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How to win a Ph.D. scholarship.

A Ph.D. student costs an institute roughly 100K Euros or two crore rupees. The first half of this sum, roughly one crore, is direct pay, while the second half represents the average cost of your lab research. Assume you’re a professor with this kind of funding. Would you hand it over to a complete stranger? I wouldn’t do that. That is why your emails begin, “My name is Ali, and I am blablablabla “Do you have any Ph.D. openings?” goes straight to the garbage. That is why the majority of students do not receive a response from any professor. They eventually give up hope and apply for open opportunities.

Because of the increased competition, only the best pupils are chosen for advertised opportunities. The others believe they are ineligible for a foreign scholarship. What if I told you that wasn’t true? Every student with a typical profile is eligible for a scholarship.
Ali sent an email to 200 professors and received no response. “The fact that you sent an email to 200 professors is the problem,” I told him. The amount of emails you send has an inverse relationship with the quality of your emails. The higher the quality of your emails, the lesser the number of emails you send. There’s no way to modify 200 emails if you send them all at once. Most likely, you just drafted one email and sent it to every professor who even somewhat relates to your field of study.

You assumed that out of 200 people, at least one would be desperate enough to try to capture you. Put yourself in the shoes of a lecturer. You have a lot on your plate. Hundreds of such generic emails arrive in your inbox every day. It’s clear that hundreds of professors received identical emails. You have funds for one Ph.D. student, but you wouldn’t give it to someone who didn’t bother to write you a personalized email.

The golden rule of How to win a Ph.D. scholarship

is that if your email can be sent to another professor by simply changing the name and institute, it will be discarded.
In other words, the more detailed your emails are, the greater reaction you will receive.

PhDs are the engine that propels research forward. Professors in the United States and Europe are very busy people. They don’t have time to visit a lab and conduct experiments. They are primarily concerned with teaching, supervising, and drafting grant bids. Ph.D. students are the ones who conduct the majority of the research. As a result, given the financial and time constraints, every professor wishes to have as many Ph.D. students as feasible. As a result, if he likes you, he’ll figure out a way to hire you. If a professor likes a Ph.D. student, I’ve seen them go out of their way to hire them. The issue is that most students ask, “Do you have an open Ph.D.?” right away. They don’t make an effort to build a relationship first.

If you’re a Nobel Laureate or a Harvard grad, it is unlikely that your profile will attract a professor on its own. It doesn’t reveal anything about your personality, work ethic, or other qualities. Furthermore, educators are not always looking for the best student. A Ph.D. student with a high-grade point average may drop out, whereas a Ph.D. student with an average grade point average may perform extraordinarily well.
“What should I write if I can’t apply for a Ph.D. post or send my CV?” you might wonder. Write to him about his studies. First, study his latest academic articles to get a sense of his interests. Professors usually comment about research gaps in the discussion portion of a paper. This is an area where he writes on what interests him unconsciously. If you tell him you’re interested in working on it, he’ll almost certainly respond.