Research Student Job Interviews 101

I have interviewed dozens of research students over the years for student internships in R&D. Before that I interviewed several times for internships and student jobs. Here are some take aways from my experience.

1. Answers have to be straight and to-the-point. Researchers are fact-driven people who dislike spin, buzzwords, and anything else that is more fluff and less meat.
2. Giving short, concise answers leads to being asked more questions (since interview durations are fixed). This means getting more chances to impress the interviewer. 
3. You interview with a person or a group, not a company! Make sure you have something intelligent to say about the specific group when asked about your interest in the position. The whole world knows Microsoft is a great software company with $XYZ billion revenues and ABC thousand highly skilled employees. But can you provide some insight about the research publications coming out of the image processing group at Microsoft Research where you are interviewing? 
4. Know your CV inside out. This is very important because interviewers can pick out any bit and ask you about it. Anything on the CV is fair-game.
5. This also leads to the corollary of not exaggerating or lying on the CV. Research scientists or professors are highly trained people who can easily discern how much someone actually knows. A student with a glowing CV and ordinary interview performance will be judged much more harshly than a student with a ordinary CV and an ordinary interview performance. Don't dash lofty expectations of interviewers. Do this by not creating lofty expectations in the first place. 
6. I-dont-know is the best answer when you dont know the answer to a question instead of trying to dodge the question. But its also useful to add one sentence after saying I-dont-know to indicate any independent thinking on your part about how the question may be answered. This helps drive the conversation forward (see the next point).
7. Difficult questions are asked so that interviewees can estimate your independent thinking capability. This is probably the single most important capability for any researcher. Try to work with the interviewer to arrive at an answer through common-sense reasoning if he leads you on by dropping clues.
8. Refrain from political or opiniated statements (e.g. I hate Windows but love Linux). I once told an interviewer that I disliked C# because it was not open source; at the end of the interview he told me that his team used C# via an open-source C# version (Mono)! Check-mate.

Student tip: English composition

This post carries a very important message. Your success in R&D is strongly correlated to how well you write in English.When you write an email to a professor/researcher, when you write a research report,  when you write a paper, or when you submit a grant proposal, what carries your impression is the text that the recipient reads. What sort of impression do you want to make?

Herein lies a problem. Most science/technology/medicine undergraduates do not practice English composition after high-school. Then suddenly, they are faced with the prospect of writing professional sounding prose. Harder than you think, and more important than almost any other skill or transcript grade. The challenge is to improve English composition to a level where it can impress rather than put off people. Here are some ideas to get you started.

1.  Start early. You need time to improve English composition. And patience.
2.  Read standard English text on a regular basis - Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Time Magazine. They are all available online.
3. Start writing. Put in genuine effort in writing email, start writing a blog, volunteer for your college newspaper, etc.
4. Take a class. Try to find out if English composition is offered in some faculty of your university. Some faculties offer specific classes in technical/business writing.
5. Converse with people who have a better command over the language than you do: it rubs on.
6. A book that I highly recommend (from personal experience): The Technical Writer's Handbook by Matt Young.

Superior English composition will impress potential employers throughout your life (this applies equally to non-R&D fields). With discipline, patience, and hard-work, you can make it your secret weapon.

Student Tip: How to Approach a Researcher/Professor for a Job

This post presents a few ideas for students wanting to understand a professor's or researcher's professional work area. This is useful when you apply for a research job or internship.

Approaching a researcher or professor for a job or internship requires that you have an idea about her work beforehand. This helps in preparing your pitch and improves your chances of bubbling up to the top of the pile of student resumes she has received. Nothing impresses more than a student who can have a brief intelligent conversation about the professor's research field.

Understand that applying for a research job is not the same as applying for a university admission. Why? Because your interest in the research job should be genuine and specific to the work being offered by the professor or researcher. Your desire to get a university degree is also genuine, but the university was convinced about genuineness for every student who applied because a non-serious student would stand to lose the most anyway - her gpa, tuition fee, and time.

On the other hand, a wrong student hire can significantly degrade the output of a research project and harm the researcher's career prospects. Moreover, arbitrarily removing an under-performing student worker is politically unfavorable for a researcher or professor and is rarely an option. Therefore professors and researchers tread with extreme caution before hiring and are experts at sniffing out the good genuine students from the lackluster ones.

But lets put on the student's hat here. The student is obviously not an expert in the researchers field, the desire to do research partly stems from the financial aspect of the research job (tuition waiver/stipend/internship experience), she must cast a wide net, spanning dozens of professors/researchers, in order to net a "catch", and sometimes she hasn't ever met the researcher or professor to whom she is applying for a job. Its hard enough trying to understand one professor's work, but what with dozens?

Unlike university applications,  which tend to be almost identical across universities, each professor or researcher requires a unique effort on part of the student. Moreover, In fact, this arduous task is a natural selection process that separates casual student job hunters from the serious ones.Here are a few things to bear in mind when fishing for research jobs/internships

Approach Medium - Cold emailing is brave but can be construed as spam in the eyes of the researchers/professors. Not because they are snobbish and proud, but because they receive a barrage of the i-want-a-job emails every day. A classic tragedy of the commons - email is free to replicate and send for students. But it is expensive (in time) to read and act on the recipients part. If you can afford it, or if you are fortunate to be in the vicinity of where you want to work, then please arrange a face-to-face meeting via the appropriate channel (e.g. calling the secretary, asking your dad's uncle, who happens to be an academic, to introduce you, etc.).

However, you may not have the resources to personally meet potential employers, so email is by far the only plausible medium. Make sure your email is not spam. Heres how

• Find out if there is a HR channel to send your application instead of directly emailing researchers/professors your resume and work samples. And yes, this is information you dig out through the organization's website, not by asking the professor or researcher!
• Most i-want-a-job emails come roughly 4-6 months before the start of the job (e.g. most summer internship applications arrive between the preceding October and January) . Why should that be? How about some extra effort, much in advance, to start reading and learning your prospective employers' work and start a genuine conversation thread regarding their work. If you have good ideas then  most researchers/professors would be happy to hire you, and assign your time to you so that you can pursue your idea.

Another great idea is to pull interest toward you instead of fishing for jobs. How? Start your own blog, post interesting things you've read or you've worked with - that homework assignment when you programmed that hash table or a sideshow of your herbarium. Or how about posting a review of a research paper you read and then asking for the author's take on your review? I once had a student who send me  a few data inputs for which a program I posted on my website didn't work. No offense taken. And yes I badly wanted to hire him (but he wasn't available - the good ones are hard to get!).

Show you are passionate about what you do and that you are willing to go the extra mile and contribute to others' benefit. Think, reflect, opine - its creative minds they are after.




More on this later...

Student Tip: The 30-second Elevator Pitch

Why you need to think up of a 30-second verbal summary of your work, and what it should deliver.

Yes you need it need it even if you are a research student! The 30-second elevator pitch about the work you do. You will asked, in some form or another, time and again, and your answer will be used to size you up as a potential collaborator, funding recipient, and future employee. So its never too early to make one up.

What is expected out of the pitch?

At the minimum, the pitch needs to answer the following questions

1. Your name, your research group (you may include your advisor's name), and if needed, your affiliation
   
2. Your sub-field of specialization in the subject you work on. Remember that you will need to specialize or generalize (zoom in or zoom out) depending on the expertise of your audience. For example, if speaking to a professor of computer science you may want to say something like "I work in distributed routing algorithms for wireless ad-hoc networks" but while speaking to a HR recruiter you may want to limit it to wireless communication and algorithms.
   
3. The key benefit of of your work vs. the state of art, or, why should anyone be excited about what you do.

Yep, thats it. Remember, people may not have more than 30 seconds so make sure to deliver your pitch in that time-frame. A good first impression can open a lot of doors. Make the elevator pitch your walking verbal resume.

Student tip: Traits of a Good Student Researcher

Are there specific traits in people that lead to success in a research career?

My cousin asked me about what kinds of students do research and what traits make someone successful in the 'research line'. An important question, and one that any student considering R&D would (and should) ask herself. But frankly, I haven't been able to stereotype the type of students who do very well as compared to the students who don't do well. What I have seen is that most students have a mix of the following abilities:

Innovator (You like breaking things to find out how they work)
"You once put sodium metal into a water filled petri dish and delighted in the aftermath, you made paper aeroplanes out of your language composition notebooks, you have a Linux OS partition on your home PC, your idea of a news website is slashdot.org, you are the in-house geek, your folks bought you Lego Technik sets for each Christmas since you were 5 and you always made something completely different than the model the brochure suggested."

Driven Hard worker (You are the human incarnation of an industrious ant)
"You are honestly hard-working, you are disciplined enough to see the sun rising occasionally, you solve each problem at the end of each text book chapter and go ask your professor or TA about the ones that you cannot solve, you love extra-credit problems, you have tried to read your professor's research paper (perhaps without understanding it), you type and print your homework assignments (including equations), you buy your subsequent semester books in Christmas break and then try to read these books over the Christmas break."

Whiz kid (you are an alien-like prodigy)
"You represented your country in the International Math Olympiad, you have a perfect GPA, you are in line to get the president's gold medal at your college commencement ceremony, you can compute the 17th root of Pi in one second, your professor uses your homework assignment submission as the homework solution sheet, you landed a Fulbright scholarship, you won the spelling bee competition, and you think about Extreme value theory whenever you hear about the stock market."

Don't really know (you are a normal John/Jane Doe)
"You don't fit into any of the above categories because you never thought about all the stuff mentioned up there, you simply don't care about who you are because your Facebook profile answers that question about you, you are always something of everything but not not really a lot of something, you haven't decided your major, you have a good GPA, a good understanding of your courses, a good desire to work, but the keyword is decent and not flamboyant."

Its important to remember that these traits are not orthogonal to each other, in fact success seems to come easier to those who can combine innovating, working hard and thinking smartly rather than just 'specializing' in one of these traits. Also important is the 'don't really know' category - because building a successful career requires networking and people skills - both of which depend on other non-research folks not binning you into one of the first 3 categories.

Student Tip: Managing Research Risk

Scientists are not known to be risk-takers in life and so it might come as a surprise to you, but research is risky - you stand to loose a lot of time and effort when a particular research thread turns out to be a red herring. Consider this (bad) scenario for a research student: many months or even years of work, and no research result or paper to show for it. Judging success or failure is usually black and white in research: simply put, good research or bad research is decided by the prestige of the journal or conference where the research is accepted for publication. The intermediate sweat and hard work that actually goes into the research is of lesser interest to the academic community, or indeed to anyone thinking of hiring you.

At the organizational or societal level research risk is mitigated via hedging, i.e., by investing in several research teams in a multitude of topics. For example, the NSF issues 100s of grants to 100s of research groups across the US every year. A few research grants that yield good results cover up for the other average and under- performing research projects. Can the same technique be applied at the individual level? But can you hedge against say, a Ph.D. topic, that seems promising to start with but may not yield tangible results two years down the line?

The answer to the question is yes. Individual research risk can be managed by putting your eggs in multiple baskets, i.e., by spreading your bets. This can be done, for example, by broadening the scope of the research problem you are investigating, trying to start up research collaborations with other researchers (often by bringing a particular skill or contribution to someone else's work), and most importantly, by being prepared to admit quickly that your research problem as being intractable and adapting.

Broadening the scope of the research problem should be done as and when new information is available. For example, if you discover that the particular algorithm you are developing is unsuitable for its primary use case, try to see if it can be adopted for another use case. You can also contribute by comparing your approach to other competing approaches in solving a research problem. For example, one approach may optimize for fast data transmission at the expense of higher battery usage in a mobile phone. Many times it is impossible to come up with a solution to a research problem that optimizes some parameters but remember that different people are looking to optimize different parameters. Doing a honest through survey of the pros-and-cons of different approaches to solve a research problem is highly relevant research, much more so than a paper describing a failed research attempt.

Perhaps the methodology you used for experimentation had some novel aspects that may be interesting to the research community. For example, in computer engineering there is a whole research community who build and discuss testbeds for doing further research. If you have been creative in your research work, then try to identify the innovative aspect and present this aspect to the relevant community.

More can be done when you start working with others. Look around in your organization or department to find folks who may have similar research interests as you do. The idea is reach outside of your comfort zone (your academic adviser) and collaborate with other people who may be working on related problems. While you may not lead any other research threads you find, working on different problems with different people is a significant value addition to your early research career. If you participate in multiple research threads, chances are that at least a few will yield great results. You have just hedged your research risk. Off course, one must be mindful of not committing ones time on too many research threads, be mindful of keeping ones academic adviser (i.e. stipend source :-) ) informed, and mindful of prioritizing which research thread is more important than the other.