PhD Interviews at St Andrews in CS

We have had an outstanding pool of applicants for our 600th Anniversary Scholarships to do a PhD in Computer Science.  This means that in the coming weeks we will be conducting many interviews with potential PhD students.  If you are one of those, or if you are just interested in what our interviews are like, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you what our PhD interviews are like.   I’m going to assume that “you” is somebody being interviewed for a PhD place, just to make writing the rest of this post easier.

What Our PhD Intervews Are

I’ve been doing the job of academic responsible for PhD admissions for about 3 years, and in that time I think we’ve admitted one student without an interview. In other words, your application for a PhD is not going to be successful without an interview.  On the other hand, being offered an interview is a good sign, because we cannot interview all the applicants we get, even though many we cannot interview have excellent qualifications.  [As I write this though, I should mention that most invitations to interview for the 600th Scholarships have not been made, so if you have not heard anything yet that is not bad news.]

We conduct most interviews by phone, skype, or other remote methods.   We don’t expect you to visit St Andrews (unless you are one of our students of course).   If you do plan a visit, then obviously that is a great chance to arrange an interview in person.   However we do not normally offer expenses for you to visit us, although of course phone calls etc are made at our expense.   A video session is ideal, but not always technically possible so is not required.

The point of the PhD interview is to talk to you to find out more about you, your interests in Computer Science, and your plans for research you might do on your PhD.   Obviously we are looking to assess your quality, and also obviously we understand it is stressful for you.  But we hope to make a it a fairly friendly and informal event within those constraints.

Without doubt the most important part of the interview is to have a chance for you and your potential supervisor to talk to each other about research.   This is what you are going to be doing a LOT if you come here.  So it’s really important to find out that the two of you can communicate well about research.  This works both ways: of course it gives you a great chance to assess how you might interact with your supervisor.   If you feel this is great, you can prioritise coming to St Andrews.  If you don’t quite click with your supervisor, or just feel that St Andrews will not be for you, then you can walk away with our very best wishes.

The interview is arranged between you and your supervisor, to get a mutually suitable date and time.   When that is agreed, I will arrange for another member of academic staff to attend as well, somebody who is not in the immediate research area.  This is to give an independent view, and is especially important when it comes to making decisions on who is going to be awarded funding.

The Actual Interview

Our interviews normally last roughly half an hour, although they can be either shorter or longer, and being shorter or longer is neither a good sign nor a bad sign!

We know you are nervous so we usually explain what will be happening (an explanation which will be boring if you have read this post.) We will usually start with a standard question like “Why do you want to do a PhD?” and often follow up with “Why do you want to do a PhD at St Andrews?” Questions like this don’t have right or wrong answers, and there are many different answers. But they do give you the chance to get talking on what are hopefully fairly straightforward and predictable questions. (Having read this they are especially predictable!)

As the interview moves along you will obviously expect to talk more about the specific plans for research that you might have and/or that we have for you.

We don’t ask trick questions, and we don’t try to trip you up. Depending on the situation we might indeed ask you technical questions. You shouldn’t be scared of these: it’s not that you will fail if you can’t remember the 4th line of the pseudocode for the algorithm GAC2001/3.1 to establish generalised arc consistency on extensional table constraints. The point of these is to explore your understanding of the area you will be spending many years researching in excruciating detail. It’s not unusual to ask you questions to which we don’t know the answer either: maybe it’s how best to do your difficult research project. It’s not about what the answer is, it’s about how you express your thoughts on a technical topic.

As the interview nears its end we will (as long as we remember) ask if you have any questions for us. This is a chance for you to ask something that’s been worrying you, or just something that interests you. For example you might be interested in how we do things in St Andrews, or what kind of place it is. You will very likely want to know when you will hear our decision: read on to find out the most common answer.

Decisions and How We Make Them

It’s important to understand that when we interview you there are two decisions we have to make. The first is whether or not we will be able to offer you a place. That means that, if you can obtain the money to pay our fees and have enough for your own living expenses, we will be happy to accept you to study for a PhD. For the vast majority of students, the more important decision is the second: whether we will offer you funding from our various sources.

It is normally much easier for us to make the first decision. In most cases we can decide relatively quickly whether or not we can offer you a place. This decision is normally taken by the staff in the interview, and that is the main reason we can often be quick. This is not always true, because for example a given supervisor can only take on a certain number of students at a time: if she or he is oversubscribed, then we might only be able to make one offer of a place. But normally, we can say quickly yes or no. This could be minutes or could be days, but not normally weeks.

Funding decisions are usually slower, because competition is usually fiercer. We have a very limited number of funded places, and many excellent students who would love to be funded by us, even among the ones we have offered places to. To be fair to all concerned, we have to wait until we have had all relevant interviews conducted before we can have a committee meeting to decide on who will be offered funding. This takes a while and unfortunately does mean that you will have to wait a while to hear. [For the current batch of 600th Anniversary Scholarships, we are hoping to make those decisions by mid April if we possibly can.]

Any decision we make may have conditions attached it. The most common is for completion of an ongoing degree to a certain standard, but others might be to obtain an English-language qualification (IELTS or TOEFL) to a certain standard. Also it is worth mentioning that our initial offer is usually informal. After making that offer we will normally agree issues like a provisional start-date, after which the official offer from the University will take a little while to get to you.

Some Final Words

As I said earlier, of course we understand this is a stressful experience for you. Please bear in mind that we understand that, so don’t panic if you have to pause to think exactly what you want to say, or correct something you said earlier.

Finally, please do contact us to ask questions at any point of the process, pre- or post-interview, with questions or concerns you have.
When you have a potential supervisor in mind, he or she is probably the best person to ask, but for more administrative issues you can always ask our PhD admissions administrator (and often it’s sensible to copy both.)
For example, you might have an offer from another University but really want to come to St Andrews. Don’t suffer in silence, but please talk to us: we might be able to move quicker on decision making.

p.s. the fourth line of the pseudocode for GAC2001/3.1 is “while Q not empty do”. See Figure 8 of Bessiere et al.