Yep. That’s how it works in this program.
Instead of we (students) having to go around contacting researchers who work in areas we are interested in, what happened was that we were asked to submit our ideas in a “matching template”, specifying stuff like Research question, Aim, Empirical context, Theoretical approach…
Then, the filled template was “processed” not sure how by the department and… Voilà ! We got matched with a supervisor. It was like waiting for lottery results. They guaranteed us that we would have a supervisor, and that we had some kind of priority over students not enrolled in the program who wanted to do research on environmental communication.
So, I feel privileged, what can I say.