Hey folks and welcome to the Grad School Sucks podcast. My name is Dr. Matt Carlson and I am your host and today I want to talk a little bit about six stories that I think you should prepare when you're going on the industry job market. Now before we get there I want to say no my voice does not normally sound like this if you're a new listener. I've been sick recently and my throat is feeling a little funky. I feel better than I sound so I still wanted to record an episode to put out but hopefully next week I will be back to sounding normal. So let's get to job interviews. I think job interviews are generally pretty stressful. They're probably stressful for most people and one of the most important things you can do for a job interview is to prepare. Of course being able to think on your feet is a great skill to have but it's best when you can do that in the context of having prepared and I think one great way to prepare for job interviews is to think in advance about specific stories that you're going to have in your arsenal. A bag of tricks so to speak that you can bring out if the moment arises. Of course you may not get asked about all of these stories but it's great to have specific stories to go to because they are far more memorable. Recruiters and hiring managers will be more likely to remember them moving forward and they actually show examples of you doing the thing you say you're doing instead of generically saying oh I can do this thing. So here are six stories that I think you should prepare and the first one is a time when you faced a difficult situation. Now recruiters and hiring managers when they're asking a lot of these situation based questions really they're just trying to see how you're going to perform on their team both from a can you get the job done perspective but also how do you function with other people are you a good team player and of course when you're picking a specific scenario to use for the time when you faced a difficult situation question I think you should think of one when you did face something that was genuinely difficult but you got through it you got to the other side and you had a positive outcome and I think that can be said for many of these questions the kind of storytelling or tell me a time when style questions can be either positive or negative and for either one I think showcasing that you took reasonable action and that you had some kind of positive outcome or at least learned something and took something away from the situation is the best way to go and not of course ending on a downer so tell me about a time when you faced a difficult situation could be something where you were working with someone in the lab and something happened maybe data was deleted or an analysis code got deleted or you faced some other kind of difficult situation and what you did to overcome it a similar question you might be asked is number two tell me about a time when you solved a problem and again I think as specific as you can get will really help them remember and help showcase your skills so an example that I use in this is that I led a data collection project while I was a graduate student finishing my dissertation and we had a lot of research assistance for a given project we had about 10 people organized in collecting data and we wanted them to do it in a really manualized fashion but we still wanted to randomize aspects of it and make sure everyone had step-by-step instructions that they didn't have to remember so what I did as the person leading that data collection project was I created a virtual protocol that we were able to put on an iPad that would walk people through step-by-step what they needed to do as well as gather information from the participants give instructions to the person who was facilitating the experiment and data collection and also help to randomize different aspects of that protocol and the fact that we're able to put it on iPads and standardize it across researchers and make it so we weren't leaning on people to remember each step along the way served to make the data collection project more efficient and reduced the amount of bias and error that we had in our data it also made our research assistants a lot happier because they had something to go to whenever they had questions now that probably took me about 30 to 60 seconds to say all that but that's a pretty good response to that kind of a situation because it showcases that I was put in a scenario where I had to come up with a solution to a specific problem and so I took some specific actions and then I also highlighted the benefits and results of those actions hey folks I wanted to jump in and say that if you're listening to this and you're thinking yeah I do want to leave academia I want to get a non-academic job but I don't know how then this is for you I've created a six step process by which academics and PhD students can take their degree take all of their skills and move it into the industry or for-profit or private sector job marketplace all you have to do in order to get this checklist of tasks is to go to the link in the description of this episode or to gradschoolsux.com/sixweek checklist and enter in your email and you'll get it delivered to your email immediately thank you for considering now back to the show so a third story you might get asked is tell me about a time when you made a mistake and of course I think it's important to bring up a genuine time when you did make a mistake not a trivial mistake but hopefully not a life-changing career-ending mistake but somewhere in the middle a moderate mistake that required you to take some effort to address and of course like I said before it should be something that resolved to a happy ending not something that ends in a flat or bummer kind of situation similar to that is question number four tell me a time when you felt stressed and as grad students there's probably lots of instances that we could pull from for that specific question but again I think the most important thing is to think about a specific time when you felt stressed during grad school and talk about the situation that you were in and then discuss what you did to get yourself unstuck what you did in order to help yourself cope with that situation and maybe address some of the stressors that were bringing stress into your life again recruiters and hiring managers aren't trying to make sure that you're superman or superwoman or that you're invincible and that you don't feel stressed they want to see what kind of a genuine reaction they get from you and to be able to figure out what it would be like for you to be on their team if you got a little stressed out so keep it positive but also keep it genuine now these last two are going to be a little bit more specific to collaborating so question number five is tell me about a time when you disagreed with a supervisor or colleague now there are a couple things here that you want to make sure and hit first is it is a moment of genuine disagreement whether you disagreed about how to carry on a specific project how to write up a certain paper or you disagreed with a decision that somebody made but i think an important aspect of this is to not make the other person the villain of the story how you treat others and speak about them when they're not around can be a great window into understanding your character and how you would function on a team and so in this question recruiters and hiring managers are looking to see if you're a problem solver you can work with others when situations arise as well as what your character is about giving grace to others when they make a mistake and then lastly number six tell me about a time when you worked as a team and of course when you're crafting your specific answer to this definitely ensure that it's a situation where you were part of a team and you were being an active participant in collaboration maybe you learned something from someone you're collaborating with whether it was a new insight or a specific tool to use and show that you're an active participant in that teamwork so those are the six stories that i'd recommend you prepare i think the best way to prepare is actually to jot down some notes for each kind of a question to make sure that you understand specific scenarios and things that you want to say and maybe things that you don't want to say and then if you want to make absolutely sure that you've got your answers boiled down to a tea invite a friend to do a mock job interview with you it can be a great way to stress test your questions to make sure that you really flushed out the best details and you've prepared the right stories for the right kinds of questions that's all i have for you today i'm going to go rest my voice and I will see you all next week. Until then, be well.