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This information is addressed to PhD applicants. The application forms are here. Your comments are welcome! Please send them here.
There is a separate FAQ about funding (financial aid) here.
Admission and funding (financial aid) are handled separately. You submit an application for admission and we make a decision without taking funding into account. Separately, you submit one or more funding applications and/or wait for our internal funding allocation discussions to conclude. Funding is a complicated topic and it is covered by a separate FAQ.
No.
There is no application deadline - we consider applications all year around. But there are deadlines connected with funding, see our funding FAQ. For some funding sources you need to submit a separate application, and candidates are usually required to have already received a formal offer of admission. No separate application is required for some other sources of funding, but once funding decisions have been made in Spring there is no more money available until the following year. In both cases we need to have received an application for admission with all paperwork well before the date in question. Furthermore, you need to allow a minimum of three months between submission of your application with all paperwork and your intended start date.
So, the short answer is: as soon as possible!
The following indicative deadlines cover most common cases:
To make an application you will need to send us, as a minimum, the following documents:
Please send all your application material to the following address:
Mr Andrew Finnie
Informatics Graduate School
University of Edinburgh
4.10 Appleton Tower
Edinburgh EH8 9LE
If you like you can send everything to the College of Science and Engineering (which is the address on some versions of the application form) but they will just forward it to us. This adds at least a week to the time that it takes your application material to reach us.
All application materials need to be easily legible. We suggest a typewriter or handwriting in block capitals, or else fill out the application form in a suitable word processing package.
Not yet, unfortunately. Maybe next year.
No, it is not required.
That is a complicated topic. It is covered by a separate FAQ. The cost of studying for a PhD at the University of Edinburgh is summarized here.
British undergraduate degree classifications are explained in this Wikipedia entry. A first class honours degree is typically achieved by about 10% of candidates and an upper second class honours degree is typically achieved by approximately the next 30% of candidates. We take the ranking of the university at which you studied into account in determining whether or not your degree is equivalent to a first or upper second class honours degree in the UK. We will normally reject applications from candidates whose degrees are not of this standard, in the absence of highly relevant work or other experience.
No. We may however suggest to some applicants that they study for a Master's degree before coming to do a PhD, if we consider that additional preparation is necessary. Also, some funding sources (for instance, the Neuroinformatics DTC) provide four years of funding covering an MSc followed by a PhD.
If English is not your first language then you must enclose a copy of a recent English language test certificate (not more than two years old) or provide details of when you are going to take the test. Details of requirements are here. Summarizing:
(These are minimum acceptable scores; a student who barely meets these requirements will probably have some difficulty coping with PhD study.) For TOEFL, our institution code is 0917 and our department code is 78.
We require no results for the GRE or other examinations, apart from certification of English language ability for candidates whose first language is not English.
No. You should ask them to submit a reference to us using the form provided. We may ask you to remind them if the reference is not received within a reasonable period of time. A way to ensure that this happens is to ask for the reference to be given to you in a sealed envelope, with the referee's signature across the seal, and send it to us yourself.
You should note that letters of reference should be original documents, preferably on the relevant institution's official headed paper, and must bear the referee's signature. Photocopies are not accepted under any circumstances.
Yes. All referees should use the form provided. Give us the names and addresses of additional referees on a separate sheet of paper.
An academic transcript is a list of all courses taken, all grades received, all honours awarded and degrees conferred. An interim transcript provides similar information for degrees you are yet to complete (it may also show the expected grade or level of award if you are near the end of the programme of study).
The transcript is usually issued by the Registrar (or equivalent) of the relevant institution.
If the transcript is not in English you will also need submit a certified translation (that is a translation by the issuing institution, the British Council or Embassy or a professional translation service).
Note that the University must verify the authenticity of all transcripts and so you must submit an original document or a certified copy (a copy, usually prepared by the issuing institution, endorsed to show it is a genuine copy of the original).
No, you must send hardcopy originals of all documents. Please contact us if there is some reason why that is impossible.
Send us what you have, together with a note about what you will send later. We may be able to make an offer that is conditional on information/documents to be supplied later.
It is certainly a good idea to look at our list of staff and list of suggested PhD topics in order to learn about the areas in which we conduct research, and who is interested in which areas. Nearly everybody maintains a personal homepage that describes their research interests in some detail and provides links to some or all of their publications. Once you have looked at this information, contacting a potential supervisor by email might be useful in deciding how to focus your application or to ask for more information about his/her current research agenda, but it is not required. It is definitely not a good idea to send a vague statement of interest to a large number of potential supervisors, or even to a single individual.
In answer to question 21 on the application form, please:
You are welcome to submit additional material, or (better) web links to such material, if you think it might help us to assess your application, but this is not required. Please do fill out the application form completely; we will not accept an incomplete application form even if the missing information is available from a CV or other document.
We hold documents until an application arrives. It is important that if documents are being sent separately from an application they are clearly labelled INFORMATICS so they reach us. The best is to send all documents directly to us.
No. See above. You need to fill out an application form.
We cannot act on your application until it is complete; we will send you an email acknowledgement when this is the case. If your application is nearly complete then we may ask you by email for missing material. We then aim to send you a decision within 6 weeks of this acknowledgement. Please contact us if you have been waiting longer than that. Possible decisions at this point are:
If you are in the second category, you should expect a final decision by late May and possibly sooner.
The research institute(s) considering your application may ask you to come to Edinburgh for an interview. If invited for interview you should check whether or not your travel expenses will be reimbursed.
We interview many UK-based candidates and some non-UK candidates who are willing to travel to Edinburgh. The interview typically lasts 30-60 minutes and involves your prospective supervisor(s) and 1-2 other people in related research areas. You will also be given an opportunity to meet a PhD student who is working in a related area. In some cases we conduct interviews by telephone or videoconference.
If you have not been invited to interview but are going to be in Edinburgh or passing through and would like to arrange an interview or a visit to one of our research institutes then you should contact either your prospective supervisor or the relevant institute directly to arrange this.
PhD students can begin study at any time of year. But the vast majority start in mid-September which is the beginning of the academic year for undergraduate and MSc students.
Your acceptance letter will specify a supervisor (your so-called "principal" or "first" supervisor). During the course of the first year, you will be assigned a so-called "assistant" or "second" supervisor whose role is to provide a complementary source of expertise and/or other forms of backup. Students in the Neuroinformatics DTC will start with the Director of the DTC as supervisor, changing after the first year to a supervisor who is appropriate to their chosen research topic.
Please contact us if you are in this position. Expect us to take a few days to come to a decision.
Please contact us to give us your new address.
No, please don't. We will of course try to be polite and will reply to reasonable questions. We will contact you by email when we need information from you, so make sure that we have your current email address.
Most communication is by email. Our final formal decision will be sent by post (airmail if abroad) to the address on your application.
The formal decision to accept is made by the College following a proposal from the Informatics Graduate School. The letter from the Graduate School is not a formal notification of admission but it may contain a formal offer of funding if the information is available at that point. The letter from the College of Science and Engineering does not take funding offers made through the Informatics Graduate School into account. If it says that you are responsible for securing funding to cover your fees and living costs, this does not mean that your funding offer from the Graduate School or Scholarship Office, if any, has been withdrawn!
Please contact us. Deferral may or may not be possible, depending in part on its duration. If it is possible then our offer of funding, if any, may be affected.
Yes. You should submit a fresh application and other documentation. If you want us to reuse some of your accompanying documents, please check with us that they are still available. But unless there has been some change in the availability of suitable supervisors, merely reconsidering the same application will not lead to a different decision.
You will receive a joining pack in July but in the meantime there is some information here about accommodation etc. that might be helpful.
The most important factors in our decision are:
Your publications and/or work experience, if any, are also important factors.
We do not use any formula in evaluating applications, other than applying the University's minimum requirements for English language proficiency and undergraduate degree level. Every application is assessed by several people including potential supervisors and others in related research areas. Weakness in one respect may be compensated by strength in another respect.
Study hard, get good grades, give the people who are writing your references reasons to be impressed with your abilities, devote serious thought to your research proposal, and submit your application before the last minute.
Question 21 on the application form asks you to indicate a proposed topic of study, and to submit a research proposal of about one page in length describing your proposed research topic in more detail. This is analogous to the "Statement of Purpose" required by other universities, but we are more interested in your research orientation than in anything else. The research proposal is a very important component of your application. One page is a suggestion, not a limit. Potential supervisors and others in related research areas will be involved in assessing your application and they will be looking at your proposal for evidence that you have an appropriate background for the topic area and for your own ideas about how research on that topic should best be taken forward. What you write is not binding, but it will give us a useful impression of your background, interests and ideas. If you have not yet decided on a precise area of study, please tell us about areas of Informatics that you find most interesting and why, in as much detail as possible.
The application process is competitive and there is more competition for some research areas than others. On average, the success rate for PhD applications in recent years has been around 20%.
PhD study involves you conducting a major research project under supervision, with little or no formal coursework. For this to work, the maintenance of close contacts between the supervisor and the student is essential. Therefore the University of Edinburgh requires students to be resident in Edinburgh or nearby for most of the period of PhD studies - specific limits are spelled out by the regulations - and "distance learning" is not an option.
There are circumstances in which it makes sense for students to spend considerable periods elsewhere. One example might be if the student's research project involves use of facilities at another research institute. Under all circumstances it will be necessary to maintain close personal contact with the supervisor.
No.
Yes, rarely. Fill out the usual application form and enclose a note explaining your circumstances. When an application for transfer is accepted, the amount of "credit" allowed for study elsewhere is determined on a case-by-case basis.
If you choose where to study based mainly on the quality of our weather, you will probably be happier elsewhere. We hope that your choice will be based mainly on the quality of our research. The fact that all of us live here despite the weather says something about our own priorities. Anyway, Glasgow and the highlands are much worse!
Feel free to contact us.
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