Established scientists receive numerous email messages from people applying for a PhD position in their group. I get a few per week and I am sure some of my colleagues get many more. At first sight this looks a burden, but it is not. More than 95% can be put aside after reading the first few lines. In the following I will give a few tips and I am sure that if you bring them into practice you will get a positive response of the scientist you have sent the application.

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Introduction

Science in the 20th century has been divided into a distinct number of more or less separate disciplines ranging from Mathematics and Physics to Biology and Medicine. This distinction was naturally based on the different aspects of our material and living environment under study. In all disciplines one can clearly define ‘core’ subjects which fall in the traditional categories without any overlap with other fields. However, there is an increasing amount of research taking place at the interface or overlapping between disciplines. For a person trained in one of the traditional sciences, it can be hard to look beyond the boundaries and spot opportunities for cross-disciplinary research. This post presents some aspects of multidisciplinary research encountered when starting up a new research line.

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Among physicists “manager” is not the most popular word, albeit that all group leaders are in fact managers. Why this is the case may be more than a blog post on itself, and I do not intend to write that post. Having quite some manager friends, for example in civil engineering or management consulting, I think there is a lot we can learn from them. One thing is the use of Gantt charts, milestones and go/no-go’s. Often people dislike these methods, a representative response is this post from 2008 on this blog.

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