The kind of person who should apply for
a PhD is someone who's got curiosity,
who's also got stamina. It's a three-year
project usually and it requires a lot of dedication.
Obviously there needs to be some level of academic credential, so you would usually require
the equivalent of a first class honours or 2.1 honours.
You've got to have a passion for study, for independent work, and you've got to have motivation.
If you don't have research training, we do have quite a
number of research training opportunities available here
including research methods Master's, which you might take up prior to doing your PhD.
It's really important you find a potential supervisor who has expertise in your area of interest.
Look at some of the key institutions in the field that you want to work with,
and see within that list who is doing research related to your field.
Look around, find a good person and
then try and make contact with them so
that they will already be involved in
the idea of your proposal as it develops.
At University of Kent you will only be
supervised by someone who is actively
researching. We have research teams so
you might have a practitioner, perhaps, who is
one of the Supervisory team, but
essentially the person who is guiding
you and helping you is someone who is
also working at the forefront of their discipline.
Some subjects require a
research proposal but as a scientist, if
people are applying for PhDs to my
department the School of Biosciences,
a research proposal is not usually
required, because usually research
funding is allocated towards specific
projects. So what people would usually be
doing is applying to a specific project
for which funding is allocated and
really what applicants then need to do
is illustrate their candidacy for that project.
A typical proposal for a PhD in Humanities will be
anything from 1,000 words, perhaps, even up to 2,000 words.
But what's important is that you
have a bibliography there, that you
outline your aims and give a really
clear sense of what it is you're going
to be doing for three years, what is it you're
going to be studying, how you're going to
go about doing that and what do you
think might come out of it in the end.
What I advise candidates to do if they do find
a project that they're interested in;
think about their own background,
their educational background, their interests,
their motivations.
What is it that has led you to this point?
Why do you want to do a PhD? What's your motivation?
What's your background and experience and usually also submit a curriculum vitae, a CV,
which tells us a bit more about your kind of
experience. Because sometimes you
might have professional experience that
isn't necessarily directly linked to
your research but it shows that you've got staying power or that you've got diverse interests
and you're the kind of person who's going to flourish when doing a PhD.
Without PhD students the
University of Kent wouldn't be able to
operate in research terms at the high
level that it does. So we value them hugely
and they're so important to
the research culture here at the University.
If you're thinking about doing a PhD then think seriously about it.
It's going to take three years or
more, you're going to be in the library a lot
but it's really an exciting opportunity to explore something in which, at the end, you'll be an expert.
Doing a PhD certainly changed my life.
It gave me the career that I have now, it's
given me opportunities that I wouldn't
necessarily have expected at the time that I
was starting my PhD. It's allowed me to
travel, meet new people, experience
different cultures and it allows me,
perhaps most importantly, to be doing a job that
I absolutely love now.
You'll have been abroad, you'd have been at conferences, 
you'd have talked and talked and
written and written, and it would have
changed you but for the best.
So if you're thinking about it, do it.
