Can I ask what your masters degrees are? I'm looking for a PhD in neuroscience too and need a stepping stone 👁
Yeah, no problem! My first Masters degree (I did it instead of a batchelor’s because my University was Strange and a bit Posh and that’s how they do things there) was in Psychology (though with a heavy neuroscience bent - my entire honours years were spent on neuroscience modules), and my second Masters was in Cognitive Neuroscience, and was also a course deliberately designed to bring in people from Psychology, Maths, Biology courses etc -- basically anything with statistics training -- into neuroscience.
THAT BEING SAID -- have a really good think about what kind of neuroscience you want to do, because BOY there’s lots of options. To consider: social neuroscience (expressions of behaviour, attitudes), cognitive neuroscience (memory, attention), perception neuroscience (vision, auditory), computational neuroscience (I don’t even know), clinical neuroscience (neuroatypicalities), and just a whole bunch more. You don’t have to have a whole plan mapped out -- I certainly didn’t -- but I knew I wanted to do something (anything!) in vision.
So for my second, more relevant Masters, I chose to go to a University with a Psych/Neuroscience department well-known for a) vision, b) neuroimaging and c) scholarships that I might even vaguely have access to. Different Universities tend to have different specialties, so it’s worth looking around and seeing what you’re into.
No worries if you’re not sure! There’s a few basic things that will act nicely as a springboard for a neuroscience PhD from a variety of courses. Make sure there’s good statistics training -- this is ESSENTIAL. Anything that offers beginner’s coding lessons (if you don’t know it already) will be useful if you’re planning to do something with experiments. If you can get a good understanding of some entry-level neuroscience (biology courses, good psychology courses, medicine/neurology options maybe?) that will help a bunch, especially if you didn't do a related undergrad degree. There’s also possibilties for auditing the revelant high-level undergrad courses and Masters courses in the first year of your PhD, if your university allows it.
Send me more questions if you have them!