11. MSc/ PhD Application to Universities

When the supervisor is satisfied, he/she tells you to apply for the MSc/PhD. It’s usually through an online portal and all the soft copies of relevant documents should be uploaded. After creating the online account in the university portal, you have to provide your personal, educational, professional details with supporting documents.

1. In general, the first step is creating an account as mentioned in the admission section on the university website.

2. Then you need to fill your personal, educational, professional details.

3. Some important documents should be uploaded as scanned copies/ soft copies to the online portal.

Documents I needed to upload when I submitted my MSc/PhD applications

• Academic transcript (If the original document is not in English, then a translation also may be needed)
• Degree certificate (If the original document is not in English, then a translation also may be needed)
• Academic CV
• Research proposal
• Statement of purpose/ Statement of intent
• Research publications/ Bibliography of my publications
• Proof of supervisors’ approval/ preference to work with me (an official letter or correspondence email)
• Certificate of English language proficiency (IELTS or TOEFL)
• Score report of GRE test
• Passport identification page 
• Employment letters
• Final year thesis/ research project report
• Some other important certificates (Ex: Courses I attended, some certificates of achievements in competitions- after secondary education, certificates of oral presentation in research conferences, etc.)

Some universities may have the requirement of sending transcripts/ degree certificates directly by the university and sending IELTS/ TOEFL/ GRE scores (electronic copies or hard copies) directly by the test management institution/exam authority. As an example, if there is such requirement for IELTS by the university, British Council/ IDP should send your IELTS results to your prospective university.

4. In addition, recommendations should be provided for each application and the number of recommendations needed by the university usually varies from 2 to 3.

“A letter of recommendation is a document you maybe asked to prepare for someone who is applying for a job, internship, college application, leadership position or volunteer opportunity. The purpose of a recommendation letter is to validate what the employer has learned about the applicant and provide additional positive details about their performance or habits.”

You should provide names/positions and contact details of lecturers/ referees who will provide recommendations for you when making the online application. After that, the university will contact referees and ask their confidential recommendation letters/ reports. Usually, for graduate school/college application, recommendations should be provided by an academic person from your university (better if you learn from/ work with him/her and he/she has a better impression about your performance). If there is a necessity of 3 recommendations, then there may be a possibility of providing the 3rd recommendation from a person who is not working in the academic field. In my experience for two of my applications, I obtained such recommendation from my training supervisor (who is working at an industry) except 2 recommendations from my university lecturers. When providing referee details, prior contact with referees is mandatory and you should ask whether they are willing to provide recommendations for you. 

5. In general, many universities charge the application fee. Thus, an application fee should be paid at the stage when you are submitting the application. 

However, it can be varied according to the country and university. As in my experience, I have only seen a few universities which do not have such an application fee. In my applications, I experienced no application fee and application fee ranging $ 40-80. The application fee also can be found in the admission process section in the university websites.

6. As the final step, you can submit your online application before the deadline of a respective intake you preferred. 

Deadlines should be considered when you need to start your postgraduate studies at a particular university intake. Most universities offer two intakes around the months of September (also known as fall intake) and January (also known as winter intake), some may also accept the third intake around April or May (also known as spring intake).

Please see the following example. This table provides application periods of two intakes in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

You can see here that, the application deadline for August intake in a particular year, is 31^st of January of the same year while the application deadline for January intake in a particular year is 31^st of July of the preceding year.

Therefore, it is always better to pay attention to the application deadlines before deciding the intake you are going to attend postgraduate studies and starting the applying process. 

In case, if you are in the middle of doing GRE/ IELTS or any other such examination, please contact your prospective university to check whether they can allow you some extension to send those scores after submitting your application. I have experienced one such situation. It was when I was submitting one of my PhD application on its deadline and at that time I did not take GRE. So the administration of graduate studies allowed me some time to take GRE test and send scores within some extended time period. 

* Please noted that quoted statements are obtained from some online resources.