How do you find a PhD place?

Following my last blog on why you might do a PhD and with final exams season approaching I thought I'd talk about how you go about finding a PhD place to apply for. Once again, I must say I'm focusing on science PhDs, because yeah...I'm a sciencey person.

What routes can you go through to find a PhD? In my experience there are 4 main ways to go:

1. Apply to a relatively new centre for doctoral training (CDT).
2. Apply for an advertised position.
3. Accept a position offered by a current or past supervisor.
4. Propose a project and find a supervisor willing to take you on.

No matter whichever way you find a PhD through there is one thing you will need to complete your studies, money! Money to live on, money to pay your tuition fees and money to fund your actual research. If you apply for a CDT funding will be guaranteed, so you can apply safe in the knowledge you will be paid and have all your study expenses covered. Similarly, if a position is advertised online or in a university department, it will almost certainly have funding attached to it. Things start to get a little bit more uncertain if a current or past supervisor offers you a position, they may have funding and be offering you first dibs on the place, or they may have a project in mind, but no funding sorted out. Therefore, you may have to wait a while until funding is secured before you can sign on the dotted line. However, if they have a project and want you to do it then it's likely they will do everything they can to secure you funding. The most difficult situation to be in is when you propose your own project. In that situation you will have to secure your own funding by applying to research councils, charities or universities with a detailed project proposal. 

Where do you go to find out about advertised positions and CDTs? My personal favourite website is Find a PhD. Find a PhD lists a huge range of funded and unfunded projects, along with funding opportunities across pretty much any field you care to name. It's basically a one stop shop for PhDs. My advice is to make sure you pay attention to the adverts on the side of the page as well as the search results as that's where I found a link to the PhD I eventually applied for and got. Another way to go is through prospects.ac.uk. They also provide UK wide listings for taught and research positions along side their graduate job listings. The final place to look is on the individual websites of university departments. Look up the webpage for the department you're interested in and check their postgraduate, research and research group pages as all the available PhDs can be spread across these locations. 

Each PhD route has its own advantages and disadvantages and may suit some people better than others. A place in a CDT entails signing up for a 4 year course in a research field. Unlike every other option, in a CDT you don't commit yourself to a project straight away, you spend a year learning and gaining new skills during which you choose a research project. This has the advantage of allowing you to investigate supervisors and projects in detail before you commit to one. Further to this there is lots of wriggle room to propose a project within the CDT's field and, as you already have funding, supervisors are happy to negotiate project modifications (which I did) or complete overhauls. Over 5 years most CDTs ultimately recruit 50 students. Therefore, being part of a CDT means you'll also be part of a community of students all on the same program. The main disadvantage is the vast amount of requirements you have to meet. All PhDs have things you have to do outside your research, but in my experience CDTs have anywhere between 3 and 4 times as many things you're expected to do. This is fine and actually helpful in first year, but once you begin your research it can sometimes be frustrating as you have many other things you would rather and should rather be spending your time on. 

In contrast to a CDT, if you apply for an advertised position you sign up to do a specific project with a specific supervisor for around 3 years straight away. The good thing about it is that you know exactly what you'll be doing from day one allowing you to be very focused. However, you can end up committing to working with someone you've never met before on something you've not studied before. Therefore, if you don't fully understand what you're getting into, there is potential for problems to crop up later down the line

Accepting an offered position from a current or past supervisor can work out really well. You'll be working with someone you know and hopefully will have a good idea if you can get on with them for 3 years. You'll probably also be doing a project that is similar to what you've done before so you'll hopefully be confident that you'll like the work involved in the project. However, going down this route can lead to you missing out on the opportunities that are available elsewhere for something safe.

Finally, if you propose your own project you're fully able to set your own boundaries. So hopefully you will love what you do. However, you have to find a supervisor to work with which might be easier said than done if you don't have funding sorted out. Additionally, as you proposed the project your supervisor might not be fully engaged with it, or fully understand all aspects, which could impact on the quality of the supervision you receive.

Whatever route you choose the most important thing to do is ask questions before you apply. CDTs often have open days you can attend to talk to the head of the program, potential supervisors and students about the work you might be doing. For non-CDTs, speaking to the supervisor about the project they're offering is vital, you'll get useful information that you can use at interview and also might find out key details the advert missed out. In all cases, if possible, talk to current students. Ask them about their experiences with the program, work and supervisor. E-mailing the administration office is the best way to find someone to talk to as the admin staff should be able to point you to someone with roughly the same background in the group you're looking at who'll be happy to chat to you.

Do you have any questions about applying for PhDs? Or, what are your experiences of applying for a PhD and what was the best advice you received? Why not share in the comments below!

Link Round-up 24th March 2014

This week has been pretty big in science so here are my favourite links from the past week:

1. Gravitational Waves Exist!
   
   Last week a paper was published describing the first every observation of gravity waves! The BBC have provided a very handy guide to what it all means. I'm not even going to try to start explaining it here as this is very, very much out of my field. However, the headline discoveries are that at the beginning of the universe everything was light and the initial expansion of the universe was faster than the speed of light. (Thank you PhD comics for explaining that to me!) 
2. What impact does the Higgs Boson have on society?
   
   I was at an event this week and was pretty shocked when a scientist said the following. "What impact does the Higgs boson have?" where he was basically saying "what benefit does it have to wider society?" So I have been spurred on to link up to firstly the CERN technology portfolio which provides details on the various technologies developed by CERN and a more thorough document describing the direct impact of the LHC for the very interested. As I think basic science research is very important I may well expand on this topic in a future blog post.
3. Planet Hunter's has new data for you!
   
   Planet Hunter's is a citizen science project from zooniverse which gets people from all over the world to search for new planets by looking at the light from stars in distant galaxies. They've finished classifying their first batch of data (quarter 14) and they now have a brand new set to get stuck into. Maybe you can help find a brand new planet!
4. The Thesis Whisperer
   
   The Thesis Whisper is a fantastic blog for anyone who's doing or thinking of doing a PhD. It's full of great tips for writing and research in general that I have found really helpful over the past year.  

And finally... Here's my favourite cover by the Piano Guys, Cello Wars its a fantastic treat to both listen to an watch. Also, after being blown away by The Lego Movie this weekend I have to link to the theme song, the epic Everything is Awesome.

Why would you want to do a PhD?

This week I thought I'd talk about deciding to do a PhD, as I'm sure that quite a few people will be currently deciding whether to do one or not. As a health warning this post is based on my experience and is focussed on science/engineering PhDs as they're what I'm familiar with.

So, I why you might want to do a PhD? It’s one of those questions which has many answers for many different people. You could probably guess some reasons pretty easily, others are probably less well known outside the academic community. In my experience some of the most common reasons are:

• I love my subject and want to keep learning about it after my degree.

• I want to be a lecturer one day so I kind of need one. (Not 100% true by the way.) 

• I want to be a professional scientist so a PhD would be a really great way to kick start my career.

• I want to explore science and give research in something new a try.

• I love being at uni! I don't want to leave! I should do a PhD!

• Oh my God! What do I do now. SOMEONE HELP ME! Oh, you'll pay me to keep doing my final year research project... That doesn't seem so bad. 

Some of these are really good reasons, some not so much. However, at the end of the day who am I to judge people on what influences their decision making process. Your motivation doesn't really matter as long as you turn up and do what is expected of you. So if you want to do a PhD just because you want to stay at uni, I'm not going to tell you not to.

Having said that in an ideal world if you're choosing to do a PhD you should hopefully be pretty sure that you enjoy research and can handle the highly independent study that you're about to undertake. But how do you find out these things? From my experience your final year research project will help, but you can also find out by doing a summer/holiday research project, which I would thoroughly recommend to all undergraduates. Not only will it give you a bit of income over the summer, it's a great thing to have on your CV whether you want to do a PhD or not. Basically you sign up to work on a specific project for somewhere between 6 weeks and 3 months and see how it goes. Some require you just to turn up and do your work, others will want reports at the end and some will want you to do a presentation on your experiences. Lots of universities offer research placements for their students that are really easy to apply for (physics at Leeds takes 36 people into their research groups every summer). In addition there are opportunities to get research placements outside of your own university. These can be accessible through looking at career's service postings, the big nationwide sites like prospects.ac.uk, through organisations like the Odgen Trust or by going direct to a research group and securing your own funding from places like the BBSRC, Royal Society of Chemistry and the Nuffield Foundation (for keen scientists doing AS levels).

When I was an undergraduate I did two summer research placements after the first and second years of my degree and I had two very, very different experiences. My first placement was within my university's physics department and involved me hitting a keyboard for 6 weeks as I desperately tried to model the interaction of light with atoms by creating a program using specialised add-ons in C++. This just wasn't for me. Basically I spent my time trying to make something, anything work and I eventually wrote a basic user manual on the how to code models in the language. After that it was safe to say I was not a fan of research and I had no intention of doing a PhD. The next summer I found myself a new research placement in a Medical Physics department with idea of it boosting my CV ready for a clinical science career. In the end I got so much more out of the placement than just pure CV building. Once again I was hitting a keyboard (this time for 3 months), but I felt I was doing something worthwhile and really interesting. I was basically pulling numerical data out of simulated medical images and finding a set of equations which mimic the way a person sees a tumour in those images. It was great! I loved the research activity, I learnt how to use the programming language Matlab, how to write a paper and I got an insight into the careers of the people around me which was very useful. This gave me two clear ideas. Firstly, I liked research where I used my maths and physics skills to do something that I felt had a clear application and secondly, it might not be so bad to do a PhD after all and I should be able to handle it.

So, why did I decide to do a PhD in the end? My personal decision was based on a combination of 'I want to be a scientist', 'I want to explore science' and 'oh God, oh God what do I do now?' Which seemed like a good enough motivation at the time and has served me pretty well so far. What would my advice be after my journey towards doing a PhD and signing on the dotted line? Get experience, but don't judge a whole world of opportunities on one placement or project. Now I'm doing my PhD, I know that even my second placement didn't give me a full picture of what I wanted out of a research project and it didn't give me all the tools I needed to succeed. If you are leaning towards doing a PhD but aren't 100% sure, why not apply? You can always change your mind over the months it takes to get from application to contract. You can always come back and do one later in life too, but it might not be as easy to do as when you're fresh out of your first degree!

If you're a current or budding PhD student why are you aiming to get your doctorate? 
What experiences of summer research placements have you had? 
Let us know in the comments below!

Link Round-up 10th March

As always, its time for a look at some of the best links I've found over the past two weeks.

1. GLaDOS Explains Nuclear Fission and Fusion.
   If you're not clued up on what nuclear fission and fusion are, or if you just want an excuse to listen to GLaDOS (as played by 

   Ellen McLain

   ) related things like me, check out this youtube video from NASA. If that's just not enough GLaDOS for you, then why not check out the amazing Pacific Rim, where she voices the Jaeger AI systems.
2. What is Academic Success on International Women's Day 
   Among the many, many articles released for International Women's Day, I particularly liked this one by Prof. Athene Donald focussing on how women define academic success. Another article well worth a read is "Don't just use women in science- listen to them too" by Alice Bell.
3. Cartilage Replacement from Your Fat
   Following on from last week's post on tissue engineering; this week research was published on using stem cells from fat to grow cartilage. In the work  fat stem cells (which can be accessed through liposuction) were put on a synthetic scaffold, and were directed to produce cartilage-like tissue. One of the possible applications of this work could be in providing ear reconstruction for children, as the tissue should be able to grow with the child or in improving on the previous artificial trachea transplant by kick starting it with fat stem cells. If you're interested in reading the actual paper, it is open access and can be viewed here. As a health warning the BBC article is full of hype and a closer look at the actual paper shows that this is a very early proof of concept study so, even though these are exciting results, don't expect to see this technology in use for a while yet!

And finally... Peter Capaldi Appears in 12th Doctor Costume at the BBC Worldwide Showcase. I don't know about you, but that picture revealing Peter Capaldi's look as the 12th Doctor was pretty funny. Thankfully, we can now see it in a more natural natural way (and looking pretty good) in Peter Capaldi's appearance at the BBC Worldwide Showcase. 

BREAKING NEWS!

Fellow Yorkshire geeks rejoice! Showmasters have just announced they will be running a Sheffield Film and Comic Con at the arena on 30th and 31st August  for the first time ever this year! The event appears to have Sky Atlantic and Anime League support, so I'm crossing my fingers for lots of Game of Thrones and anime related shenanigans. 

What is Tissue Engineering and How Will it Help You?

I've previously mentioned that my PhD comes under the heading of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, but what is tissue engineering and what might it do for us in the future? 

The main focus of tissue engineering in many respects is the production of replacement tissues and organs in the lab which can be used to repair the human body. The overarching dream is that one day people will be able to have new organs which are available on demand. Why is this something that we want? Firstly, we might be able to use artificial tissues to treat new illnesses, improving quality of life for people by regenerating their bodies. Additionally, by having organs off the shelf, we could eradicate the transplant list. How brilliant would it be to live in a world where no one dies waiting for a transplant?  So, how do we make these new replacement organs and how far off are they from being in use?

It's safe to say fully manufactured organs are decades away from use, but small tissue replacements are closer general usage than you might think. The artificial trachea transplant reported in 2011 is a tissue engineering solution and there are tissue engineered patches for heart reconstruction along with tissue engineered heart valves and skin currently going through clinical trials. So we are beginning to move into the area of artificial, regenerative surgery.

How do we make artificial tissues and organs? Firstly we need to understand what gives an organ its ability function. An organ's properties come from both cells and the structure that supports them, made of proteins and other organic molecules, both of which are extremely important. So we need need a material to support cells and provide biological function along with a source of cells to fill this scaffold. At the moment there isn't a single solution to do this. Some researchers are using artificially made polymer materials to create scaffolds, but you can also make fully biological scaffolds. Some researchers are taking tissues from animal sources, removing the cells in it and using the decellularised tissue to provide a natural cell support with the inherent architecture needed to replace an organ. This may sound like a really weird idea, but this it is proving really successful in clinical trials and in many ways is using materials perfectly evolved for a function in an engineered tissue. Finding a cell source is a huge challenge. In some cases it's possible to implant a scaffold and let the cells of the body move into it over time. For example if you give someone an artificial bone or muscle then the scaffold provides mechanical function and cells are not needed immediately. However, when cells are vital where should they come from? In normal transplants patients have to be on immunosuppressive drugs in order to stop the body attacking the transplant, due to the recognition of foreign cells. Therefore, the ideal cell solution needs cells which come from a patient themselves. However, this is difficult in many ways; you need the right type of cells in huge numbers, that means cells must be harvested from a patient and grown in the lab. The most plausible way to do this is arguably to harvest adult stem cells which keep your tissues repaired in normal day to day life and make them into the right type for the scaffold. However, this is time consuming and expensive and could be considered to be the biggest barrier to tissue engineered organs.

What might tissue engineering do for you in the future? It could be a long time before we get to artificial full organ transplants, but you may receive tissue engineered structural tissue fragments for bone, muscle and blood vessel grafts sooner than you might think. However, direct tissue replacement are not the only thing tissue engineering is good for. Manufactured tissue samples could also be used to revolutionise drug development. At the moment it takes around a decade and a huge amount of money for a new drug to get to actual use in a hospital. In that time it will go through laboratory tests, animal tests and numerous human trials. However, the success rate of new drugs reaching hospitals is extremely low and only around 16% of drugs which start clinical trials succeed. The main problem is that animal tests and current lab methods do not give us the actual human response to a drug. Tissue engineering could help overcome this by creating mini-tissues, which we can connect together to create models to examine exactly how a drug effects every part of the human body. This would be a fantastic development on so many levels and could make life saving drugs cheaper and get them to patients quicker. It could also replace animal testing for medicines.  

Tissue engineering has the potential to impact on medicine in a huge way. With a lot of hard work and time, in the future we will receive manufactured organs and drugs developed on tissue engineered models. Fingers crossed this will save lives and improve the quality of life for many people around the world.