First of all: Please contact me only after having read, understood and digested all of the information here.
If you are interested in applying for a PhD position of (up to a max. of) 4 yrs at the Polytechnic University of València, in València, Spain, please contact me.
This is yearly opening. I.e. there is in principle a possibility each year.
It is also possible for you to apply for a position with me at the KIAA located at the Peking University (with the most beautiful campus I have ever seen). But this has to be discussed case by case. So, if you are not afraid of going to one of the most interesting cities in the world to work as a PhD, contact me.
Conditions and notes for the València PhD application:
- Apply only if you have finished your Master the latest by September (title in hand) and if your marks (Bachelor/Master) are in the 80% range. Also tell me in which percentage did you end (among the 10% top students, 20%?) I personally do not believe in this taxonomy, but I am afraid it is a strong asset to obtain the grant.
- It is not guaranteed that we will get the funding, i.e. that the proposal is successful. I cannot promise success.
- The salary is low as compared with other European countries, but the cost of life is also low when compared to those same countries. This is particularly true for València in spite of being the 3rd largest city of Spain (see e.g. here and here).
- Since you will get a work contract, health insurance and other social services are fully included. Spain ranks as the 7th best healthcare in the world, as indicated in the year 2000 in a report by the World Health Organization.
Important: We have to write a proposal together and upload all documents (proposal, cv, etc) before the 1st Oct, plus some other bureaucratic formalities which we would need to do before the deadline. So “time is of the essence“, as they say. The sooner you contact me, the better. Do so by June at the latest.
You should also be interested in knowing who I am: if you don’t, since you would in principle spend some years with me. This is something that students usually don’t realise. You are going to spend four years of your life interacting with someone who might be nice (as it is in my case, of course) or… not nice. I recommend that you ask my previous students and postdocs without telling me, obviously, to get an opinion. Their e-mails should be easy to find in the internet or arxiv.
But I also want to know who you are: This is nothing personal, but what I wrote above goes in the two directions. So please make sure that at least I get two recommendation letters about you. Since we should start talking the latest by June, have those letters sent to me before.
Topic: Anything related to astrophysics or relativity. It is up to you. You will have complete freedom. If you don’t come up with something, I can suggest a topic, of course.
Propaganda: It’s a 10 min walk from the beach 🙂 And now, to draw your attention, a picture from a random beach in València (propaganda, yes, but the picture is real and from the València area).
