I will soon be flying out for an interview for an academic postdoc, in a lab fairly outside my PhD research area. My thesis was in protein biochemistry, and this lab is a ChIP-seq/computational lab. The PI asked for three specific aims and I'm kind of at a loss about what exactly is being asked for here, and asking the PI seems like a bad idea.

I've obviously been doing background reading in preparation and I have some general ideas for avenues of research, but I feel a little silly getting up in front of a room of people and telling them all about the kind of research I want to do that I obviously am only passingly familiar with.

I have three broad aims in mind but they're not terribly specific -- is this going to fly or am I setting myself for embarrassment?