Top 4 reasons why an international PhD will open doors

International universities offer many different types of scholarships, sometimes more than what options you'll have at home. If I was to pursue a PhD Back in my home country, I'd probably have to pay for both tuition fees and living expenses.

Bigger universities often offer scholarships that depend on your nationality or your type of course. In other words, there are separate scholarships for engineering students, Chinese students or medicine students and so on.

If you find a scholarship that suits you and you have a chance of getting it, that might be your choice of university if you cannot decide where to apply to for your PhD.

International scholarships and grants always look good on a CV and that's what you will be thinking about from the time you start your PhD: how to boost your CV and make yourself look like a prospective young researcher.


If you're striving to become a professor someday, you'll need a few academic publications by the time you finish your PhD.

Having publications mean that your works are available to everyone in the world and wherever you want to send your next job application to, everyone can read your articles and papers.

Of course, you can be published if you're studying in your home country but chances are you'll be writing in English if you're pursuing an international PhD.

Having published works in English automatically means that you have a bigger chance of being cited, which boosts your citation index and impact factor.

In simple words, more people can read and use your work if you write in English and from an internationally ranked university. And the more people that reference your work, the better chances you have at future employments.

Studying a degree in a country that has a big number of international students is always an advantage. However, once you start your PhD, you want to start networking on a different level than when you were an undergraduate.

Thinking about your future career becomes your focus and you want to meet as many people as possible from as many places as possible. Not only as future contacts and potential future colleagues or employers, but also to listen to their experiences.

No one's path to a PhD is the same, but you can take advantage of advice, tips and tricks about certain steps in your own PhD journey.

Another major door that opens for you when doing a PhD are the conferences and seminars that you will need to establish an impressive academic CV. You never know who might send a call for paper or ask you to be one of the keynote speakers!


In most cases doctoral students take part in teaching too. Depending on the subject you're studying, it can be from the beginning of your PhD or later on in your second or third year.

Teaching is an excellent experience if you want to stay in academia. PhD students often do laboratory demonstrating or help with seminars and tutorials.

What's good about teaching is that in most cases you have to pass training to gain an 'approval to teach', which is a great advantage once you finish your studies. That means you can apply to various teaching positions across the globe, as you will have an experience of teaching in English.

There are myriad reasons why it's beneficial to pursue an international degree, and these are only a handful of reasons. The fact you decided to move abroad and start everything anew also means you're independent and adaptable, which are highly valued skills wherever you decide to look for a job after your studies.