Interested in getting a PhD with Robby and the SPARTIE Lab within MSU's Information & Media PhD program?

Dear prospective PhD students and other PhD-curious people who found their way here,

Michigan State University’s Department of Media and Information (my department) will be accepting applications for PhD students this coming cycle (as we do every cycle) and I am open to including admits in my lab, the SPARTIE lab. 

Our PhD program in Information and Media is composed of PhD students across three departments: 1) Media & Information (mine), 2) Advertising and PR, 3) Journalism. When you apply, you choose one department to be your home, presumably where your PhD advisor (e.g., me) is located, but the program involves working with faculty and taking classes with students across the three departments. This program design allows you to delve deeply into your home department but also expand your network and potential interests across all three departments in the PhD program. 

Here is some general advice about applying:

I strongly suggest you attempt to find an overlap in interests with multiple faculty members in your target department. 

Reaching out to faculty in advance is totally OK. If you send an introduction email, please make sure to describe your specific interests that overlap with the professor’s. Read carefully about what they’ve published recently so you can illustrate a strong understanding of what the faculty member studies. Feel free to ask if they are still working in those specific areas of your interests. Also, include your CV and highlight your previous research experience, methodological skills, and of course, conference papers and publications. 

Once you have a clear understanding of how the professor’s current research overlaps with your own interests and experience, then write about those connections in your academic statement.  

Here is some advice if you’d like to apply to work with me in the SPARTIE lab:

Check out my CV and the lab website to see what we’ve been working on and get a feel for our lab culture. And make sure your interests and skills align with our research projects. Our research uses social scientific methods and involves a significant amount of writing and quantitative data analysis. If you’re coming from a hard-core engineering background and want to stay technical, I am not the type of VR researcher with whom you want to work. If you have some technical background, but more importantly want to focus on writing up theoretically grounded, empirically supported research articles about technology uses and effects (not building technologies themselves), then the SPARTIE lab might work well for you. 

Also, please note that my lab regularly presents research at the International Communication Association’s annual conference, and while we do send our work to other conferences (e.g., DiGRA, CHI, CHI Play, NCA) and publish articles in a range of subfields (e.g., media psych, communication and technology, game studies, human-machine communication, mobile communication, HCI), I am most strongly connected to the ICA academic community. Hence, I recommend you add a few sentences in your application about your perspective on ICA (e.g., which divisions or interest groups you find relevant to your interests). 

Looking forward to seeing your application. 

Thanks,

Robby