Overview of Alanine on PostgraduateForum.com

Overview of Alanine

Signup date: 11 Sep 2014 at 6:50pm

Last login: 03 Dec 2016 at 10:12pm

Post count: 23

Recent Posts

Research assistant + PhD?

Alanine 23 posts
9 years ago

Anyone who has personal experience of this- would be great to hear from you :)

So I guess from what you're saying it broadly depends on how supportive the supervisor/research group are?

Pay is listed as 30k- is this higher than average for an RA? I thought 22-25 was more in the research technician bracket.

Research assistant + PhD?

Alanine 23 posts
9 years ago

Has anyone completed a PhD while working as an RA? (In the biological/medical sciences...)

I have an interview for a position like this next week. When I spoke to the supervisor he said the funding was available for 3.5 years, and the candidate should be able to complete a PhD in this time, if they wanted to.

Is anyone completing their PhD this way or know of someone who is? What are the main pros and cons?

As far as I can see, the obvious advantage is a much higher pay and possibly more structure. But I am not sure what it would mean in terms of workload and stress!

Any advice would be much appreciated :)

Why do you want to do PhD?

Alanine 23 posts
10 years ago

Hi All,

I just wanted to gain a bit of perspective on some ways of answering this (surprisingly tricky) interview question. How would you answer this? What are interviewers actually wanting to hear?

Do these reasons still hold true for those of you still working on your thesis?

Super short interview- bad sign??

Alanine 23 posts
10 years ago

And yes it was an advertised post, up for a long time and available to any health/ biosciences student!

Super short interview- bad sign??

Alanine 23 posts
10 years ago

Quote From Clupea:
Don't think you should necessarily abandon hope. If it was an advertised post (rather than a meeting with just you in response to a speculative letter) the Uni HR will have set in stone that every candidate must be asked the same questions to avoid accusations of unfairness and they wouldn't have bothered interviewing you if they didn't think that you were a plausible candidate, probably they will have had many applications.

Thank you for your kind words! The thing that concerns me is every time I answered a question they would nod and agree.. In all my previous academic interviews/poster presentations the interviewers picked on little errors, made me defend my work and generally got me to a point when I had to admit I didn't know the answer.

It makes me think they'd already found a perfect candidate and were just going through the motions. Which is really disappointing as they'd seemed like genuinely nice people who'd be good to work for and the project was exactly what I wanted to go into.

At the end the lead supervisor said it might take them til next week decide so not to worry if I didn't hear for a while.

Super short interview- bad sign??

Alanine 23 posts
10 years ago

As the title says...

They seemed to ask me very easy questions, all of which I *think* I answered ok. But I was only in there for 20 mins (with 3 interviewers) and they didn't ask me anything challenging, which makes me think they'd already decided I wasn't a good candidate..

Ugh.

Interview Dread- any last minute advice?

Alanine 23 posts
10 years ago

So I have my first PhD at interview tomorrow at Durham and am getting a definite sense of doom. I did my MSc project last summer and so have forgotten most of it, especially all the finer details. I've relooked through it and made some notes but I don't know it well enough to stand up against questioning!

We only got 5 days notice for this interview so I've been spending my time researching the subject area and papers the two supervisors have written instead. Bah.

Any last minute advice?