【留学中介】小白提问环节，大家申请phd的时候都有找留学中介帮忙吗？？？

Qijia1991

I believe paid services do help undergraduate level applicants or some graduate level applicants, but not PhD level applicants.

WHY? Most of the consultants do not hold a PhD degree, most of the consultants have no idea what true reasearch life is? Not to say, if you want to apply for PhD in Economics or Finance.   Do the consultants know who is the leading scholar in the sub-field, as some universities may be specialized in asset pricing, some others may be specialized in corporate finance. Basically, they don‘t know more information than you, provinding that you have attended some academic conferrences, write some research papers, or cite some important papers.

But, there are some exceptions: it is ok to find a paid service, if you are not price sensitive and if your english is really bad.

The disadvantage is that for personal statement, the content must be research-density, otherwise, you cannot convince a professor to hire you as a PhD candidate. Therefore, under all situations, it is your duty to market yourself in front of others, because you know what"s inside your guts, so you can make a custimzed info better than anyother. Paid consultants can indeed help you with some literature-style materials, but to academics, such materials are gabage, if they are irrelevant to research. (You may refer to the writing samples from Philp J. Guo (PhD at Stanford, Assitant Professor at UCSD) and work on your own).

From incentives perspective, you are looking for the optimal PhD program, which means hard to be admitted, taking account of your background; the paid services are ,on the other hand, looking for programs that are optimal for them not for you as long as you are admitted by one of the applied programs (say, this program admits many Chinese students, the quality of admitted applicants have a high variance, ultimately, they will lower the choices and mitigate with a medim-difficult programs in order to increase the admission odds). Therefore, the aligning your best interest with paid service is damn difficult.

Lastly, PhD is about research from tons of tedious and irrelevant information, and screening them to find most useful information to you. Think twice if you are ready for a PhD, if you cannot DIY. You will spend the next 4-6 years staying in this program, do it wisely, do it prudently, on your own.