After summarizing my experience from home to Europe and then to the United States, I recorded my junior high school, college entrance examination and voluntary filling, college life, selection of graduate tutors and research direction. This time, I will talk about the application, interview and choice of my overseas study. This is "academic talk", and we welcome to pay attention to the public number.

From the beginning of graduate school tutor selection, I was going to wait for graduation to go outside to see. So I didn't have time to study while I was a graduate student, while I was in class, setting up an experimental platform to do experiments, and preparing materials for studying abroad.

North America or Europe?

At that time, most of the friends who went abroad went abroad were to North America, and there were also some to Europe, but there were few. However, one of my good friends studied in Holland and a senior brother in England. The information they learned from them made me feel good about Europe. Moreover, my master degree is better connected with the European doctor. Because the European university education is 3 + 2, that is, 3-year undergraduate and two-year master's degree, so the domestic undergraduate can not directly study in Europe, so I need to get a master's degree first. It just matches my situation.

On the contrary, I can go to the United States to graduate from a general undergraduate, which makes me feel that my master's degree in China is a little redundant. In addition, applying for American schools requires GRE and TOEFL scores plus a large fee, and applying for IELTS in Europe is OK. And the information I was exposed to about the United States may be more unilateral, which makes me not so relieved about the safety of that. For all these reasons, I only applied for European schools.

Where is there a seat?

It's not clear which schools I applied for now, but it takes a lot of effort to find a vacant or open doctor's position. In contrast, the information of American universities is more systematic and clear. The website of the college or department lists every professor, and each professor has his own research page. The research team, research project, published papers and job vacancies are clearly listed on the above page. It is easy to find. Generally, searching the name of professor or keywords in research field can be found quickly.

Europe was much worse in this respect at that time, and the information listed on the website was very systematic. If you go in from the official website of the college, you often go around and around quickly without any clue. What's more, some schools don't have English websites at all, or they have turned into their own national language web pages after they go in a few layers from the official English website to the surface. Especially in many German schools, I sometimes have to rely on Google translation to continue.

Remember that Dutch schools do the best in this respect. Basically all the web pages have English version. I only know that the English standard of Dutch is only a little lower than that of their native language. So I applied for many Dutch schools, especially those famous ones, and also applied for several Swiss schools. I have a lot of research in many universities in Germany, but I have not applied for many because of the unclear information and language barriers. Schools in Denmark and Sweden have applied for oneortwo, and the impression is a little blurred.

After applying, I found that some research projects are cooperative projects within the EU. The corresponding doctoral training is carried out in accordance with the project rather than limited to a university or a country. In addition, the website and information of these EU cooperation projects are English. It is very easy for me to make it easier for me to dig into a lot of information about this aspect. The results show that a project which is suitable for my field is one of the research projects of Mary Juju in the EU. I knew little about Mary Juju project at that time. More domestic hearing was the Humboldt scholarship project in Germany. But the research area of this project attracted me deeply, and the whole project was co-operative by more than ten universities and several companies in several European countries, so I applied for two doctor positions for this project.

Remote interview

After a round of application, we started to receive the rejection letter and online interview invitation. I have forgotten all the schools that have refused to write down, but I am impressed by the schools that sent out the interview invitation because they all participated in the interviews. I think my master's research results and my experience in attending academic conferences in the United States have given me a lot of points for my interview.

A Swiss interview with Zurich federal technology is a good school, but the professor is doing pure numerical simulation, and I am more interested in experimental research. But I was still ready to attend the interview, and soon received a reply from the professor saying that I interviewed several candidates, but unfortunately I was in the second place, and the first was a person who had worked in IBM for several years. I thought it was good to compete with such IBM cattle. I was convinced that their vision, oral English and professional ability were several higher than me.

One interview was conducted by the Netherlands' tu/e, a young professor who just returned from a professor of California technology in the United States. I also did a presentation on Skype, as usual, about what my master's did. After the interview, I received a letter from the professor saying that I was very optimistic, but I still had a second interview. The second interview was to go to Dutch school myself. I was very excited and curious to accompany me to the end. This is the most formal doctoral interview I have ever experienced. It is only now known that it is similar to the on site interview process of American Faculty and it is a cross-border flight. I intend to record the unique experience before and after this interview in an article, because there are many stories about it.

Offer select wind wave

The other two interviews were from the EU's Mary Ju research project, but the two interviews were about two or three months apart. The interview with Professor Greece should be the first of all my applications. Remember that the Internet didn't seem to be very good at that time, so I talked about it on the phone. The interview was very smooth, and soon received the offer from the professor. But I knew that the doctor was in pure numerical simulation research by talking to the professor. I was not very interested in this, so I rejected the offer I received the first time.

The second interview was with a professor in Italy. I felt that the professor was very humorous when chatting. He still had some knowledge of China. More importantly, most of the doctoral position was experimental research, which was exactly what I was interested in. And the doctoral research project is written half of the time in Italy and half in Germany, and finally two schools can take degrees.

So I am looking forward to this position, but there are some twists and turns when I wait for the results after the interview. A few days later, I received a letter from Professor Italy saying I was very satisfied with my interview, but I wanted to confirm again if I was really interested in the position because he learned from the Greek professor that I was also interviewing there and refused the offer. The original project has been communicating with professors from more than a dozen universities in recruiting students. They will greet the offer internally before they decide to send it out. It is estimated that the Greek Professor, after seeing my name from Italian professor, told the Italian professor the whole thing about my refusal to offer.

I explained to Italian professor sincerely that because I have great interest and expectation in this position, I am brave enough to take risks and refuse the offer of the Greek Professor without any other offer. I guess my explanation convinced Italian professor to send me an offer soon, and I said I did it and accepted it. Besides the above reasons, there is also an important reason why this offer is accepted. It is that the doctor position is embedded in the research project of Mary Juju in the EU. This project has many advantages in various aspects. It is still necessary to use a special article to make it more thorough.

So follow your heart, not following the feeling, but thinking about what really matches to you, and looking at whether these things you really care about can stand the test of time. Will you still make the original choice when you look back in a year, three, five or even ten years?