Promotion types
contact
Julia Orthmann
Early-career researcher coordinator at the ICBM
Coordinator of the ICBM Alumni Network
Dr Ferdinand Esser, MBA
Coordinator for Early-Career Researchers at ICBM – Cluster of Excellence ‘The Ocean Floor’
Management and Coordination of the Graduate School of Natural Sciences, Medicine and Technology (OLTECH)
Julia Temmen
PhD matters
Promotion types
Structured doctorate at the ICBM
Structured doctorate at the ICBM
Supervision is provided by several professors. The doctoral candidate is employed by the Research Training Group or receives a scholarship. The programmes include a doctoral curriculum, are often interdisciplinary and usually also support the training of soft skills and additional qualifications. The systematic and intensive supervision within these programmes usually enables a doctorate to be completed within three to four years.
Structured doctoral programmes are offered by universities, particularly in the Research Training Groups funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Customised promotion
Individual doctorate
An individual doctorate means working independently on your own research project and is often seen as the classic path to a doctorate. At the beginning, the future doctoral candidate looks for a professor in the relevant research area. Throughout the doctoral period, the supervisor will accompany and support the research activities. At the same time, the doctoral candidate is either employed as a research assistant at the supervisor's chair or writes the doctoral thesis externally, e.g. in a company.
As a rule, individual doctoral candidates do not have to complete a mandatory training programme. Therefore, there is also no generally binding duration of the doctoral phase. Nevertheless, the duration of the doctorate should be reasonably limited. For those doctoral candidates who are relieved of non-doctoral tasks and can devote themselves fully to their research work, a processing time of three years is an adequate time frame for the preparation of a dissertation. In the case of doctoral candidates who, as academic staff, do not have to take on doctoral-related tasks in research and teaching to a greater extent, a maximum processing time of five years should be worked towards. In order to make the duration of the doctorate calculable, non-doctoral activities should be clearly limited in terms of time and subject matter.
The freedom of the individual doctorate has advantages and disadvantages. Doing an individual doctorate therefore means constantly re-motivating yourself and independently managing the progress of your work. A close and trusting relationship with the supervisor of the thesis can be helpful.
Application for an individual doctorate:
With an individual doctorate, you are free to do your doctorate in one of the ICBM's research areas. To do this, you first need a professor who will supervise your dissertation and with whom the topic of your dissertation will be agreed. The application is made via the Admissions office.
Doctoral programmes
Doctoral programmes
In recent years, alongside the traditional individual doctoral programme, so-called structured doctoral programmes – such as Graduate Schools (e.g. OLTECH in Oldenburg) or research training groups – have increasingly established themselves in Germany as a route to a PhD. Structured doctoral programmes are characterised by a structured training programme and integration into a challenging and interdisciplinary research environment. There are currently around 700 doctoral programmes in Germany, and the number is rising.
Completed doctoral programmes
- SFB TRR 51 IRTG – Roseobacter
- ‘The Ecology of Molecules’ (EcoMol)