Hello,

I have a phd interview next week which would be my ideal project. It's my first interview so very keen to avoid any silly mistakes!

The project is looking at whether poor management of a common disease in childhood is linked to complications in adulthood and how this can be prevented. I'm from molecular bio background so know a lot about the basis of the disease, but little about working with clinical populations and epidemiology.

So I am wondering, 1.How would I go about recruiting patients/seeking ethical approval? 2. What statistical methods could potentially be used for this sort of data? Any other comments or opinions would be highly appreciated, very little information about how the project would be undertaken was given in the proposal.

Thanks for any advice!
Tom

Regarding ethical approval, the university will have an ethics committee and a standard procedure for applying for approval - you usually have to give an outline of your project, copies of information sheets you'd give to your participants, informed consent forms and so on. You may also need to get NHS approval (if this is a UK project) which is normally the case if you're working with vulnerable or young people or need to get sensitive medical data. NHS ethics approval is notoriously slow and involved, so this is something you'd need to talk to your supervisor about early in the process if you start the PhD.

In my experience of PhD interviews they wanted to know more about how I'd approach the topic, what kind of study I'd carry out etc, rather than the stats, but others on here may have had different experiences. I'm a year into my PhD (which is in psychology) and haven't had to commit to my stats approach yet.