Amy Kim
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Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs
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Recruitment
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- Familiarize yourself with program requirements. You want to learn as much as possible from the information available to you before you reach out to a faculty member. Be sure to visit the graduate degree program listing and program-specific websites.
- Check whether the program requires you to seek commitment from a supervisor prior to submitting an application. For some programs this is an essential step while others match successful applicants with faculty members within the first year of study. This is either indicated in the program profile under "Admission Information & Requirements" - "Prepare Application" - "Supervision" or on the program website.
- Identify specific faculty members who are conducting research in your specific area of interest.
- Establish that your research interests align with the faculty member’s research interests.
- Read up on the faculty members in the program and the research being conducted in the department.
- Familiarize yourself with their work, read their recent publications and past theses/dissertations that they supervised. Be certain that their research is indeed what you are hoping to study.
- Compose an error-free and grammatically correct email addressed to your specifically targeted faculty member, and remember to use their correct titles.
- Do not send non-specific, mass emails to everyone in the department hoping for a match.
- Address the faculty members by name. Your contact should be genuine rather than generic.
- Include a brief outline of your academic background, why you are interested in working with the faculty member, and what experience you could bring to the department. The supervision enquiry form guides you with targeted questions. Ensure to craft compelling answers to these questions.
- Highlight your achievements and why you are a top student. Faculty members receive dozens of requests from prospective students and you may have less than 30 seconds to pique someone’s interest.
- Demonstrate that you are familiar with their research:
- Convey the specific ways you are a good fit for the program.
- Convey the specific ways the program/lab/faculty member is a good fit for the research you are interested in/already conducting.
- Be enthusiastic, but don’t overdo it.
G+PS regularly provides virtual sessions that focus on admission requirements and procedures and tips how to improve your application.
ADVICE AND INSIGHTS FROM UBC FACULTY ON REACHING OUT TO SUPERVISORS
These videos contain some general advice from faculty across UBC on finding and reaching out to a potential thesis supervisor.
Supervision Enquiry
Graduate Student Supervision
Doctoral Student Supervision
Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
Airports are often assumed to have static predetermined catchment areas, based on administrative boundaries or geographic measures, from which they draw air passenger demands. This has been shown, over decades of study, to be an oversimplification, particularly across large geographic regions where long-distance air passenger “leakage” to larger hub airports is of concern to the smaller local airports losing these passengers. In order to broadly understand the drivers of these airport choices, and the resulting potential implications on emissions and price-based environmental policies, it is important to study air passengers and airports over large areas spanning multiple administrative boundaries, which has had little attention due to data limitations. First, using a dataset of air ticket purchases made by domestic air passengers in a large section of the U.S Midwest, this thesis proposes a utility-based choice model framework to understand the transportation service-based factors observed to influence airport choice probabilities, and thus airport market shares. Spatial plots resulting from these probabilities reveal that market areas and shares increase as airport size (and thus, services) increases. The market areas of small airports diminish towards the direction of surrounding airports whereas those of large airports cross strongly into multiple jurisdictional boundaries in all directions.Next, the environmental implications of passengers’ choices for different airports are assessed by estimating average and marginal emission factors on alternative routes using Modified Breguet Range equations, and determining the relationship between aviation emissions and price-based environmental policies through a supply-and-demand relationship analysis. Findings show emissions factors could be 18% up to 105% higher when passengers choose small or medium airports over large hubs to travel to the same destination. Additionally, emissions on routes from all the aforementioned airport types are inelastic to price.This thesis provides further evidence for the need to coordinate both air and ground transportation planning across jurisdictions and with airport authorities, given the implications for airports, air services and air travel, and environmental considerations. It also shows that price-based environmental policies, although critical for supporting various environmental protection initiatives, have no measurable effectiveness on directly reducing emissions from flying.
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