The last year has been very productive. I managed to complete my MSc in Political Theory from the LSE and survive the nightmare that is the PhD and funding applications. Fortunately, in the end everything went well and I am now in the fourth month of my PhD.
Someone has to say a few words about the application process and it might as well be me. The first thing to say is that failure is part of the game and you should not (always) blame yourself for it. One can fail at two levels. The first is failure to get accepted into a PhD program and the second is failure to get funding for the program. For some reason, once you receive an offer of acceptance for a doctoral program you have on average of one month to accept or reject the acceptance offer, even though the outcome of the funding application will be announced in May-June. What does this mean? That you have to gamble.
You can get rejected for multiple reasons. Your application and your CV might be excellent, but it might be the case that there is no one directly related to your research project to supervise it. Or, it might be that most of the spots in the PhD program have been already filled by the university’s own masters students. Sometimes it might be just brute bad luck. So what should you do to maximise your chances?
The first thing is not to take it personal. Failure is an integral part of the academia. Academics get turned down all the time. Articles are rarely accepted for publication by academic journal without corrections, abstracts for presentations are often rejected, applications for grants are (especially in the current economic mess) rarely successful and so on, you get the point. Don’t take it personal.
In what follows I will mention a few important points to have in mind based on my personal experience . Obviously my experience relates to the British educational system, although I am guessing that what I say might apply elsewhere as well. Continue reading