International students form an important element of most universities’ internationalisation strategies, especially for research and the recruitment of high calibre PhD students (PGRs). Despite the numerous studies of PGRs’ post-arrival experiences, there is a major dearth of research into their pre-arrival, application experiences. Given the worldwide competition for high calibre PGRs, along with impact posed by the Covid-19 pandemic and by Brexit for the UK, it is vital for universities to ensure that factors clearly under their control, such as the information on their websites and the way they communicate, are as informative and helpful as possible. In this article, we draw on social media data to examine the challenges and uncertainties that Korean PGR applicants experienced in navigating the process of applying to UK universities. The paper compares their confusions with information available on university websites and recommends a series of points that higher education institutions should check for. It also reveals and discusses issues associated with communication. While the data has been collected from Korean social media websites, we argue that our paper has broader relevance for the following reasons. First, the same fundamental intercultural issues—different educational systems and different background knowledge—apply to PGR applicants from other countries and so their queries are likely to be similar or comparable. Second, the insights gained from social media websites to facilitate the application process and thereby enhance recruitment can usefully be applied to other countries and levels of study, in a way that has rarely been done to date.

国际学生是大多数大学国际化战略的重要组成部分，特别是在研究和高素质博士生（PGRs）的招聘方面。尽管对 PGRs 到达后的经历进行了大量研究，但对其到达前的应用经验的研究却非常缺乏。鉴于全球对高质量 PGR 的竞争，以及 Covid-19 大流行和英国脱欧对英国造成的影响，大学必须确保清楚地控制这些因素，例如其网站上的信息和方式他们沟通，尽可能提供信息和帮助。在本文中，我们利用社交媒体数据来研究韩国 PGR 申请人在申请英国大学的过程中所经历的挑战和不确定性。该论文将他们的困惑与大学网站上提供的信息进行了比较，并建议了高等教育机构应检查的一系列要点。它还揭示并讨论了与沟通相关的问题。虽然数据是从韩国社交媒体网站收集的，但我们认为我们的论文具有更广泛的相关性，原因如下。首先，相同的基本跨文化问题——不同的教育体系和不同的背景知识——适用于来自其他国家的 PGR 申请人，因此他们的查询可能是相似或可比的。其次，从社交媒体网站获得的有助于促进申请流程并因此加强招聘的见解可以有效地应用于其他国家和学习水平，这是迄今为止很少有的方式。