PhD and MA by Research are aimed at people
who’ve got an interest in doing a PhD, at
any particular stage in their career, it doesn’t
have to be exclusively for people who have
just completed MAs – we have had students
who are retired, we’ve had students who
are in mid-career and we’ve had students
who’ve come directly out of an MA programme.
So in a sense it’s open to all sorts of
students, it is a question of whether or not
the student is really, strongly interested
in doing a PhD in that area.
I think a lot of the workshops in Arts and
Law are very nice. There’s a lot of workshops
on after-PhD life.
We have four broad areas of expertise that
we like to supervise in. The first of those
is corpus linguistics, which is my own area.
And then there’s cognitive and psycho-linguistics,
and the third area is discourse and stylistics.
And then finally English language learning
and teaching.
I would say to check online who are the people
that are working in the Department that you’re
interested in and scope out someone who has
a similar research interest to what you want
to study and send them an email already to
find out if they’d be interested in supervising
you and your project, and if they have any
tips or advice for writing your research proposal.
And it also really helps getting accepted
if you already have someone in there who knows
you and knows what you want to do and who
wants to supervise you so that would be my
main piece of advice.
