Open call for applications
We are looking for highly motivated PhD students who have a record of excellence in their previous studies. Most of our incoming students will have Masters or MPhys degrees as part of their entry qualification. Applications from candidates with excellent Bachelor degrees will also be considered for some projects involving St Andrews supervisors. If you join IMPRS-CPQM holding a Bachelor degree, you will do extra graduate courses to take you to the equivalent Masters level.
If you are interested in the projects offered by IMPRS-CPQM and would like to join us to work in a stimulating research environment, we invite you to apply for admission into our research school. Candidates from any country can apply for admission to IMPRS-CPQM. Gender balance is an important issue for us, and we particularly welcome applications from female candidates.
Toward the end of each year, we have an open call for applications which will be announced through a large number of channels. However, we are aware that applicants' circumstances differ from country to country and also on an individual level. So we are also happy to discuss applications received throughout the year.
Application procedure
Please use our online form to apply for a position at IMPRS-CPQM. You can find the form HERE. In addition to the information requested in the form, we also ask you to upload the following documents:
- a cover letter describing your motivation for applying to IMPRS-CPQM and a statement discussing the projects you are most interested in (if you have priorities regarding the selected projects, please discuss them in the cover letter),
- a CV with complete description of your academic career,
- a transcript of courses taken and grades obtained,
- if you would like to submit further documents in support of your applications, you can do so via our online form as well.
Please make sure to have these documents ready as separate pdf files when you start the online application procedure as you cannot save the data entered into the online form. The page with the application form also includes further instructions for your consideration.
- Please only upload pdf documents. The total size of all uploaded documents must not exceed 20 MB.
- Please use meaningful filenames for the attached documents, e.g. "MSc_Transcript.pdf" instead of "Image_0001.pdf". Further, please avoid using punctuation marks in your filenames (apart from the ".pdf", obviously).
- Please make sure that your referees know that we might ask them for reference letters. We will contact them if we would like to hear about their assessment of you. So please do not ask them to send us their letters right away.
Selection procedure
Written applications will be considered by the supervisors of the projects applied for, and by a team selected from PIs at the participating institutions. Short-listed candidates will be invited for interview, either by Skype, in person or both, depending on circumstances.
Most of the IMPRS places will be allocated in a workshop in Dresden which we organise after each annual call for applications. The selection workshop for the next recruitment cycle will likely take place in February 2020.
If we receive applications of prospective IMPRS students at a time which makes a participation in the next workshop inconvenient, we will find other ways to give the applicants an opportunity to present themselves.
Once the selection procedure is completed, we intend to give feedback to the applicants as quickly as possible.
