I am a MSc student, currently looking for a PhD. Problem? I am completely lost! I have a fairly clear idea of what I want (genomics), but I have no idea which could be the "best" places to do it. I've heard a lot about London, but the thing is, I don't know if that would be a good place for a PhD student money-wise, because I've heard that live there is crazy expensive. The same with some places of the US. I would ideally want a place where I have enough to live out of the PhD funding (each country has its own PhD normals) and not have to take another job.
This being said, I am still lost. There are so many places that I have no idea where to start. I would be really useful if you could give me some advise, maybe your own personal stories.
I would say first make sure 'within' yourself that you more or less know what you 'love' to do. Currently, you mentioning 'genomics' I think is too broad. Try to confine it bit more in your head. What would love to do that you wouldn't feel tired at all even if you were burning the midnight oil several nights in a row?
You will see that in every community, be it bioinformatics, computer science, graphic design, people tend to hop from one bus to another. Trends change, but your creativity and passion should not. So make sure what you do does not deplete you.
Trying get into labs with good publications, calculating impact factors, keeping good relations with Prof.This and That...there is no end to these exhaustive list of strategic moves. Rather than looking for the 'best places', look for the 'best' area of interests that makes you feel excited to work about. Make sure you present your work every now and then to people. Go to conferences etc. 'Best' places will find you. Or one day, you might yourself become the 'best' place for others to learn from.
If you want to pursue a PhD degree, it usually means that you want to get into academic area for at least 5 years. One thing you need to consider is what you want to do after 5+ years. Still academic years or industry? If academic years, you may focus on the lab that already have strong publications. Some of the labs are more biased to biology, but they generate a lot of NGS data. And the project rely more on the data analysis. So if you are good at analysis of these data. Then you can contribute a lot to the projects and be the first author of the paper. If industry, I would suggest you to go to a lab focusing more on algorithm and statistics. There are also a lot. Just check the lab web sites. This is my understanding. Anyway, I think it depends on your career goal. Sometime it may be a litter bit difficult to talk about career goal at you stage. But you need to think about it.
Another way you can do is to investigate where your senior colleges went. Senior colleges are good resourse and guild lines for you. You can visit them, talk to them and ask for suggestions.
London PhD students are generally granted more money to compensate for the increased cost of living. So I wouldn't let that put you off if you would otherwise like to study in London
Possible duplicate of Looking for opinions on PhD programs in Genetics and Genomics/Bioinformatics