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:
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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment