I’ve been slowly realising how much cultural capital is involved in applying for a PhD. It’s an opaque and hyper-competitive process with little in the way of public guidance available. I suspect it’s getting worse, but I was lucky enough to be supervised by someone already teaching me as a masters student, so the opacity of the process didn’t really hit me at the time. I’ve not looked at it properly yet but this FutureLearn course looks really helpful given this context:

