Speaker 1: Hello everyone, my name is Fee and I'm a research assistant in genetics and stem cells at the University of Cambridge. In this video, I'll be talking about my interview experience that landed me my current job. Prior to this interview, I've also interviewed at other labs and institutions, but this video is more focused on my experience at Cambridge University. The points that I'll be discussing in this video include who the panel of interviewers are and what they were like, the length and structure of the interview, the types of questions asked, my general thoughts and feelings at the time, and also some general job interview tips. I started my job application process when I was still doing my master's, but if you're interested in my academic journey leading up to where I am today as a research assistant, feel free to check out this video that I made, I'll link it above and also in the description box below. Essentially after 1-2 months of applying for jobs, I received this interview invite to my current position. They gave me about 1-2 weeks to prepare, which I thought was a good amount of time. At the time of applying, there were still COVID restrictions, so my interview was scheduled to be on Zoom. After accepting the interview, the HR team at Cambridge sent me some information, and this email included who the panel of interviewers are and their names, and also the positions that they held in the lab, the time of the interview, and also the Zoom link that will be sent closer to the date. At this point, I didn't have any contact with any of the researchers at the lab, this is because job advertisements at Cambridge tend to go through the HR team first, and then onto the Cambridge job advertisement sites and other more generic sites as well, like LinkedIn, jobs.ac.uk. So job applications and interviews are generally handled by the HR and also recruitment team. During my interview, there were 3 interviewers, the Principal Investigator aka PI of the lab, Super Simple Staff Scientist, who is my current line manager and also supervisor, and finally the lab manager. I provided all 3 of their names prior to the interview, so of course I did a little bit of stalking. I read some of their key research papers, and usually not the entire paper, just the abstract and the discussion to get a general idea of their research interests. And this brings me on to a very silly and stupid mistake that I made. The reason that I had to read so many more papers than usual for this particular interview was because I didn't actually know about the interview I was attending. And before you ask how that's possible, when you apply for a job, there's obviously a job description on the job advertisement site. However, once the deadline for this job opening has passed, the job description and the job posting will be taken down from all of these sites. And because this was actually my first job application submission, I didn't think that I'd be shortlisted to the interview, let alone did I consider that these postings would be taken down. So silly me, I didn't think to take down the job description, and when I was offered the interview, I had absolutely no notes on what this project was. So don't make my mistake and always take down the job description for every single job that you apply to. So back to the interview. My interview lasted about 30-40 minutes. My time slot was 3.30pm, which honestly wasn't the best time of day because I knew that I was sort of the middle to end candidate, and this is the time of day that people are generally more tired or also tired from interviewing a bunch of candidates in the morning. With that being said, you can use this to your advantage to make a lasting impression. Especially when your interview is online, it is important to up your energy a lot more to sound more enthusiastic, but make sure to not go over the top. For me, I made coffee 15 minutes before the interview to sort of hype up my energy and also get some caffeine in. As mentioned before, I had a panel of 3 interviewers. My interview was roughly divided into two parts, which they told me during the start of the interview. Part 1 was mostly asked by the principal staff scientist and it was mostly knowledge-based questions. Part 2 was mostly asked by the PI and it discussed experiences that I mentioned in my CV and also general questions like my career goals. The lab manager sat throughout the entire interview, but only asked me one question at the end. And now I know that she's been working for the lab for about 20 years now, so I think that she was there mostly to check if I could fit in well with the team. Before asking me any questions, he told me that he asked all candidates the same list of questions, so that made me feel like I really needed to put my best foot forward. The first question that he asked was, what can you tell me about the immune system? Which was very very broad, so I kind of blanked out even though I did a whole undergraduate module on immunology. So the first thing that I thought of, I was like, okay, let's start off chronologically and talk about the innate immune system, so our first line of defense. And whilst I started talking about things like macrophages, neutrophils, phagocytosis, he kind of stopped me there and was like, okay, but let's talk a bit more about the adaptive immune system. So what do you know about that? Then I went on to talk about B and T cells and something about MHC presentation. So that was okay, but I felt like I didn't quite hit the point of T cells, which was what this project was mostly focused on. So now that the immune system part was over, he asked me if I've studied stem cells before, which I didn't take an undergraduate module in, but I had a very surface level kind of understanding. So then he was like, that's fine, and gave me a brief description of what mouse embryonic stem cells were and also chimeras. So the next question was a scenario where I need to genotype a chimera, and how would I go about doing this? Mind you, I had absolutely no idea how to answer this question. My only understanding of chimeras at the time was that they usually have like patchy fur coat colors, and that's an indication that you've generated a successful chimera because the embryonic stem cells that you've introduced into the surrogate mother has successfully been incorporated. So then you would know, okay, that's a chimera. That was my thought process at the time. I didn't know anything about the genetics. So I started talking about if you mate them and one has a fur coat color and the other one has another, then you'd know that heterozygous or something like that. Anyways, I completely butchered that question, and I didn't know where I was going with that, but I was just trying to talk my thought process through. He basically told me at the end that you can decide PCR primers to target a region of the genome, and from that you can tell whether the gene is present. You can also do loss of allele or gain of allele analysis using qPCR just to check the copy number, and then from there you can tell if a mouse is homozygous, heterozygous, or does not contain a gene, and then you can also use wild-type mice as a kind of control. So at the time, even when he was explaining this to me, it didn't make a lot of sense, but now this is something that I do on a very regular basis. Essentially, I think he asked me that question to see how well I could understand a future potential experiment that I would be working on. And so those were some of the key subject areas that I was interviewed about, and it felt like the longest 20 minutes of my life because I was so nervous and I didn't know how to answer the majority of questions. And this interviewer was particularly stern-looking, which made me even more nervous. He did not smile a single time throughout the entire interview, so I didn't know if the answers I was giving was heading in the right direction or if it was just completely off. In such a scenario, the best thing that you can do is talk through your thought process very clearly, keep up a good energy, and emanate good vibes. So that's part one of the interview done, and moving on to part two. The second part of the interview was led by the PI of the lab, which looked slightly less intimidating than my first interviewer, but the general atmosphere was still a bit tense. He went through my CV and sort of picked out two key experiences to elaborate on. One was my most recent one, which I talked about just fine because that was my master's thesis at the time, so it was something that I was working on and I was very confident talking about. But the other one was a project that I did about 2-3 years ago, so I couldn't remember a lot of what I did, especially the details. It was in fact the project I was least confident about in my entire CV, so of course they had to pick it out. So this project was a sort of CRISPR-Cas9-based project that I did during my undergraduate where we had to target and knock out a gene of interest and then design our experiments accordingly. So he asked me about how I designed these gRNA constructs. I for the life of me could not remember. I couldn't even remember the details of the pathway that this specific gene that I was targeting was involved in. So yeah, I just tried my best to say, okay, we did a bit of linearizing, cloning, but the details of the plasmid design, I really could not remember. But he was nice at the end and he just kind of asked me a general question like, oh, so did you guys manage to generate a successful knockout? Which then I said, no, we generated maybe a partial knockout, but it was very difficult to tell because we were still optimizing Western blot experiments at the time and trying to get antibody dilutions and incubation times right. The questions he asked, I could tell that it was mostly to test whether or not the experiences that I mentioned in my CV was something I was actually involved in and whether I knew what I was doing. I could also tell that he was generally more interested in career development of fresh graduates, mostly from the way that he was genuinely curious and also supportive of my future career plan. Questions that he asked about my experience was not so much knowledge based, but was more to test how well could I conduct my own research. So my immediate thoughts after the interview was that I obviously flunked it. This went worse than two of my previous interviews that I had before at the time, like significantly worse. Firstly, I didn't even know what the project was about, so I didn't really revise a lot about the adaptive immune system, let alone stem cells. None of the papers that I read came up during the interview and 60% of the questions I struggled to answer. Compared to other RA interviews that I've attended, this one is definitely the hardest by far and I felt like there was no way that I was getting this job. The other interviews that I attended mostly talked about more technical techniques, so the specifics of, can you talk me through how you did cell culture for this specific cell line. It was very lab technique focused and they were looking for someone with the most relevant skillset. This interview at Cambridge was different such that it really kept me thinking really hard the entire way through, not just about my existing knowledge but also how I would go about designing experiments, think critically and learn to adapt. It was really challenging but I think it was one of the best interview experiences I had. The interviews were a lot more serious compared to what I was used to so that made me more nervous and there were definitely many reasons to doubt myself during this interview. However, I got an email from the PI the next day to schedule a phone call and from that call he asked me about my visa situation and if I've also been offered other positions by other labs. And then the day after, I was offered the job in writing. So with all of that being said, my best advice for any interview is to present your best self and articulate your thoughts clearly, which of course takes years of experience. Regardless of how well or how terribly you think you did during an interview, the right lab will find you as long as you're open to opportunities. So that's it for this video, thank you so much for watching, please like and subscribe if you found this video helpful. You can also follow me on Instagram at biometwithv for more short form content. And that's it for this video, see you in the next one. Bye.