Best research universities: Following the candy trail

In today’s post, we are going to talk about the complicated issue of choosing a university, research centre, or department within a university where you would be satisfied with the training and teaching you receive. As you can easily understand, this entry of the blog is mainly focused to post-graduate students who are searching for the perfect place to carry out their Master’s Degree, PhD, Post-Doc… or any other kind of studies you are planning to obtain after getting your Bachelor’s degree.

Why is this? Let’s start. When you arrive to the last years of your Bachelor degree, and especially in the last one, you face the difficult task of original research and investigation: you have to look for references, read articles, and elaborate bibliographies. This is mandatory in most of the cases and thus I am going to stop for a moment here and give some advice for those of you who are not familiar with bibliographies and referencing your work.

Tips for Bibliographic Research

When you write your research essay you have to add references. You can’t say, for example: “It is well-known that we should eat five times per day”. Where is the reference? Who said that? Is it popular culture or someone, in fact, did research to find out that exact number of times was the most recommended? Like building a house, a piece of research needs solid columns based on previous reliable research.

The first step, look for the best databases in your field. A quick Google search will be more than enough to find out where to look for peer-reviewed articles in your area of expertise if still, you can’t find anything reliable go and ask your professors where to search. In the field of Biomedicine, for example, we usually do our research with Scopus and PubMed. Keep in mind that most of these databases require you to log in using your institution credentials. You should be able to easily find out how to do this with the information provided on your university webpage. For more information on references, check out this article published in our blog a few weeks ago.

Help your future self:

As a result of your work you will –hopefully- create a beautiful and high-quality piece of research that, despite being small, is more than enough for getting a good mark in your final dissertation. It is not mandatory but in most cases you choose that subject for your final dissertation because you like the topic, and maybe you are thinking about doing your Master degree or your PhD in that field, if this is the case, your bibliographic research will give you more insight into the best universities and research centres that are working in your fields of interest.

Here is an important life hack: once you have found the articles that best suit you and your work, keep your eyes wide open and write down where those researchers work. The best researchers work and teach in the best universities, and they produce research with the highest impact among the scientific community.

The best Universities publish in the best Journals:

This is something really important to understand. The best researchers produce high-quality research because they are in good universities where their work is recognized, they get enough funding and their laboratories are well supplied. Those are exactly the centres you want to study in, the researchers that would teach you what you want to know and also with the best and most recent technology.

Keep in mind that most of the professors that teach you in the university are, at the same time, researchers with vast knowledge of the field. If you want to be the best professional, you have to learn from the best professors and researchers, that’s something we all would agree on; and obviously, these are the ones that publish in the best scientific journals, produce more patents, and get more citations. It is not by chance that the best researchers are hired by top universities. Also, it is not by chance that the list of the best research universities in the world starts with Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) in its TOP 3.

Searching for your ideal University

Now that you have your list of the places where your research interests are being investigated, it is time for you to find more information in order to decide which one is perfect for you. What else is important? Fees, accommodation, the city you would be living in… That is when EDUopinions gets to be helpful for you, our database is conformed by thousands of reviews written by real students who spent time there. Thus, they are the most suitable to tell you the truth about studying there, their experience, what they loved, and what they hated.

Let’s see some examples of this. The list of the best universities in the world according to their research outcomes starts, as everyone would expect, with Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Stanford, the MIT, Imperial College London… There are also a few surprises not that far away from you, accessible universities suitable for your interests. Let’s see some good examples of great universities with high-impact research that you can review on the EDUopinions website:

• Technical University of Denmark (DTU)

• Université de Montpellier

• University of Copenhagen (KU)

• Delft University of Technology – TU Delft

• Friedrich Alexander Universität Erlangen – Nürnberg (FAU)

• University of Oxford

• The University of Manchester

• Imperial College London

• University of Michigan

• Harvard University
• Katholieke Universiteit Leuven – KU

Those were just some examples, there is even more information in our databases. Keep your eyes open, search for the most interesting and recognized pieces of research, and follow the candy trail until you find where they work, then check the world rankings, write down the universities that you are most interested in, and come to our webpage to read the reviews that former students left available for you completely free of charge. Hurry up! Don’t lose your time!

Also, if you found this article interesting, do not hesitate to share it with your friends. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram. And more importantly, you can leave a review in EDUopinions so that prospective students can learn about where to study based on your previous experiences. It will be just a moment and you will be helping your mates with one of the most important decisions a student has to make in a lifetime. Think about it, think about how lost you felt when you had to do this.

Hochschule Fresenius

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"Basically, it’s a private university with a good reputation and also the lecturers are well..."

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