FAQ

Start early. You can register an account in the on-line application system at any time, and then log in repeatedly to prepare, edit, save, preview, submit, and follow the review and evaluation progress of your application.

Use the preview function before submitting your application in order to check the appearance of your application as it will be evaluated by recruitment and admission committee members. All mandatory fields must be completed before the preview function becomes available, but fields can be edited as often as necessary as long as you have not submitted your application yet.

Make sure to only use e-mail addresses for your referees that will work and will be read at the time that the requests for letters of recommendations will be sent out. This is entirely your responsibility, and must be taken care of before submission of your application.

Make sure to only include contact data of referees who have agreed to write a letter of recommendation on your behalf, and make them aware that their letters will have to be uploaded in the on-line application system within two weeks of your submission of your application. In order to complete their review process, referees must submit their on-line evaluation after they have uploaded their letter and answered the standardised on-line assessment, and they will receive an e-mail confirmation of their successful review submission.

Log in after submission of your application to follow the progress of upload of letters of recommendation, and remind your referees in case the reviews do not show up as completed in time before the deadline.

Do not use Large Language Models to write your application for you. We want to hear from you.

Provide a complete set of documents as recommended by the call for applications and the application form.

Preferably apply in response to a currently active call for applications, and only apply for one of the projects that are actually advertised as open projects.

The IMPRS accepts applications exclusively through the on-line application portal. Applicants can register an account in the on-line application portal at any time. Applicants are invited to consult the list of open PhD projects and to submit their application for one suitable open project.

The applicant will need to fill an on-line application form and upload documents such a CV, academic degree certificates and transcripts with translations into English or German, and supporting documents such as English language tests or GRE tests.

Upon submission of the application material, the two referees that the applicant has named in their application will be contacted and asked for letters of recommendation on behalf of the applicant. It is the applicant's responsibility to ensure that the information in the on-line application form is concise and complete, that all documents have been uploaded and submitted according to the instructions in time before the deadline, and to ensure that the referees they name have been informed and have agreed to answer a request for a letter of recommendation within two weeks.

The applications will be reviewed on a regular basis. Review may be followed by an invitation for an on-line prescreening interview and/or an on-site in-person interview. Not all decisions are made on the same schedule. Most applicants will receive a notification about the status of their application within four months. Candidates will also be able to check the status of their application by logging in to the on-line portal. Incomplete applications will eventually show up as declined without further notification.

Candidates will be pre-selected based on their academic qualifications and recommendations. A recruitment and admission committee that includes faculty members of the participating institutes reviews the applications, selects them based on the students' excellence as proven by their university records and by letters of recommendation, and advises the potential supervisors about the candidates and their qualifications.

Candidates under consideration will be notified. Invited candidates will be given more details on how to prepare for the scientific discussions during their interview.

The final decision about the acceptance of a student rests with their potential supervisors. Admission to the program may be dependent on the fulfillment of certain requirements that need to be met before the beginning of the new academic year (e.g. completion of a degree, completion of credit courses, participation in an English language course).

While it is not mandatory to contact the members of our faculty before sending your application, your chances of getting accepted into the programme may increase if you have gotten a particular potential advisor interested in working with you. Please do not send generic requests to all of them, but only contact those whose fields you would like to discuss in more detail with specific questions. You can then refer to these previous discussions in the appropriate spot in your application.

About 35 doctoral researchers are enrolled at any given time. We admit up to 10 PhD doctoral researchers in total per year. Their funding comes from several sources. The list of open projects may indicate the specific source of funding for an advertised project, or the project may be more generically IMPRS-funded. Anyone hired on a project position and desiring to pursue work towards a PhD degree under the roof of the IMPRS also needs to submit an application to IMPRS (see the “Other” projects listing for details).

Short answer: No (most IMPRS are PhD programmes only, see also here).

Long answer: Maybe. While it is true that the IMPRS currently can only accept candidates with a Masters's degree or equivalent for enrolment and funding in the Solar System School PhD programme, there are at least two options to collaborate with MPS scientists on your Master thesis topic. As a Master student doing research at the MPS, you could still benefit from the local IMPRS infrastructure (international office, lectures, retreats, social events), the main difference is that Master students are not eligible to be funded by the IMPRS.

The Technical University of Braunschweig offers a two-year international M.Sc. programme in Solar System Physics which constitutes an excellent preparation for doing a PhD in the IMPRS. Apply here for the Solar System Physics M.Sc. degree programme at TU Braunschweig.

The University of Göttingen offers a M.Sc. Geoscience programme welcoming international students. Information on the University web pages is at Geoscience (M.Sc.), MSc Earth and Environmental Sciences, Application portal for the Master's degree program “Earth and Environmental Sciences”.

The University of Göttingen also offers a local M.Sc. Physics programme which is open to international students. General information for international students may be found starting from here, while information on how to enrol specifically into the M.Sc. Physics programme may be obtained from here. While you have to take care of your housing and living expenses yourself, you might still be able to support yourself through student research assistentships or teaching assistentships. Ask the MPS supervisor you would be interested to study with about possible options, or look for job offers for a "Studentische Hilfskraft" posted by the university here.

In this case, delivering an impressive Master's thesis made at the MPS and as a consequence having a local supervisor support you will result in a high priority for your application to proceed into the IMPRS PhD programme.

Upon submission of the application, the referees that the applicant has named in their application will be automatically contacted and asked for letters of recommendation on behalf of the applicant. The applicant needs to contact all referees before submission of the application! Applicants may only provide a referee's e-mail address if that referee has been informed and has agreed to answer the upcoming automatic request that will be triggered by the application submission. It is the applicant's responsibility to ensure that the referee e-mail address is valid, and to ensure that the referees they are naming have agreed to answer a request for a letter of recommendation within two weeks of receiving the request.

We ask referees to provide their assessments exclusively via our online form. Detailed instructions are provided in the request e-mail. The online form consists of two parts: an upload area to provide a letter of recommendation in pdf format, and a web form area with three sets of questions. The first question in the web form is "What is your relationship to the candidate?" (including a free-text field for a short answer), the second question is "For how long have you known the candidate?" (including a free-text field for a short answer). In the third set of questions the referee may evaluate the candidate with respect to eleven qualities using a percentile scheme by checking boxes. A referee may choose to fill the web form and upload a recommendation letter for the candidate in pdf format (giving the recruitment and admissions committee a very complete picture of the applicant), or may choose to provide information for one of the two parts only (recommendation letter only or web form assessment only), or may fill neither of the two parts before submission (resulting in the weakest possible recommendation). No part of the recommendation will be shared with the applicant.

Applicants are asked to provide institutional e-mail addresses when filling in the contact details of their referees. Letters of recommendation received through requests to e-mail addresses associated with commercial e-mail providers will be given lower weight or may be disregarded. We reserve the right to automatically reject non-institutional e-mail addresses for referees. Applicants are responsible to provide typo-free, valid e-mail addresses for themselves and for their referees. Requests for letters of recommendation will fail if the e-mail address given is not working (even temporarily), which will leave the application incomplete and subject to immediate rejection without further notice.

The letters of recommendation that benefit a candidate's application most are usually those written by academic teachers or scientific supervisors of the applicant capable of judging the candidate's academic achievements and potential to perform excellent research. Letters should be provided on official institutional letterhead, otherwise they will be given lower weight or may be disregarded. That said, while the two mandatory letters would ideally come out of an academic/scientific research institution, applicants may choose to name an additional third referee who could in principle provide a recommendation letter with a focus on a different set of skills of the applicant.

The members of the recruitment and admissions committee appreciate the independent perspective of external referees. Applicants should choose two external referees. In addition, applicants have the option to name a third referee who can be affilated with the IMPRS or MPS. If an applicant asks an IMPRS or MPS scientist to act as a referee for them, and they agree to do so, then the person with the IMPRS or MPS affiliation volunteering to be a referee should remind the applicant that their name should be put as a third (additional) referee.

ETS has assigned the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research an institutional code to receive your TOEFL or GRE scores from them directly.

The TOEFL code for institution "Max Planck Inst Fellowship" (Solar System Research) is 5480.

The GRE code for institution "Max Planck Inst Fellowship" (Solar System Research) is 0070.

Please still submit your application by the quarterly deadline. Take care to note on your application the date at which you have taken the test(s), as well as the date at which you expect the result(s) to become available. Then please send us your TOEFL and/or GRE physics test results scores by e-mail to info@solar-system-school.de as soon as they are available.

This is up to you, but test results indeed may not be very representative of your current skills if they are older than five years. If you are submitting old test results, please take care to put them into context in your application and explain how you think you have been able to maintain, or improve upon, the level documented by these results.

This is entirely up to you, as reflected in ETS's "ScoreSelect Option" policy. When considering the investment in time and money required to re-take a test, you might want to factor in the information by ETS that test-takers often achieve similar results when a test is repeated a short time interval after the previous one.

English language tests. Candidates whose most recent academic education has not been entirely in English or German for at least two years are required to provide a certificate documenting proficiency in English, for example Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English, Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English, IELTS Academic, TOEFL-iBT, TOEFL-PBT, GER, CEF, UNIcert language tests or equivalent. Proficiency in English can also be demonstrated through a degree obtained in a course of study taught in English. Applicants who have worked or studied in an English-speaking country for at least two years within the last three years are exempt from having to provide a certificate. If no language test is available at the time of enrolment and none of the above exceptions apply, admission is not possible.

GRE Subject tests. Applicants with university degrees obtained outside Europe who provide GRE physics or chemistry test scores will be given preference over those who do not provide test scores. This does not apply to geosciences projects, as there are no GRE geosciences tests. We do not require GRE General test results, but you will have the possibility to indicate and upload your test results if you have them during the application process.