Was straight forward, had take home assignment and also a personal code sample to show. Lots of interesting chats with research scientists working on challenging problems. Great opportunity to help build tooling along with possibly getting published
The departmental interview is just one round with three interviewers. In my case only one professor is really close to my research but that almost happens to everyone because not all professor you have on your list will be available. The professor who's working in my field asked more technical questions and details about my past research project, whereas two other professor mainly chatted me through their life experience and why they think MIT is a good place to go.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your research interests. Why do you want to do a PhD?
There isn't one, I'm just forced to write a review to get on here. No calls or zooms or whatever. I did some phone calls to get a sense of some of the professors and their labs but it wasn't mandatory.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why do you demand that people pointlessly do this when they don't have useful input?