How to find a PhD position

As promised, some more about how I looked for PhD positions/scholarships, and how I found this position. I don't claim to be an expert on this, but the least I can do is share what I learned.

When?
I started looking late February, and already found several expired application deadlines (for next September or October). Not sure when the best time is, but start looking early on.
Update (June 26). The mailing lists mentioned below had many more ads for positions in May/June compared to earlier on, so keep that in mind as well.

Where?
Where do you want to go? In my case I really wanted to go abroad, but not too far away, preferably something like UK, Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, France or Belgium. Length, requirements and finances can differ a lot depending on the country, so make sure you read up on it. Wikipedia has decent info, and more details can usually be found on the web site of some random university from that country.

How?

1. Aggregator sites.
Use sites which list many positions, like:
International: Scholarship positions, Find a PhD
EU: Euraxess
Netherlands: Academic Transfer
UK: Jobs.ac.uk
... and more

Ivor Kovic also mentions and reviews a bunch of these.

These sites can help, but they are often very messy with expired or miscategorized ads.

2. University websites
Another option is manually visiting a lot of university web pages. But unless you already know which universities you might want to go to, this is very time consuming.
On the other hand, you are sure not to miss anything important. Also, you immediately get a good idea of the research they are doing, and if you save the page with the vacancies for all universities you are interested in, it is easy to check again later on if there are any new ones.
It can also help to find a page with university rankings of a particular country, this way you have a nice list of links to universities in that country, can keep track of which ones you visited, and have a decent idea of the quality of their research.

3. Mailing lists
There are also mailing lists which post vacancies for PhD and postdoc positions. These are really a great source of interesting and relevant positions.

Some examples of computing science ones are:

• ImageWorld
• VisionList
• Connectionists

It can be difficult to find these, which brings me to:

4. Ask your professors
Really. Just talk to your thesis advisor or some other professor you know well, and tell them you are looking for a PhD position. After all, they advertise for their own positions, and there is a good chance their colleagues use many of the same methods.

What did I use?
In the end, I found my position using option (2) after looking at well over fifty web sites. It was also in the findaphd.com and jobs.ac.uk aggregators, although I missed it on both sites.
Most interesting alternatives I was considering in case I got rejected, came from mailing lists (two from imageworld and two from visionlist) and one my thesis advisor remembered seeing on one of these lists, so in a way all of these options were useful.

So it begins

About a month ago I started looking for a position as a PhD student (more on this process later). After a while I found a scholarship at Oxford. Deadline was only about 10 days after I found the ad, and I didn't have much experience with most of the rather specific "things that will be an advantage". Still decided to apply because the topic seemed so interesting, and I had a solid background in the research area. Wrestled with the 15 page application form and got three professors to submit a reference within two days of asking them.

One week later, I get a reply that I am invited for an interview. Since I don't live in the UK, I'm offered a phone interview.

A few days ago at 10am, I had the phone interview with them. Nervous as hell, only slept two hours. At 10:04 I answer my mobile phone, and am barely able to hear anything through the noise. Just enough to agree for them to try again. Second try: less noise, still far from perfect with occasional noise bursts and echoes. It will have to do. Four people on the other side of the phone: three professors and an administrator, but I'm mainly talking to my potential supervisor.

Then the questions start:

• "Why did you apply for this position"
• "Tell us about your Master thesis", including a short discussion with one of the other professors on the (dis)advantages of the technique I'm using vs one he's suggesting.
• "Tell us about your Bachelor thesis", since the topic for that was closer to the one I'm applying for. Some nasty questions about details I really can't remember after two years.
• More background, now about what topics were treated in various courses. Followed by a rather specific question, which I almost certainly answered incorrectly, but manage to blurb out something reasonably relevant anyway.
• What work from their group did I read? (I mentioned I read something in my answer to the first question)
• Probably some more questions I forgot.
• Opportunity for me to ask questions. I ask him to tell me some things about the research groups, how many others are in it and what do they research, as well as about the co-supervisor who was mentioned in the description of the position.
• Final question about why I want to go in this direction.
• Told that I will hear from them today or tomorrow.

24 minutes after it starts, the interview ends, and I am left with all the thoughts about how I could have done better on this or that question.

Around 5:30pm, I get an email in which I'm being offered the position. Five minutes later I accept.

So begins an exciting and challenging 3+ years of my life.
Moving abroad, with everything involved in that. Away from friends and family, off to a strange place. And with that I think I have something interesting to blog about.

I'll start October 1st, so won't be moving for a while yet. In the meantime I'll blog about all the things I need to arrange before that, and possibly just about random other topics.