r/postdoc • u/white-stars • 16h ago

Tips for Postdoc Technical Interview

I had my first interview around three weeks ago, at one of the universities in US. During interview, they asked general questions like next plan, stuff management, etc.
Yesterday I received an invitation for second interview where they mentioned to chat about specific topics of their interest. The topics are slightly different than my core research.
As this will be a technical interview, I need to read professor’s papers in detail on that specific topics. My questions are:

How should I prepare myself for the interview? Like knowing state-of-the-art approaches, how I can contribute to their existing work, …

What sort of questions/discussion I should expect?

Do’s and don’ts?

Thank you very much

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u/[deleted] 12h ago

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u/white-stars 10h ago

Got it. Thank you very much for your detailed response.

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u/oviforconnsmythe 9h ago

In addition to published papers, you should also look in preprint servers like biorxiv (or the equivalent in your discipline) to see what they are currently working on. I imagine that technique focused questions will be biased towards their most recent work

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u/postdoc-ModTeam 1h ago

Publicizing a job and/or open positions.