Are you looking to pursue a PhD?
That’s wonderful: the world needs smart people like you, equipped by their training to expand and communicate human knowledge. Welcome aboard!
But perhaps you’re not quite sure how to decide what to study and with whom. These are big decisions, but some advice can help. Read on, and I’ll get you started.
Probably the most important thing I can tell you is this: I can’t tell you everything.
Both the nature of PhD programmes and the ways advisors recruit students vary a lot among fields and from country to country. Be wary, then, of online advice (including mine!), and ask for help from a trusted mentor in your field.
Who might that be? If you already have a research mentor from a Master’s degree or an undergraduate research experience, you’re set! If not, consider asking the instructor of your favourite course, or a researcher near you whose work is in the field that interests you.
The second-most important thing I can tell you is that you aren’t choosing just a PhD research topic. Instead, you’re choosing a topic, an advisor, a programme, and a place.
I’ll focus today on the first two, which are tightly intertwined. But don’t forget the others, which include issues around programme length, financial support, and the desirability, for you, of living near the programme you choose. These things matter too.
The research question
To find a research topic, you’ll obviously need to start by asking yourself what kind of scholarship you’d like to do. A PhD will be built not just around a topic but around a research question, and that question needs to satisfy three criteria.
First, it has to be a currently unanswered question, so that your work will yield new human knowledge.
Second, it has to be a question that’s answerable with the resources and the time your PhD programme will allow.
Third, and most important of all, it has to be a question that fascinates you! You’ll spend years of hard work answering your PhD’s question, and you’ll be miserable if you aren’t burning to find the answer.
How do you find a research question that excites you?
Ask yourself what grabbed your attention in your undergraduate courses or Master’s degree.
Now read some scholarly papers in or around that subject. Don’t neglect preprints – in some fields, these are becoming a routine way for academics to communicate their work, and you’ll be seeing newer results than you will in published papers.
As you read what you’ve found, ask yourself: Which papers raise new questions for you? Whose work seems innovative and exciting, and do their papers suggest a match for your own ideas? Ask your own mentors, too, what big open questions are related to the things you find most interesting. Who works on those questions?
If you’re having trouble finding interesting papers and preprints to read, talk to a librarian about search tools (Google Scholar is great, but it’s not all there is), or consider joining a social media platform like Bluesky (where you’ll find me among many other academics). You don’t even have to be active there; you can simply find and follow academics in your field, who are likely to post about their newest work (along with their vacations, their snacks, their pets, and their pet peeves – because after all, academics are just people like you and like me).
Contacting a supervisor
All this will help you build a list of potential topics alongside a list of potential advisors. You can then email those people to ask if they have plans to take students.
Just so you know, active researchers get a lot of enquiries about that – but most are poorly prepared, being off-topic, generic, or obviously written by ChatGPT.
If you handcraft yours, showing that you’ve thought about your topic and why you’re contacting the researchers you’re contacting, your enquiry will stand out.
If you’re lucky enough to be able to attend a conference in the field you’re interested in, even better: introduce yourself to someone whose research you admire or whose talk you enjoyed, and ask about PhD opportunities. Nobody will mind – and if they don’t have open spots in their own labs, they’ll likely suggest alternatives.
How much latitude will you have to choose your research question?
Sometimes you’ll see a PhD position advertised with a research question already well developed (perhaps because that’s what the funding is for).
It’s still fine to ask whether the project can be adapted to suit your interests, but you’ll need to understand if the constraints are firm. Other times, you’ll approach a prospective supervisor with ideas of your own, hoping to find a fit between your ideas and theirs.
By the way: you probably won’t settle on the final version of your research question right at the start. It’s normal for scholarship to evolve while you’re doing it, as early results suggest new questions or as some approaches pay off more than others.
Ask a prospective supervisor about this: do they, or does their institution, have a timeline and a process for nailing down the precise work to be done? It’s common for refinement of the research question to be a formal part of the degree programme (especially in the lengthier programmes typical outside the UK).
Sometimes, even the choice of advisor comes well after you’re admitted to a PhD programme, with the first year spent visiting several labs in a “rotation” (this is common for biomedical programmes in the US; here’s an explainer from one such programme in Canada).
Researching a supervisor
Once you’re talking with a few researchers about possibilities in their lab, you’ll be working with them to find a topic that fulfils both your needs and theirs.
But don’t pay attention only to the topic! PhD advisors vary tremendously in their mentoring style; ask them about that.
Are they hands-on, offering weekly meetings and close instruction in the lab, in the field, or at the archives? Or are they hands-off, expecting PhD students to work independently to design and execute their own scholarship? Neither of those is wrong, but they’ll suit a very different set of students; it’s worth thinking about what it is that you need.
Finally, it’s (sadly) true that not all advisors do a good job. Once you’ve identified a potential advisor with whom you have a good topic and style match, it’s absolutely critical that you talk to some of their recent students.
You can get contact information for those students directly from the potential advisor (they’ll expect to be asked), but look on your own, too – via the lab website, or by trawling through the coauthors on the advisor’s Google Scholar profile.
Ask the students you find about their experiences. Do they feel supported? Do they have access to their advisor when they need it? Does their experience match the way the prospective advisor described their mentoring strategy? What’s the atmosphere in the research group?
If they’ve moved on from the lab, were they able to publish their research, and did they feel well-positioned for their career’s next step?
Finally
If all this sounds like a lot – well, maybe it is. But making a good choice is important.
You’ll be investing a lot in the PhD programme you join and the research question you choose – it will be your full-time (at least) preoccupation for several years.
Just as important: your advisor will be investing a lot in you, so they’ll want to get it right too. But you can do it, with some careful thought and an ear for advice from your mentors.
Good luck!
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