Researcher

[AnnikaL]

I don't know anything at all about the Finnish PhD requirements, I know that some - not all - British universities require a masters as a pre-requisitve for a Phd and I suppose that they may then do further stipulations about what is a 'recognised' Masters. I expect what you're encountering is something similar, that they don't know how to validate the quality of your masters. I'm also 99.9% sure that I've seen Phd positions advertised in some Finnish universities where the masters wouldn't be totally necessary but that's no good if your institution is telling you this is not the case.

I'm not a "business" person but know a fair bit about various aspects of social media and how it can be/is proposed to be used. So, my suggestion would be to look at things like crowdsourcing ( a fairly obvious one for applying to help form business strategy I would've thought), or tagging... I expect there are many possible approaches and having a masters under your belt I'd expect you to be able to pretty much find all this out for yourself quite easily just from Google. But I've no idea how that should be structured into a research proposal, I'm afraid.

[Rosamunda]

I have no idea either but I just wanted to let you know that Doctor of Philosophy is abbreviated as PhD or Ph.D. in English. Not P.hD.


I assume the supervisor's role is to supervise PhD students once they have been accepted. Since you are still in the selection process I can understand that they wish this to be your own work. I have met many foreign PhD students so I don't think there is necessarily any discrimination against candidates from other countries. On the contrary, I think the faculties encourage foreign students to apply for PhDs.

[interleukin]

There are usually no right or wrong answers when you get asked to make one of these (they are not uncommon in my field), the whole point is to see what happens when the prospective students have to make a project of their own, without much/any supervision. It can be scary to make these things without any idea of what the supervisor really is looking for (sometimes the supervisor may not know either, just know if they see a well thought through project based on good research). It is, however, a great way to sort out the students who still think that Wikipedia is a good primary info source and who are not capable of creative planning of projects.

Obs, this is how it works in my field, I can not say how things really work in your field. It does, however, sound like it is the same thing (based on the supervisor not wanting to supervise you).

Good luck!