Opportunities

Instructions for student-initiated student visitors

We welcome a small number of high quality PhD students to the EPRG. There are a number of criteria for a potential visiting student and we will not normally consider any student who does not meet all of these criteria. Visit the International Students website for more information about types of visas, language requirements and application procedures.

1. Excellent written and spoken English is a pre-requisite for a successful academic visit. You must present a valid English language test (at the standard required for undertaking a masters degree at Cambridge) before we can initiate a discussion about a visit. View our detailed English requirements.
2. You should have a well‐developed proposal for what you want to work on during your time at the EPRG. Normally you would be working on a component of your home university degree (a PhD thesis chapter, or a masters thesis). We would expect evidence of exceptional academic performance. We would not normally consider students who are not registered graduate students (thus undergraduates or those who have completed an undergraduate degree but not yet started a graduate degree will not be considered).
3. Your proposal should identify one or 2, and no more than 2, potential supervisors within the EPRG group; your email should be copied to both of these potential supervisors. Your proposal should clearly state how it relates to your potential supervisors’ work and how it will link with their existing research. Normally, this would involve an application of their previous work to a new problem or dataset.
4. If accepted, you would commit to working towards a joint publication with your supervisor of a standard to be published in the EPRG working paper series.
5. You would be expected to come for at least one Cambridge full term, and we would not normally consider a visit that just includes the summer period.
6. You are obliged to pay EPRG a ‘bench’ fee to cover administration, IT, and other overheads costs. The current bench fee is £500/month for PhD students. Please note that VAT may also be charged depending on payment means.
7. You must have your own source of funding. We can offer no financial support to student visitors and it would be your responsibility to apply for any funding for which you are eligible. We would require you to demonstrate that you have sufficient funding to cover all your maintenance, travel costs, and the EPRG ‘bench’ fee. We could not normally act as your referee in any application if you have not worked with us previously.
8. PhD student visitors would be expected to be residents in Cambridge during the period of their visit and to come to the weekly EPRG research seminars and any regular EPRG events in person (if applicable) during their visit.
9. Your full application would address all of the above points and would include 2 referees of whom at least one should be of international standing in their field, and one of whom should be a current supervisor, who would explain not only your progress and promise but how the visit would contribute to the successful completion of the research.
10. Potential visitors are welcome to make contact in the first instance to the EPRG Administrator, indicating possible supervisors (who can be copied in) to ensure that these criteria are met and to start the process of discussing the specifics of their proposal; however, they should satisfy themselves that they can meet all the criteria specified above first.
11. All candidates will be interviewed prior to final acceptance.