I have written to several supervisors in my field enquiring about a studentship. None of them have replied. Not even with a refusal. Is this normal behaviour on part of supervisors?

Danny, you have to remember that they are very busy especially at this period when a lot of other students are looking for PhDs too. Give them a good week sometimes before you contact them again by email or even by phone (better!)

Make sure you have written to the person suggested in the 'Application Enquiries To:' section. If you apply to a personnel department, graduate school or a departmental secretary, you should at least get a quick acknowledgement of your application. If you write directly to the supervisors you can expect delays.

Thanks for your replies.
Is 3 weeks delay unussual?

After three weeks you should probably get in touch to check they've received your application. If your application looked in any way like it was part of a bulk mailing it may have been deleted on arrival.

Thanks Findaphd team.

I think deleting application without reading is not a fair thing to do. Any way I will email them again or just look for some other place.

It may not be fair, but because they receive so many applications which are apparently bulk mailed, they have the choice of reading applications all day from people who have no specific interest in their research (and who are therefore unsuitable) or spending the day doing some research and teaching their current students.

We go on about this to discourage people from trying to apply to everyone, no matter what the subject. It means that genuine applicants like yourself can sometimes be ignored.

We receive applications to [email protected] asking to work in our lab every day from people who are obviously mailing every email address they can get their hands on. We don't do any research at findaphd, we don't have any studentships and we don't have any labs, but still they come!!