If you are considering contacting me to inquire about applying for PhD study with me at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, please note the following information. (You are welcome to contact me anyway with any sort of questions, but I am providing this information to save you time because it is likely that your questions are already answered here.)
A PhD here is a funded position, which means you aren't asked to pay for it; the university pays its PhD students from a limited pool of money, which means there is a limited number of slots available. They won't accept your application unless they can pay for your PhD study.
At this university there are two two ways to get funded. One is to be directly hired by some professor who has funding to carry out some project. The other is to be funded by the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship or by the department or university directly. I will explain these below.
Regarding the first mechanism, I do not have any funding to hire a PhD student in the 2022-2023 academic year, so I cannot offer funding through this route, no matter how good your application is.
The second mechanism needs a bit more explanation. There are several different funding sources (in addition to the Hong Kong PhD fellowship, each university, and each faculty and department within each university, has its own pile of money for PhD students), but they all go through the same application mechanism. Departments nominate applicants to their school, schools nominate applicants to their university, and universities then nominate applicants to the Hong-Kong-wide competition. Nominees whose applications are unsuccessful at one level will get funded by the lower level; e.g., if the university nominates someone to the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship and they don't get it, then the university will use its funding to pay for that person's PhD study. What this means for you is that you only have a chance of getting accepted through this mechanism if you can convince the department that your application will be competitive for the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship; the department won't even consider applications that it thinks aren't competitive for that fellowship. To understand what is considered competitive for that fellowship, read the criteria below.
Some additional caveats are in order regarding this second route. Our university has some very specific things it looks at when it considers what sort of application "could be competitive for a Hong Kong PhD Fellowship". I won't bore you with the details, but to summarize, they basically only care about how famous your undergraduate institution was and how high your undergraduate GPA was; they pay little attention to the quality of your application materials, proposal, recommendation letter, etc., or to your master's degree. Furthermore, they are unlikely to even consider your application if your undergraduate degree is from any Chinese university other than Shanghai Jiaotong, USTC, Zhejiang University, Tsinghua, or PKU. I find these criteria stupid and I don't support the university's choice to use them for evaluating PhD applications, but I am not the one who makes decisions on PhD applications; I am just passing this information to you to help you make decisions when preparing your PhD applications.
If you can clear the abovementioned bar for Hong Kong PhD Fellowship applications (i.e., if you graduated from an undergraduate institution that is sufficiently prestigious), then you might be competitive for that fellowship, and you are welcome to apply. Your application will go to a committee in our department who will review the applications and choose a small number to nominate up to the next level, as described above. At that stage you will need support from one or more professors who are interested in your research proposal and ideas; this support is not itself sufficient to get accepted (as mentioned above, the department cares more about the ranking of your undergraduate institution than it does about anything else), but it is necessary, since as far as I know an application still won't progress without support from at least one professor who expresses a willingness to work with you. Different professors have different opinions and different criteria on which they evaluate applications, since they are different people with different views and beliefs. Personally, I care a lot about an applicant's research plan, because (1) a PhD in Hong Kong is a fairly quick degree without a lot of coursework, so a PhD student needs to already have a good idea what they want to do, unlike in the United States where I was able to spend the first several years of my own PhD dithering around figuring out my interests; and (2) even though you probably won't end up doing exactly the same research as what you write about in your proposal, the proposal is still a way for me to see what sorts of ideas you can come up with, how clearly you can express research ideas, and what sort of thinker you are. Therefore, for me to consider supporting a PhD application, I would place a lot of weight on the quality of the research proposal and/or writing sample.
If you believe you meet the university's criteria for Hong Kong PhD Fellowship applications, as well as my own criteria about the research proposal and writing, feel free to get in touch with me. If you do not meet those criteria, you are still welcome to contaact me but I am providing this information so you can realistically evaluate your chances.
by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2021-11-23.