competition with those very same people.
Along with just the basic stress of doing all the teaching assistant work, publishing papers, and attending conferences, it would quickly build up your stress levels.
Therefore, you need to start planning to ensure relief and find ways to protect yourself from these stresses.
And, connecting with your peers is undoubtedly important to have a stress free life in academia.
When this question is raised, you have to have a simple yet convincing answer so that they understand that you understand what’s coming in your way.
If you could, would you have changed anything about your academic experience so far?
Very few people go through an academic experience and say that there’s nothing that they would have changed.
Usually, you’re going to say that you would probably either have changed something about yourself or about the environment in which you are doing your academic work previously.
If your previous supervisor is involved in the answer, you want to be careful. This is why this question has become a tricky graduate school interview question.
If your answer is related to something from the institutional perspective and you wanted to change your academic experience, that’d be a satisfactory answer.
However, you want to think strategically about approaching these issues.
Always focus on how you’ve persevered despite such a challenge, and the same rules apply if you’re talking about something that you wish you would have changed about yourself.
As an example, you can say,
In the first year or two of my undergrad, I wasn’t as involved as I could have been in my department.
But I quickly understood that the education at this level isn’t the same as high school, so I pushed myself to be involved as much as possible in the last three years of undergraduate studies.
And I was able to get the most out of it and developed a renewed commitment.
In such an answer, not only do you describe the problem, but you will have an opportunity to come back and say how you turned it around to be an advantage for your application.
This kind of answer will be a great way of responding to a question like that.
Final words
The most important aspect of any type of interview, in general, is honesty and genuineness.
Even if some of these graduate student interview questions are difficult to answer, you will face no trouble answering them if you prepare well enough.
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