PhD Motivation Letter Example

A PhD letter is a different document

For a Masters you are asking to be taught. For a PhD you are proposing a working relationship with one person who will spend four years supervising you, and who is choosing between you and eleven other people with equivalent marks.

That changes the letter completely. The reader is not an admissions committee processing a queue. It is usually the supervisor, reading on a Sunday evening, deciding whether to put you on a shortlist. They are asking one question: would working with this person be interesting or exhausting?

The example here is from Tomás Ferreira, applying to a funded position on a project about groundwater contamination modelling at a Dutch technical university. He holds a Portuguese MSc in environmental engineering.

Show you have read the actual work

Tomás opens by referencing the 2024 paper the advertised project builds on, and he does something most applicants never do: he disagrees with a small part of it. Politely, and with a reason. He notes that the calibration approach assumes a homogeneous aquifer, and that the Portuguese karst systems he worked on during his MSc would break that assumption in a way he found interesting.

This is the single highest value move available to you. It proves you read the work rather than the abstract, it proves you can think about it, and it opens a conversation. A supervisor who reads that paragraph now wants to reply.

Doing it badly is worse than not doing it. If the disagreement is naive, you have demonstrated the opposite of what you intended. Read the paper twice and check that your objection is not already addressed in section four.

What to take from it: find one specific technical point in the group's published work that connects to something you have done. Engage with it as a colleague would, not as a student asking for approval.

Evidence means methods, not enthusiasm

The second half of the letter is where Tomás establishes that he can do the work. He does not say he is passionate about hydrogeology. He says he built and calibrated a MODFLOW model of a 40 square kilometre karst catchment, that the field campaign involved eleven monitoring wells over fourteen months, and that the model failed twice before he found the boundary condition error causing it.

The failure is deliberate. Supervisors know research mostly does not work. An applicant who narrates only successes has either not done enough of it or is not being straight with you.

He also names the tools: Python for the pre and post processing, PEST for parameter estimation, QGIS for the spatial layers. Concrete and checkable.

What to take from it: describe one project at the level of method. What did you measure, with what, over how long, and what went wrong.

Say why this group and this country

Tomás gives two reasons. The first is technical: the group has the only long running monitoring network in Europe that matches the conditions he needs. The second is practical: he wants to stay in academia in Northern Europe afterwards, and he says so.

Being honest about ambition helps you. A supervisor investing four years wants to know roughly where you intend to end up, and "I am not sure yet" is an acceptable answer only if you say what would help you decide.

Funding and eligibility, handled in one line

If the position is funded, do not spend a paragraph on money. Tomás gives one sentence confirming he meets the mobility requirement and that his MSc is completed and certified. Anything more belongs in the form, not the letter.

If you are applying for a position where you must bring your own funding, that is a different letter and a different conversation, and it should be stated plainly in the first paragraph rather than revealed at the end.

Length and tone

Between 600 and 800 words. Slightly longer than a Masters letter, because the technical paragraph needs room.

Write it the way you would write to a colleague you respect but have not met. Not stiff, not casual. Address the supervisor by name and title, and spell the name correctly, which sounds obvious and is the most common error in the pile.

What gets these letters rejected

• A generic letter sent to twenty groups. Supervisors talk to each other and can recognise it instantly.
• Proposing your own project when the advert describes a defined one. Read whether the position is open or scoped.
• A paragraph explaining why climate change or public health matters. The reader has devoted a career to it.
• No mention of the group's work at all, which reads as an application to a salary rather than to a research question.

Before you send it

Ask yourself whether the supervisor could reply to your letter with a real question. If the only possible reply is "thank you for your interest", the letter has not given them anything to engage with, and it needs a sharper technical paragraph.