Even though I applied for a PhD a long time ago, I still vividly remember the admission process. Balancing the second year of my master’s, work, personal life, and applications (which can easily count as another job) was quite challenging.
Recently, I received an email from a student asking for advice. Since my recommendations were quite general, I decided to publish my response here. It’s almost verbatim; I just removed personal information and specific details. I hope it can be useful for someone else too.
Dear Student,
I want to preface my answer by saying that it is based solely on my experience. The whole PhD admission process is quite diverse and can be very different depending on the country and university. For example, in the US, you typically apply to a university program and first pass the selection process before choosing your supervisor. In Europe, you generally contact a supervisor first or apply to a specific advertised position.
During the second year of my master’s degree, I actively looked at various PhD positions across the globe, from the US to Japan. I mostly used websites like academicpositions.com and universitypositions.eu. You can certainly extend your search by visiting university websites directly, but these two platforms are a great starting point.
Usually, vacancy descriptions provide a broad research direction, allowing you to decide if it interests you. When I was searching, I had not settled on one specific field, so I applied for positions in NLP, computer vision, and audio. In Europe, you mostly choose a research topic from the ones proposed by the lab. In the US, it is often more of your responsibility to come up with your own research idea.
After applying for a vacancy and passing the initial screening, you can expect different interview steps, much like a regular job interview. Based on my experience, you might be asked to review or implement a paper, complete a coding task, and do a general interview covering your background and knowledge.
If you want to start preparing now, you need to work on two main fronts:
- Focus on organizational requirements, which means gathering all necessary university documents, obtaining letters of recommendation, improving your GPA, and securing any needed language certificates.
- Build and improve your portfolio by highlighting your projects, publications, hackathons, and other achievements on your CV to stand out among other applicants.
I found my current position on one of the websites mentioned above. After applying, I went through a couple of interviews where they asked me math and ML questions, discussed my general experience, and gave me a coding task. Additionally, you can directly write to professors at your university whose research aligns with your interests to ask if they have any upcoming vacancies in mind.
Lastly, I want to point out that the admission process can be difficult, time-consuming, repetitive, and tiresome. It is what it is. However, if you can secure a position that you genuinely like, doing a PhD can be a really fun and interesting experience.
Please let me know if I missed anything, and I will try my best to help.
All the best,
Yury
That’s everything I shared. I hope these pointers are helpful for anyone else navigating the exhausting but rewarding path of PhD admissions! Feel free to reach out if you have any other specific questions.