ra:interview-prep

A command for practising interviews for research programmes through mock questions and feedback.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it with an optional professor name and university to prepare targeted questions and answers. Without those details, it asks for them first.
Why use it?
It gives you a way to rehearse before meeting a professor or admissions panel, including when you have not yet chosen the interview details.

Command

Part of the research-app-toolkit plugin — 9 skills, 9 commands, 1 agent, 1 hook shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/xujingchen1996/research-app-toolkit/interview-prep
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xujingchen1996/research-app-toolkit

Or install research-app-toolkit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills, 9 commands, 1 agent, 1 hook.

Per session 16 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 114 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00016 $0.00114
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.00057
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00023
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00011

Measured 3d ago against content hash a84db7e37e17, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ra:interview-prep scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/interview-prep.md · 16 lines

What it actually says

Use the interview-prep skill to prepare for your research program interview with mock questions and feedback.

Arguments (optional):

  • professor-name — name of the interviewing professor
  • university — university name

Example: /ra:interview-prep John Smith MIT

If no arguments are provided, you will be asked for the professor name and university.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 16 lines · 16 tokens per session scan A a84db7e37e17

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ra:interview-prep is a command published in the GitHub repository xujingchen1996/research-app-toolkit (113 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 16 tokens to every session and 114 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.