Find a Supervisor 
Choosing a Ph.D. supervisor is the most essential part of your Ph.D. application. as you need to find a supervisor who is capable of providing you with mentorship, support, and guidance throughout your Ph.D. journey. That’s why spending time choosing a supervisor is very important at the beginning of your graduate application process. Because you need to make contact with them to identify who will be an acceptable fit for you and your research interests.
Considering the responsibility of a Ph.D. supervisor, they would have much time to share their supervision, their own guidance, and their expertise to support you over research projects, and they would show their interest in your project and provide regular guidance and feedback to help you brush up on your work. However, keep in mind that each supervisor's supervision experience and expertise are completely unique. Depending on the supervisor's timelines, some supervisors would expect to arrange the meeting on a monthly or weekly basis, but sometimes it would depend on regular experiments. The most important thing is that your and your supervisors’ ways of identifying research intersections match up with the best possible way to gain final output at the end of the research journey.
Finding a Ph.D. supervisor depends on your path, whether you are applying to an advertised project or with your own research proposal.
Advertised project
If you intend to apply for a Ph.D. program with an advertised project category, the process of finding a supervisor is much simpler than writing your own Ph.D. research proposal. Most reeling institutes listed their research projects with prospective supervisors, and you have a great chance to contact them directly. Make sure you do more research before contacting supervisors, and that you are more knowledgeable in order to clue up their research and ask specific questions about their research project.
If you are proposing your own research project, you must be the full package of the relevant field by obtaining all research information from academics and departments and ensuring that this is aligned with your proposed research topics, aims, and research interests. If you can make a fully academic research proposal including all expected criteria, it will have a great chance of obtaining approval from supervisors. But writing your own Ph.D. project is quite difficult as you have to read a lot of articles to make sure whether your information is correct or not. Making your own research project doesn't mean writing a final draft; it would need a more decent plan of what you are planning to do in the next academic year.
Resources to arrange your own research proposal
- Scientific database: This is a huge platform where you can collect a lot of data at the same time. If you are in the STEM world, there is no doubt you are fully awarded scientific articles, and these databases will provide a wide collection of data to refine your research. It consists of the most outstandingly cited articles that are published by leading researchers on your platform.
- Browsing a university and department website: considering the success of finding a supervisor, you must be aware of your supervisors and their research interests. So the university website is the platform to reach their academic profile and identify their specific, interesting paths, publications, and academic achievements. It can give you a good idea of your prospective supervisor and whether or not they want to supervise the potential Ph.D. student.
- Discuss with academics at your current university: They must be aware of who the experts in the relevant field are and have the expertise to provide information on how to approach prospective supervisors. If you have close relationships with your previous supervisors (undergraduate or postgraduate), it will be an opportunity to identify a good fit for your work
Then, when you finish designing your research proposal, you must have a clear academic landscape regarding your proposed research project.
Who can supervise you?
There are no restrictions to working as a supervisor, especially since it would not depend on senior roles to supervise Ph.D. students. As junior research fellows, other assistant professors act as supervisors when they perform outstanding research. However, each university has specific criteria for working as a supervisor for a Ph.D. student. It always depends on university rules and regulations.
Find a potential supervisor
Supervisors are highly demanding along with their research workload, and they may not respond to your inquiry immediately.
Please be patient!!!!
Allow time and put a reminder in; sometimes it would work (personal experience).
Fortunately, your proposed research project was overseen and approved by more than one supervisor. There are some factors you may consider to make a final decision.
- Career stage of supervisor and funding: If they are beginning to supervise you, they would have much time with less research experience. Meanwhile, if senior professors are interested in supervisors, they have fuller research experience with busy timelines. These all factors depend on funding. That’s why, in the end, you need to consider how much funding they can allocate for your project.
- University facilities: If you make contact with different universities, you can reconsider the facilities at each university.
- University Department: It can give ideas regarding the composition of your academic staff. It always depends on personal preferences.
Hopefully, you are allocated to working with them for a minimum of three years, so make sure before starting your journey that everything will go well with them.
Author: Nimalsha Hansani| nim_niii
Resources: https://uwaterloo.ca/graduate-studies-postdoctoral-affairs/future-students/applying-graduate-school/before-you-apply/finding-supervisor (University of Waterloo)
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