Suppose a computer science student who has had lots of life problems and failed courses during their master's degree, but eventually defended successfully with an excellent score, seeks PhD positions.
Is it impossible for him to get accepted into a PhD position and a professor who's willing to work with the student or is there still a chance, even a little?
The student is from Iran, seeking PhD positions in Canada or Germany.
I will answer specifically for the German system, as that is one of the two countries the OP expressed interest in in the comments.
To enroll in a German PhD programme, you need the agreement of a professor to supervise you and (typically) an MSc in a related subject with (often) grades exceeding some threshold. Only the overall grade on your MSc certificate matters, not the individual modules.
Thus, the fact that you have some failed modules on your transscript will only matter for your admission to a German PhD programme indirectly, by impacting your ability to convince a professor to take you on as a student. There might be some professors for whom this is a deal-breaker, but there will also be some who don't much care; and certainly many who see it as a negative which can be overcome by other strengths.
It is worth pointing that failing modules is very common [or at least, used to be until not too long ago] in the German system (eg the math exam in computer science often have failure rates of 50%+). So I expect much less of a stigma carried by it than it seems to have in the US, for instance.
If you have a poor academic record, it is bound to have an impact on your chances to admitted to a good PhD program. But, in life, bad the things happen, sometimes due to life and sometimes due to mistakes.
If I tell you that it is impossible for you to get admission to a PhD program, would you stop trying? That would be one more mistake in your life.
There is no sweet answer to this. My master's supervisor once told me: "You judge yourself by what you think you could do and the world judges you by what you have done." I do not know if it is his own words or he quoted from somewhere.
Your job is to narrow this gap. You have a poor academic record. But what you could do is improve it by doing extra-curricular activities. Start a Github project and contribute to open source, particularly in the area in which you wish to do a PhD. Try to collaborate with academicians in your university and try to write research papers, preferably as the first author. Interact with industry over meetups. Keep track of research blogs and read recent papers.
Build your profile and forget your past record. If you do this properly, it might delay your admission but once you get it, your PhD could be a lot easier considering you already know what is a failure, literally. And you know how to succeed after failing.
Best of luck!
This isn't my field (and I'm in the US), but I think it would depend on the program as well as the individual advisor. It's probably best to contact potential advisors beforehand and address the circumstances. If every other aspect of your resume is stellar and you just had one bad semester due to your life problems, then you'll probably get in somewhere. Good luck!
