The PhD hunting experience

I imagine that most of the students among us have certain aspirations after their studies. When we eventually move on from a life of lectures, exams, and being hungover every other business day, I imagine that, regardless of the specific job, a lot of us will be looking for common qualities and perks. Most of us will probably seek some form of work-life balance, sufficient pay to live comfortably, an ability to foster a social life, decent relationships with work colleagues, a manageable level of stress, prospects of future development, and job security. 

I, on the other hand, have my sights set on doing a PhD after I’m done. Near the end of my first Master’s degree, I had the displeasure of diving into the thick of the PhD application process. My Bachelor’s degree was fairly interdisciplinary, and my Master’s was vaguely within the AI-linguistic area. While this isn’t the most specialised background ever, I figured I’d have some chances somewhere.

My first mistake was not having done a Research Master. I had somehow missed the memo that if you want to go beyond the postgraduate level in academia (at least in the Netherlands), you shouldn’t just do a measly one-year degree. Perhaps naïve of me to assume otherwise, admittedly. Paired with a Bachelor's in Liberal Arts & Sciences, my profile, upon first glance, boiled down to “bachelor in nothing and a half-master in something-or-other”.

Reality wasn’t going to stop me. I updated my CV and set off on the hunt by checking the university listings directly (surprisingly hard to get to sometimes!). The applications usually begin with a shout-out of various initiatives, projects and other organisations that nobody really cares about. The “this PhD was brought to you by” section, if you will. You then have to parse the pitch of why the program is actually super important, followed by some expected tasks & methodologies, what they want you to have, what they do for you, and how to apply. 

Let’s say you choose to apply to one of these programs. Your CV is probably never going to fit all the bullet points listed in the requirements, but a bit of embellishing and rewording can get you decently far. By far the most cumbersome aspect is the motivation letter, where you have to pretend to be a competent, interesting person, and the person hiring you has to pretend that they care. Having done 20 PhD applications, the “motivation” aspect becomes more of a mockery than anything.

You put together your best application, send it off, and then don’t hear anything for about a month. When you do eventually hear something, you find that there were over 150 other applicants, and other people were more suitable for the role, so thanks but no thanks. Sometimes, they can’t even provide you with feedback because of the number of applicants and how long the hiring process is taking already. Overall, I managed to make it to the interview stage just twice, both times because the original set of candidates didn't tickle the fancy of the project leads.

So, anyway, I started a second Master’s degree. If you're hunting currently, good luck to you.