Finding PhD supervisors

Your interactions with your PhD supervisor will form the most important relationship you experience on your doctoral program. Finding the right supervisor is essential for both academic and personal reasons.

1)  Choose Carefully

What you might first do is create a list of potential universities you want to apply to for your PhD. After, you may start looking for supervisors in potential departments. You should only reach out to one supervisor at a time, ensuring you don’t spam every faculty member in a department. Make sure to check: are they available for graduate supervision (if it doesn’t specify, you can email them anyway), what are their research interests, how many PhD students have they successfully supervised? These are all important considerations.

2)  Don’t Look for Exact Match

It is easy to get anxious about finding exactly the right supervisor who perfectly matches you research interests. But the truth is what matters most is finding someone with related specialisms which may not be the same as yours; after all, your PhD proposal is a unique and original project which no-one has done before. What matters is being able to explain how their research interests can benefit your project.

3)  Be Ready for Rejection

Even for the most competitive candidates, it is common to receive multiple emails where a potential supervisor informs you that they are not taking on PhD students this year or that your specialism does not quite match what they are looking for. The important thing is to remain persistent; have back up supervisors from the same university ready to email and remember that everyone goes through this difficulty, it does not reflect on your potential or your work at all.