Each PhD journey starts in the same place. You need to get a PhD position! Learn how to contact PhD supervisor and make a great impression!
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Hi! Welcome to Motivated Academic
Last week on our blog I was talking about research proposals. So I was talking about what a research proposal actually is and why do we need that in the first place. Why do you need to write one and if you want to get a PhD or in general any project in academia. Today I want to take a step back. Because always if you want to get a PhD position you would need to write a kind of research proposal and I want to talk about how do you actually initiate the contact with your prospective supervisor and how do you build a relationship that will help you to get the position you want. Before we start talking about specifics, I want to talk about what do you have to do first.
Before you take any action
So what do you have to do first is you need to ask yourself why do you want to do a PhD in the first place. So before you start contacting your prospective supervisors it’s important to understand why do you want to do it in the first place? Why do you want to do a PhD in that specific research area? And you might be wondering why do I ask you these questions. Well, you need to have a strong why and very clear why for why do you want to commit to doing a PhD. Why do you want to do a PhD in that specific research area because you need a source of inspiration? You need a source of inspiration because you’ll be committing three to five years of your life to do actually this program this PhD program in this specific research area.
So do you have a strong enough why to actually commit three to five years of your life to this specific PhD? Another question I want you to ask before you take any action in terms of writing a proposal or contacting prospective PhD supervisors is to understand how PhD fits in your career aspirations? So what I mean by this is having a PhD necessary to progress through your career? Say if you want to do an R&D, industrial R&D as your career path do you actually need a PhD to do it? Or maybe you want to be a professor and well that’s a requirement to have a PhD right? To reflect on those questions as you prepare before you actually start preparing your proposal for a PhD. And I want to emphasize having a clear why will help you to build a meaningful relationship with your prospective supervisor because if you know why you want to do it, your communication will be geared towards the outcome right? So your outcome will be to get a PhD because you want to XYZ, you want to become a professor, you want to change the world, you want to develop a solution to a particular challenge. And that’s why you really have to have why!
Step 1: Do your research (knowledge gap)
Now that you know why you want to do a PhD and why you want to do a PhD in this specific research area, I want you to do your research. You have to be very well prepared because before you approach your prospective PhD supervisor.
But I don’t want you to research them yet! I want you to research your knowledge gap. Because even though your PhD might change as you go along it’s really good to have an idea of what you’re going to do in your PhD or what kind of research gaps you address in your PhD. And yes you got that right – well we do have to start with a literature review. Each research proposal starts with some sort of literature review because you need to know the research area you want to explore right?
And you usually do it by understanding the current state-of-the-art that is present in the present literature. So as you start doing your literature review, you will notice some sort of challenges, some sort of limitations or any other research questions that are still unanswered in the current state-of-the-art. So you would need to select what research questions you want to address or you want to explore in your research. Once you identify those you need to have a clear rationale for why do you want to do it. Again answering the question why. So why those research questions need to be answered in the first place? Why they are timely? Why do you want to address them? It’s also good to know more or less what kind of methodologies or methods you’ll be using in your research. This is a good time to actually start thinking about methodologies, because as you do your literature review you will notice that some people use experimental methodologies, some people use theoretical frameworks to do their research. And it’s good to understand what they do and how they do it. And can you demonstrate any experience using those specific methodologies? If you can then that will make your application stronger! If you cannot think about what other skills you have that you can bring to the table and that you can use to actually learn those methodologies that you have to use in your research.
Step 2: Do your research (PhD supervisor)
Once you identified what you want to work on what’s the research that you’d like to perform during your PhD, it’s a good time to start identifying potential PhD supervisors with whom you want to work and hopefully who will want to work with you.
So you’ve done your literature review you probably identified a couple of respected research groups in this specific research area you want to do your PhD in. So it’s good to think about your prospective supervisor as someone whose expertise is relevant to your work. In fact, their expertise needs