When is the best time to apply for a PhD program?

Photo by Max Fischer on Pexels.com

I often receive emails from students, asking “Can I join your lab as a PhD student?”

In most cases, I cannot say “yes” immediately. This post explains why.

In email exchanges and zoom interviews, I tend to discuss things that I write below.

I encourage students to think of the question of “when to start” from 2 viewpoints and 2 timescales.

Table of contents

1. From a student’s short-term perspective
2. From a PI’s short-term perspective
3. From a student’s long-term perspective
4. From a PI’s long-term perspective
5. Summary

From a student’s (=your) and a PI’s (=my) viewpoints.

From a short-term and a long-term timescales.

1) A student’s short-term viewpoint

Including myself ~20 years ago, we tend to be very short-sighted when young. Students who are finishing the final year of university are, in particular.

In Australia, 4th year undergraduates do a Master-equivalent Honours thesis project. It tends to be very intense. Usually, it is the first time for students to spend >6 months on one thing and write >10,000 words. While doing this, they don’t have the luxury to think about the future.

At completion of Honours, they tend to think “when to start PhD” by looking at other students, who haven’t thought about it properly too….

If you are at that stage, I recommend you to “take off” at least for several months.

Travel. Read books. Do anything (e.g., volunteer) that you wanted to do. Join a company as an intern and see how the world (outside academia) works. Try to become a Youtuber. Test yourself and gain experience to make you unique.

All these activities will help you identify if it’s worth doing a PhD or not.

Currently, life expectancy is quite long. And you will retire 5 to 10 years later than your parents do / did!  

There is no rush to decide when to start your PhD. Delaying it for a year or more doesn’t matter for you in your life. A hasty decision will cost you  3-5 years (depending on programs). 

In fact, in my experience, the more mature students tend to do well for PhD. (There may be some stats on this, but I’m not aware of it).

Having said that, it’s important to secure the money. If you don’t have economic security, you might want to work for a while to save the money. Actually, you can gain experience from work, too. If you want to join my lab, working in some company that allows you to learn programming will be a huge plus.

If you have already decided to do a PhD 100%, then try to find well-funded research labs, which interests you the most. They might have TA or RA positions for you. Gaining experience in that domain will be useful for you in a long-term (See #3).

2) PI’s short-term viewpoint

By PI, I’m going to talk about myself. (I recommend that you talk with your future PI.)

My main short-term concern is whether you fit the lab. I wrote our policy of recruiting new members (prospective PhD candidates) here. https://sites.google.com/monash.edu/tlab/joincontact-us?authuser=0

I want to make sure you have great TIPS. Techniques, Intelligence, Personality and Speed.

In short, Techniques include various knowledge and skills (e.g., programming).  Intelligence includes communications skills and mindsets (e.g., growth-mind). I want to work with someone who fits with the existing members, including myself!  Speed includes adaptability upon feedback.

The best way for us to find these out is to work on some projects. It can be several months. It can be a Honours project. etc.

I need to make sure TIPS because I want to have a happy supervision experience.  3.5 years is short-term for me, but a long investment from my viewpoint!

What projects you want to pursue matters. But that’s something we can also figure out better if you do some projects with us.

3) A student’s long-term viewpoint

Students tend to have vague long-term plans, especially after PhD. Roughly, those who want to do PhD with me have 3 plans.

a) academic jobs, including research and teaching

b) jobs outside academia (e.g., clinical or industry) 

As I don’t know the reality for option b), I can only give some realistic advice on the pathway a). 

The most important thing that students don’t know is that the day you get a PhD will matter in the future. The date of PhD conferral matters.  Not your age. This is true for almost all scholarships, fellowships, awards, grants, and promotion.

(In Japan, I know some fellowships/scholarships that use “age” as one of the criteria. But that won’t continue given the current worldview. It’s age based discrimination…)

Your CV at the time of PhD conferral will constrain where you can go next (e.g., postdoc, scholarship, etc). The better your CV is at that time, the better options you have.

This means, the later you start PhD, the better.  In fact, the best strategy I usually recommend is to publish a paper before you start PhD.  If you can do that, that will increase the chance of your success in the long-term.

4) PI’s long-term viewpoint

From my viewpoint, choosing which PhD candidates to work with for the next 3.5 years is quite important in the long run.  Having great PhD students shapes the lab in a sustainable manner.

I, as a PI in Australia, generally want to take PhD students. If you, the student, can get a scholarship, I don’t have to pay you. This is important for my long-term viewpoint.

If I were in the US, I would generally have to cover your stipend in some way. If I were in Japan, I would like to take students who can get a JSPS fellowship so that they can focus on research. I may write on these issues later.  Specific details differ for each country.

Roughly, mid-sized labs like mine tend to consist of PI, postdocs, PhD candidates, RAs. Some other short-term students (like Honours, interns, etc) also join in and out.

Hiring postdocs is pretty expensive in Australia. Generally, one grant can hire one postdoc for 3 years in my field. So, relying on a postdoc is quite stressful (as the grant success rate is not that high ~10-25%) and not stable.

So, I would be very happy to work with PhD students, who can contribute to the lab in various ways.  That’s why I pay attention to TIPS.  In particular P: personality.

5) Conclusion & Summary

I hope that what I wrote here has some capacity to generalise to other fields and PIs, but I’m not sure.

At least, if you want to join my lab as a PhD, this is pretty much what I will ask you to think…

1) Take off and think about long-term plans.

2) Delay the start of PhD to maximize your chance in the future.

3) Think a bit from the PI’s perspective as well.

I have also posted some videos answering related questions from a student who is thinking of applying for US/Australian PhD (English), a high school student thinking of going to US University (Japanese) and a student thinking of US grad school (Japanese).

Our policy of recruiting new members

New (updated on Oct 20, 2021) 

Our policy of recruiting new members (prospective PhD candidates and postdocs) 

We believe that it’s important to have a “get-to-know” period (like an internship period) before we make decision on whether to work with you. 

During the friends period, we ask you to work with us on one project. This can be a summer/winter intern project. It can be a research unit in your university, where I serve as a co-supervisor. Or a new collaborative project with your current supervisor. It may be with / without contract and would last for a couple of months or up to one year, depending on the cases. 

From our end, we want to see several aspects in you that we think are critical. We want to see if you fit with us.

TIPS

Techniques: This includes various knowledge and skills. These are the things difficult to glance from your CV. For example, we want to see if you can program in the way that everyone can understand. We want codes that are easy to debug. We don’t need any complex and clever codes for our projects.

Intelligence: We care your intelligence in various domains. This includes communications skills and mindsets. Can you communicate effectively with others using various tools? Can you plan projects taking into account of rest and failure? Can you manage yourself? Do you strive to beat yourself yesterday? 

Personality: We want to make sure if your personality fits with the existing members. We want to become friends before collaborators! 

Speed: We want to see if you can adapt and grow speedily. When you receive feedback and suggestions, do you react quickly? Can you improve the projects and yourselves? 

— 

During the friends period, you can also test us, and in particular, see if you like with working with me. I know that this is quite unusual kind of laboratory. But I hope this makes sense to both of us. We are striving to make our lab happier and more productive lab! 

Procedure:

We are not urgently and actively recruiting postdocs or PhD candidates at the moment. But, if you are interested in working with us in the future, please send your CV.  Depending on the project and availability of the lab members, we may offer you the friends period.

Projects: 

Please see this page on our Research Statement. 

As described , we are interested in people who share the goal with us. To address the problem of consciousness. Any background is welcomed. In particular,  mathematics (especially category theory), physics (especially quantum physics, quantum information), and linguistics (especially cognitive linguistic – how much of what we experience is influenced by our language?).  But these are neither necessary nor sufficient. 

Most projects in the friends periods are either online psychophysics or data analysis. But it can be a theoretical project. Data analysis projects require substantial programming skills. We tend to work with Python, Matlab, R or other language.