The beauty of science is that it doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, or your gender. The rules and laws of the universe are the same for everyone.

Elizabeth Blackburn

Survey at University Freiburg

The central hub for doctoral researchers at the University of Freiburg, Graduate Centre (GraCe), has released first results of their survey about working and supervisory conditions of doctoral researchers. Some of our executive council members were fortunate enough to be invited the initial presentation of the survey results. We already discussed some of their results in one of our blog post.

Statement of UniWiND

On 27 June, the German University Association of Advanced Graduate Training (UniWiND) released a new recommendation paper on their website. UniWiND is a national network of German universities dedicated to improving conditions for early career researchers. As of now, the paper is only available in German but is said to be released in English soon. The publication focuses on doctoral supervision, offering structured recommendations to enhance quality, accountability and training. They advocate the implementation of support systems and sustainable career paths. We have taken a more detailed look at the recommendations in one of our blog post posts and are currently working on a commentary paper setting out our perspective on UniWiND’s ideas.

Wissenschaftsrat discusses employment structures

The German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) is an advisory body on science policy. It provides guidance to the federal and state governments on the development of universities, research institutions, and the science system as a whole. They started anew the discussion about employment structures in academia with a detailed publication, which has not yet been translated into English. We highly encourage everyone to read these ideas, as they may become the focus of development in the German university landscape in the coming years.

Our new series: PhD 101

We are calling on all of you to share your PhD experiences with us. For our ‚PhD 101‘ series, we are looking for the tips, resources and personal insights that you encountered during your time as a doctoral researcher. Please send your contributions for the next newsletter via email or using the contact form on our website. We would love to include as many of your voices as possible in this project.