FIND a German PhD supervisor

Anecdotal evidence has it that the success rate of international PhD candidates is better within structured PhD programmes than doing a research-only PhD. So, if you can find a structured programme matching your research interests, go for it!

Maybe you already have a specific research interest and can't find a good match, or you're not admitted to the programme of your choice? In that case you can do as the vast majority of German PhD candidates does and do a research-only PhD.

Besides a good master's degree in a related field, you "only" need to find a PhD supervisor. You may also call it doctoral supervisor. Recently I have also heard PhD advisor, which is good because you need advice instead of supervision. It seems interchangeable in the German context; I'll stick with PhD supervisor for now.

In a perfect world, your master's supervisor would give you a recommendation for a PhD supervisor, someone they already know with an established relationship built on scientific cooperation and trust. Or maybe you gave a poster presentation during a scientific conference, and you have contacts of a professor who is interested in your work - good for you, stop reading!

In a less than perfect world, there are good databases for open PhD positions in Germany by DAAD German Academic Exchange Service: PhDGermany and by Research in Germany: Find your PhD position. If you find anything promising there, stop reading!

You are still here? Don't lose hope. According to Statista there are 50'000 professors at German universities. At least 30'000 teach at "Universit?ten" entitled to confer a doctorate, and most of them do not use those databases. There are enough PhD supervisors for everyone and in any given field!

Intrinsic Motivation

There is no particular incentive for professors to supervise students from abroad. Potentially it may cause extra work, additional red tape ... so why? - Intrinsic motivation! Every researcher is curious about their own field and every professor has more research to be done than there are hours in the day. You can offer an additional pair of hands and an extra 40+ hours of work per week. You will contribute three to five years of your life, and you are willing to go all in.

Requirements

This deal only works if

1. you bring the skills needed to do the research - a PhD is not a training class
2. your interest is genuin and you know what you subscribe to
3. your research interests match with the potential supervisor

I cannot help you with 1. and 2. but we can turn around 3.:

Look for a supervisor who matches your research interests!        

Now, use Google - properly!

Everybody uses Google but hardly anybody knows that you can use search terms inside google. Let us say you are interested in genetic factors of drought resilience of sweetcorn, because that is super important for agriculture in your area.

This is very informative, but there are still some newspaper articles in between so instead of sweet corn we'll use the latin name mays and to make sure google doesn't mistake this as a spelling mistake, we add quotes "mays".

Exclude Search Terms

Some of those articles may focus strongly on genetic engineering using CRISPER/Cas and I am really not interested in that, so I add -crispr.

At this point google.com becomes suspicious, we may actually want to go to scholar.google.com - let's keep that in mind.

We still have around 50'000 results world-wide. But in fact, we were looking for a German supervisor - do we have to go through all of those articles and find out who is German? Of course not! Actually, passport or nationality do not matter. We are looking for a professor affiliated to a German university. Let's go and filter for German websites.

Filter by Domain

You can filter your search results by the internet domain, which is one of the features I use most often on google.

site:.ke will return only sites with the top level domain KE for Kenya

site:ac.ke will only return academic websites from Kenya

site:ku.ac.ke will only search the Kenyatta University website for you

Unfortunately, Germany does not have a second level domain system, i.e. ac.de does not help to find universities - but site:.de will reliably narrow our search to German websites!

The first result is a PhD thesis by Lena K?sbauer and her supervisor was Prof. Christian Z?rb . According to his website, he's been running a research project on repeated drought stress in vine and mais since 2019. There you go, a potential supervisor!

Maybe you love the Rhineland, or you want to do research specifically at the 德国科隆大学 ?

The search produces 12 documents on websites of the University of Cologne, many of them related to CEPLAS - Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences .

Searching across a list of universities

In some cases, you want to search across several websites. Maybe you want to know which of the member universities of the Ghana-NRW University Alliance conducts research in your topic. You can combine several site:... commands using OR.

To combine a search at Hochschule Bochum - Bochum University of Applied Sciences , 德国波鸿大学 , 德国科隆大学 , Universit?t Duisburg-Essen , Technische Universit?t Dortmund , Heinrich-Heine-Universit?t Düsseldorf , Rhine-Waal University and Universit?t Siegen just use the following search term:

drought resilience "mays" -crispr (site:hochschule-bochum.de OR site:ruhr-uni-bochum.de OR site:uni-due.de OR site:tu-dortmund.de OR site:hhu.de OR site:uni-koeln.de OR site:hochschule-rhein-waal.de OR site:uni-siegen.de)

Within the consortium there is a lot of research happening not just in Cologne, but also at the Ruhr-University, at Duisburg-Essen, in Dortmund and at Rhine-Waal.

Moving to Google Scholar

If you feel you have too many results or the results are not academic enough, you may move over to google scholar. Which typically yields about half as many results. In out testcase it only returns publications from University of Cologne - so in most cases, I'd stay with the regular google.com