Behavioural Flashcards
Tell me about yourself
I’m currently a JRF and a postdoc at Oxford. I also did my PhD at the same institution.
I’ve spent the last 6 years developing my skills as a researcher and I feel that I’m ready to establish my own indep research group
….
Tell me about a time when you have to deal with a difficult situation or mistake
Tell me about a time you failed
Geotech engineer in industry mistake in chatting with my colleague near miss next health and safety meeting, I highlighted worried that I may be reprimanded encourages work-safe culture always wise to do the right thing
What do you enjoy about your current role?
collaborative environment
support each other
provide creative feedback
make our ideas a reality.
What do you see are the main challenges of this role?
What do you think are the hardest part of starting your research lab?
People
Share your research vision
Capable of doing the work
Go to more conferences to promote my work
Funding
Recruit and grow the team
Collaborate with more researchers > more grant opp. Develop industry network
What do you know about our dept?
Focus on resilient and sustainable infrastructure engineering
You are interested in key challenges such as resilient infrastructure and structural heath monitoring, which are all well aligned with my research activities
Why are you returning to Australia?
long term plan was always to return to Australia
home for me, closer to my family
Learnt a lot from my experiences at Oxford
look forward to contributing to research goals at Melb
Tell me about a time you overcame an obstacle
I met an obstacle when I was trying to find speakers for my first workshop on XML
I was optimistic that I would get a good range of speakers to choose from as I have made several calls for speakers through several online avenues.
However, I did not get a single response, when it was 3 weeks to the event data and this was really worrying.
Nevertheless, I managed to overcome the obstacle by trying a new strategy when I cold invite early career researchers.
So I would go to each dept website and look through the profiles of the early career researchers and invite anyone who has applied ML in their research.
I specifically targeted early career researchers as I felt they are more inclined to accept a cold invitation, And
I was right as almost everyone I cold invited accepted.
So the workshop turns out to be a success and I’ve now obtained funding to expand that workshop into a large research cluster.
Tell me about a time you exhibited leadership
I have led the establishment of a workshop at my college that is centred around XML, as I felt there was an unmet demand for a platform for useful knowledge transfer and collaboration on machine learning across diff discp.
The workshop was very successful and I have since obtained funding to expand this into a larger research cluster with lunchtime seminars and annual conferences.
I am also recruiting new members to the committee to help up with the expansion of the program.
Tell me about a time you’ve had to work with a difficult person, or difficult people
I once had to work with a difficult student who was smart but not interested in his work
He was in danger of getting expelled and I felt like I had to do something to help him
Talk to him, discover he was slightly depressed
Advised him to see counselling services
Ever since then, I noticed he had a gradual change in his attitude and he is now off the academic warning list
Tell me about a time when you had success
One of my personal goals is to improve my teaching eff every year and last year my goal was to increase student engagement in my tutorials
I tried a different strategy when nstead of simply providing the answers to the tutorial sheets, I would focus on covering the key concepts that is required to answer the tutorial sheet.
I was worried the students may hate the new approach but they actually liked it and they are more engaged. They ask more questions and when I quiz them, they can answer the tutorial sheet questions themselves
I was very happy with the new strategy as I felt it was a success.
Pleasantly surprised when my students nominate it as best tutor.
Tell me about a time where you had to work as a team in research
I am part of a research team at Oxford looking at developing new cyclic design methods for monopile foundations for offshore wind
This is a large scale project with lab testing, field testing, theoretical modelling and numerical modelling and i’m in charge of numerical modelling
It was a very useful experience to see how important teamwork is for large scale research projects and how all the individual work components ties in to complete the big picture
You don’t have much experience with XXXX. What do you say?
I completely understand your concern. but I wouldn’t be here if I honestly didn’t think I’m prepared to take this responsibility and make a success out of it
How would you handle a conflict?
I have observed some conflicts in my workplace although I’ve never personally been involved in any myself. These conflicts may be due to perceived lack of efforts from certain project members or authorship disagreements.
From my observations, the best way to deal with conflicts is open communications.
Let each party voice their opinions and identify points of agreement and disagreement.
Focus on the issue and don’t make it personal.
Find a collaborative solution that works for everyone and follow through with the plan
