As you may know, asides sharing graduate school opportunities, I like to share practical insights and directional content that will give you a sense of what you are missing or not missing.

Serving you below:

HOW TO LEVERAGE "OPO" for grad school applications

- A THREAD

2) OPO is an initialism coined from "Other People's Opportunities". This means you will be leveraging opportunities specific to others to your advantage. After this thread, you will stop asking:

"Can you share scholarships for Atmospheric Social Law"?

(you get the drift).

3) PROCESS:

A) Once someone shares an opportunity. Say @olumuyiwaayo, @Jamaticulus or @AaronAkpuPhilip or myself shares an opportunity on our timeline, the first thing to do is to locate the name of the university and the country it is located.

4) (B) Type the name of the institution on Google and locate the website of your department. Often times, if there is a mass recruitment by the institution at the time you saw the ad, its likely there is something for prospective student looking to get into your department.

5) If otherwise, that is, if the ad you saw was particular to the advertised field, the leverage you have is that you are informed about the institution and you have the privilege to dig faculties.

(C) List the names of probable supervisors on the department's website.

6) (D) Write supervisor-specific emails to each one of them. You don't need to reference the ad you saw. Just cold email directly. If you don't know how to start, check my pinned post.

Do this for EVERY OPPORTUNITY posted by all academic influencers here.

7) (E) Keep a spreadsheet containing metadata like Name, Department, University, Country, + or - relies, request to be contacted later (with date).

This way, you will not miss out on anything or "Yakubu" any opportunity.

8) (F) Send a follow up email should you not get any response with 1-2 weeks. It's a pandemic and perhaps, response time could be longer. But ensure to do follow up.

Later, I will share more ideas on how to leverage another "open source" opportunity to your advantage.

9) I am hoping that you will stop asking to be served opportunities all the time (it's not like we will stop anyway). But... Hunt like a tiger too. Maybe in 2-4 years time, if we continue like this, there will be a Nigerian in every department in institutions across the world .

10) Sit down, we've got you covered. We don't and are not joking with your future too. We will combine shouting (cc: @AaronAkpuPhilip) with succinct instructional/directional content to guide you to promise-land. Don't lose hope.

Big Daddy Loves You!

#BigDaddyTweets #phdchat