If you’re thinking of applying for a PhD, welcome to PhD application season! It’s been a while since I applied for my PhD and I went through a slightly different application given that I was applying while in medical school for an MBPhD but I learnt a lot about what was important to me when looking for suitable projects, which I will now impart onto you so you can find the best projects for your interests and skills!

First of all, make sure to keep a record of the projects that you are interested in! I had an Excel sheet where fields were populated with information on the various things that were important to me that I found through my research on different labs (all discussed below). This will be very useful to keep track of progress with applications as well, especially if you’re applying to multiple PhD programmes. Keep in mind that this is a numbers game and good projects are competitive to get onto, so you are likely to be making multiple applications before you get accepted onto a handful that you can choose from. 

Overall, I think there are three factors that make a good PhD: 

1. You as the student – a bit obvious for me to say! 
2. A good project – a project that is doable within a specific timeframe and has contingency plans in case the initial research plan doesn’t work out is key. 
3. The supervisory team and overall research group culture – this determines the quality of supervision and support you will receive during your PhD. 

I think all three need to come together for a good PhD experience – you need to have an interest in the research question and gel well with the group/your supervisors to feel like you’re in a stimulating environment which encourages you to learn and grow. 

Back when I was applying for PhD projects, my biggest dilemma was deciding on the type of project I wanted to do. Given that I didn’t have much research experience, I wanted to do a project that had both wet lab and dry lab elements so I can develop skills in both. My background in Medicine also meant that I was interested in research that was more translational, so I could work on research that had a more direct link to improving patient care. Your interests and priorities for a project are individual to you so it will take some reflection to figure out what type of project you’d want to spend the next few years working on. For example, if you can’t make sense of immunology then going for a project on immunotherapy would make very little sense! 

The next big thing to consider is how much funding your project and lab have. I didn’t have an issue with this since all MBPhDs were funded and projects came with a consumables budget separate to the core funding each lab had. Newer group leaders might not have as much extra funding available if you were interested in running some additional experiments (things like sequencing can get quite expensive!) so you might need to work with your supervisors to apply for funding. It’s entirely up to you whether that’s what you want, since the experience of applying for grants can be very useful. You should also think about whether you get a stipend/salary and if you do, how much that is given that some funders pay more than others. 

The one big thing that mattered to me aside from the actual PhD project is the size and culture of the lab you might be joining. I preferred a slightly smaller lab and I’ll use an example from when I was applying for PhDs to explain. Back then, there was a supervisor whose work I was very interested in, but their lab was HUGE. The group was divided into multiple subgroups and I would be working in one of them if I went for that project. While I was very interested in the research, I chose not to apply for that project because I probably wouldn’t get that much contact with my main supervisor and honestly, I felt overwhelmed simply thinking of how big the lab was. Lab culture will play a big role in your PhD experience and I highly recommend that you visit the lab + speak to all members of the supervisory team to get a feel for how you get on with them. I spent a week during the summer with the lab I ended up doing my PhD with, and the time I spent there was what helped me decide that it was the lab I wanted to be in. Along that line of thinking, consider the composition of lab members: how many postdocs, technicians, research assistants and other PhD students are there and what do they work on? This will help you figure out who has the expertise to help you if needed and who might be working on a similar topic. 

Some slightly less “important” factors to consider when choosing PhD projects are 1) non-research skills the lab can help you develop and 2) other interests your lab and supervisory team have. These were important to me because I had already been doing a lot of outreach work through this website and my non-profit so I was keen to go into scientific communication. On top of that, my experiences have taught me that it is a priority for me to continue my hobbies so being around other people who encourage that was a key consideration. Everyone in my current lab has interests ranging from climbing and netball to baking and pottery and there were some people in the lab who are very active in scientific communication so that ticked the boxes for me. 

In short, the key factors I think you should consider when deciding on PhD projects to apply to are: 

1. The type of project you want to do – this requires self-reflection to understand the skills you want to develop and subject areas that interest you. 
2. Funding – both for your project and for your lab. 
3. Size and team culture of the lab – you can learn about this by speaking to all members of the supervisory team and visiting the lab. 

My next blog post will be on meetings with potential PhD supervisors where I break down the important questions to get answered when you meet a potential PhD supervisor for the first time so stay tuned for that! Good luck with your PhD project hunting! 

Jean