Your PhD application planner
One profile drives everything below: find a PhD supervisor, draft a research proposal, write outreach emails, and build your CV and portfolio — all from the same interests and background.
0 of 7 fields set — start with your profile.
Getting started
Build your profile
Interests, target degree, region and background — set once, used everywhere.
02Shortlist supervisors
Turn your interests into targeted searches across Scholar, ResearchGate and university sites.
03Draft proposal & outreach
Work through a guided proposal structure and a tailored first email.
04Package your CV & portfolio
Pick a style, then track deadlines on the application timeline.
All sections
How this works. Postgraduate Research Planner keeps everything in this browser — nothing you type is uploaded anywhere, so fill in your profile once and every other section reads from it automatically. Where a step benefits from a second pair of eyes, an optional AI draft button (marked with a spark) asks Claude directly when this page is opened inside Claude; on the public site the same spot offers Copy AI prompt, so you can paste the identical, guard-railed prompt into any assistant you use. Either way the result stays editable before you use it anywhere. For finding real people — supervisors, faculty, labs — the tool never guesses names or emails; it builds targeted search links to Google Scholar, ResearchGate, ORCID and university sites so you find and verify the actual person yourself, and every outbound link opens the real site in a new tab. Researcher Arena, at the top of the sidebar, adds the evidence layer — scholarly-graph and dataset search, research gaps, citations, compute guidance and more — held to the same rule.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find a PhD supervisor?
Pick your research interests in your profile, then open Find Supervisors. It builds live searches across Google Scholar, ORCID, LinkedIn, ResearchGate and site-restricted university faculty pages so you find and vet a real person yourself — check their last two years of publications and current funding before reaching out.
How do I write a PhD research proposal?
Use the Proposal Builder's nine guided sections — title, background, research questions, significance, methodology, research environment, timeline, ethics and references. Each section explains what it needs, and most can draft a starting point from your profile that you edit before using.
How do I email a PhD supervisor?
Open Outreach Emails, choose "cold introduction," and fill in what you know about the recipient. Keep the first email under 200 words with one clear ask, and wait two to three weeks before a single polite follow-up.
What's the difference between an academic CV and a resume?
An academic CV is comprehensive and grows over your career — publications, talks, grants, teaching — with no length limit. A resume is one to two pages, cut down to what's relevant to a specific role. See CV & Résumé for both, with real template links.
How much GPU memory (VRAM) do I need to train or run a model?
For inference, roughly parameters × bytes-per-parameter for your precision (4 bytes for FP32, 2 for FP16/BF16, 1 for INT8), plus about 20% for activations and overhead. A full fine-tune with the Adam optimizer needs about 16 bytes per parameter — weights, gradients and optimizer states — before activations, so a 7B model needs well over 100 GB unless you use LoRA/QLoRA or sharding. Researcher Arena's compute tool does this calculation for your exact model size and precision, and names a GPU tier that fits.
How do I know if my dataset's classes are imbalanced?
Compare the largest class to the smallest in your target column: a majority-to-minority ratio beyond roughly 3–4:1 usually needs handling (resampling, class weights, or a metric other than plain accuracy). Upload a CSV in Researcher Arena's dataset corner for a real, in-browser count of rows, missing values, duplicates and class balance — nothing is uploaded anywhere.
What is the Researcher Arena?
A set of research-planning-and-development tools above the core workflow: scholarly-graph and people search, a dataset corner with a real in-browser dataset health check, an evidence-grounded research-gap finder, a multi-style citation generator, compute/GPU guidance with no invented prices, a reproducibility checklist, a statistical-test advisor, and a literature-matrix builder. Open it from the top of the sidebar.
Does this tool store or share my information?
Everything is saved only in this browser's local storage — there's no server, login or tracking, and nothing is uploaded. The one opt-in exception: when the page is opened inside Claude and you click an AI draft button, the text that draft needs (such as your profile summary) is sent to Claude to write it. On the public site, Copy AI prompt only copies text to your clipboard.
Researcher Arena — research planning and development tools
Focused tools for the research-planning-and-development work a literature search alone doesn't cover — the open scholarly graph, dataset discovery, research gaps, citations, compute and more. Built the same way as the rest of Postgraduate Research Planner: real, verifiable sources and links, or an AI draft you edit before you rely on it — never a stated fact.
Your research profile
Set your research interests, target degree and background once. The PhD supervisor search, proposal builder, outreach emails and CV tools all read from this profile automatically. Nothing here leaves this browser unless you choose to use an AI draft button inside Claude.
Used to narrow faculty and job-board searches. Pick as many as apply.
Pick every area that fits — searches combine all of your selections.
Comma-separated. Narrower than the interest tags above.
A few sentences on your background and what you want to research next. This is what AI drafting tools use as context, so the more specific, the better.
Find a PhD supervisor by research interest
Postgraduate Research Planner never invents names, emails or affiliations. It builds live search links from real search engines and directories so you find and verify the actual person — then read their last two years of publications before you email anyone.
Pick as many as apply — selecting more than one broadens the search (either topic matches), it never narrows to results tagged with all of them at once.
Author & citation search
People & networks
University faculty pages
A site-restricted search is the most reliable way to reach faculty listing pages, since every university structures its own directory differently.
PhD & scholarship listings
Funding & grants
Matches the region selected above, plus funders that aren’t region-specific.
How to evaluate a potential supervisor
Before you write to anyone, check whether they’ve published in the last 18–24 months (an inactive profile is a real signal), whether they currently hold funding or grants that could support a student, roughly how many students they’re already supervising, and whether their recent papers actually match what you want to work on rather than just their general department. A quick scan of their last three papers' introductions usually tells you more than their bio page does.
site: to a normal Google search — e.g. graph neural networks faculty site:edu.au. Swap the region to change the domain, or edit the query directly in your browser's address bar.
Write your PhD research proposal
This structure follows what most research-degree programs actually ask for. Work through it top to bottom, or jump to whichever section you're stuck on — each section can draft a starting point from your profile if you want one.
0 of 9 sections started
This structure draws on published guidance from FindAPhD, DiscoverPhDs and Dublin City University Business School. Always check your target program's own template — some ask for a fixed page limit or extra sections.
Email a PhD supervisor
Pick an email type, fill in what you know about the recipient, and Postgraduate Research Planner drafts a ready-to-edit cold email from your profile. Send one tailored email at a time — never a mail-merge blast.
Etiquette that actually matters
Keep the first email under 200 words, make one clear ask, and attach your CV rather than describing it. Give a supervisor two to three weeks before a single polite follow-up — not sooner. Personalise every email around something specific in their recent work; a generic email to twenty names is easy to spot and easy to ignore.
Further reading: FindAPhD — contacting supervisors · a community cold-email guideline (GitHub)
Build an academic CV or résumé
An academic CV and an industry résumé are different documents for different readers. A CV is comprehensive and grows over your career — publications, talks, grants, teaching. A résumé is one to two pages, cut down to what's relevant to a specific role.
Choose a style
Bullet-point rewriter
Paste one raw achievement or task and get three punchy resume-bullet variants back.
Build the document
Build a research portfolio website
A portfolio earns its place when a reader can click through to something real — a paper, a repo, a demo — in under two clicks. Pick a format that matches how much you want to maintain it.
Choose a format
What to include, roughly in this order
A one-line summary of who you are and what you work on; two to four featured projects or papers with a link and a sentence on your specific contribution; your publications with working links to Scholar/ORCID/DOI; a compact skills list; brief experience/education; and a contact email. Keep the visible language natural — let the work imply your direction rather than stating it outright.
Draft your one-line summary
Uses your saved profile — background, interests and stage — to draft the opening line readers see first. Edit it before publishing; treat it as a starting point, not a final line.
Build it
Find research papers & tools
Live searches across the literature-discovery tools researchers actually use, built from your interests, plus a reference shelf of the frameworks and datasets that come up most in each area.
Selecting more than one interest broadens the search (either topic matches) rather than requiring every topic in one result.
Literature search
Suggest frameworks & tools for a topic
Describe your topic and get back real, well-known tool and dataset names to look into — every result links to a search, never a guessed URL.
Reference shelf
Find a journal to publish in
Journal-matching tools want your actual title and abstract pasted into their form, so they're linked here rather than embedded. Use the venue-type helper first if you just want a starting direction.
Suggest search keywords & venue type
Paste a title or abstract. This suggests search terms and general venue types — never specific journal names — so you always verify real matches with the tools below.
Journal-matching tools
Conferences & venues
Peer-review platforms, independent conference rankings, and submission-deadline trackers — useful once your field leans on conference publication as much as journals.
Reference & citation tools
Citation style, at a glance
APA — author–date, common in social sciences and education.
IEEE — numbered brackets, standard across CS and engineering.
Harvard — author–date, widely used across UK/AU universities.
Vancouver — numbered, the norm in medicine and health sciences.
PhD application timeline & checklist
A generic 12-month runway, working backward from a target start. Check items off as you go — your progress is saved in this browser.
Used only to compute the reminder dates below on your own device — never sent anywhere.
Downloads one reminder per stage, timed backward from your date above — a personal planning nudge, not an official deadline. Import the file into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook.
PhD research tools & resources
Search across everything, or filter by category. This is the same curated list the other sections draw their links from — typo-tolerant, so a rough spelling still finds the right tool.
No resources match that search.