The Doctoral Council acts as the representative body for all doctoral researchers at the university. It was established in the State of Berlin following the implementation of the new Berlin Higher Education Act (Hochschulgesetz). At Freie Universität Berlin, the council comprises two elected members from each department, totaling 22 members. We interviewed Maren Vogel ….

Highlights

“I think personally the most rewarding was the amount of people that have approached me from my department but also beyond with their different personal stories, however big or small. Not all of them lead to kind of political decisions or political issues, but it’s just very rewarding to hear how much trust people put in the work that we do as a Doctoral Council.”

Maren Vogel, representative of the doctoral council at FUB

Welcome to the Dahlem Research School Podcast, the DRS for Docs at Berlin podcast from Freie Universität Berlin. I’m Dr. Marlies Klamt and I’m excited to host today’s episode. In this episode, we’re introducing the speaker of the newly elected Doctoral Council from May 2024, the very first Doctoral Council at FU. It’s the perfect opportunity to explore what the council is, what they do and their rights and responsibilities. We’ll also discuss how you can get involved if you’re interested. Our guest, Maren Vogel, will give us a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to be part of the council.

Let’s dive in. Maren, we are thrilled to have you here with us today. Could you start by briefly introducing yourself and let our listeners know a bit about who you are, what you do and for the moment leaving your work with the Doctorial Council aside as we’ll dive into that later.

Thank you, Marlies, for having me here. My name is Maren Vogel. I am a research assistant and PhD student at the Department of Law at the Freie Universität Berlin. I’m working on the interplay between the law of the European Union and international commercial law and specifically dispute resolution. I have been a member of the Freie Universität since April 2022 when I joined as a research assistant and PhD student. Before that, I pursued my undergraduate degree at Heidelberg University where I finished with my first state examination in law. And yeah, so I’ve been here for two and a half years and I’m very happy to now be the first speaker of the Doctoral Council of the Freie Universität Berlin.

Congratulations on that. For those who might not be familiar with the concept of a Doctoral Council, let’s start with the basics. Can you explain a bit about what it is and what its main responsibilities are?

Of course. I think the concept of the Doctoral Council is quite well illustrated by the work of the legislator that made it mandatory for Berlin universities to have a Doctoral Council. The idea that the legislator had in 2021 was to strengthen the involvement and representation of PhD students in the questions that relate to them and their rights at the university. But they also wanted to strengthen the PhD students‘ network to communicate across the borders of their respective departments and fields of study and work that they do. So for us, this means that we have quite a broad kind of idea of what we can do and what we want to do. We are still in the phase of defining for ourselves and developing an idea of our aims and goals. What we have now reached is kind of a threefold idea of what we see ourselves as, which is firstly representation, secondly, a network, and thirdly, a point of contact. Representation for us means firstly to get in contact and to find out what PhD students want a Doctoral Council to do for them, to let us know what we can do and what issues we can and should address, especially those that are not limited to a specific department or a specific work structure within a department, but more globally within the universities, because a lot of these issues don’t only come up in one field or the other. That is the first pillar of representation.

Secondly, we are trying to foster and build connection within the university beyond the subject borders because I feel like PhD students tend to stay within their fields like a lot of undergrads also do, but this is very firmly instilled in kind of the environment that we study and work in and we try to build an opportunity to get to know people from other fields and maybe even foster some academic exchange between these different fields.

And then thirdly, we want to be a point of contact for PhD students that have any issues relating to their PhD projects, whatever that looks like for them. Because we found that there’s quite a lot of different structures of counseling and of different supervision and support systems within the university, which we would not be able to kind of do for ourselves for PhD students. So we try to be a point of contact to point people with any sort of issue in the right direction where they are able to find help and also take them along the way of getting what they need from these different structures that we have within the Freie Universität Berlin.

That sounds very interesting. Thanks for explaining that in detail. You already mentioned that the Doctorial Council has quite a bit of influence and rights, but I think a lot of doctoral candidates aren’t fully aware of that. Could you talk a bit more about the kind of say you have in decisions and why having a Doctoral Council is so important?

Yes, of course. I think there’s twofold to keep in mind. There’s different institutional levels at the Freie Universität that you kind of have to think about separately and also a different degree of involvement. One is more informal, where we try, as I said, to build a network and be a point of contact. And the other is more formal, where we are kind of an actual body that is installed within the university. So we have “Rede- und Antragsrecht”, which means that we have the right to speak and to make demands at the Academic Senate of the Freie Universität Berlin, for example, on this highest institutional level, where we are not allowed to vote because we are … The PhD students are technically also part of the student bodies. They didn’t want to give us kind of a double vote, if you will. So we have this opportunity to speak at the Academic Senate with any issues that we find relevant for them. We have also a more informal but very good relationship to the executive board, which has been very welcoming and very forward with their support for our work. And we are also members of the governing body of the Dahlem Research School, where we are allowed to speak and vote on issues because all these issues are directly related to PhD students.

And then we also, next to this institutional, more like centralized bodies, we have the department level. We always have the right to vote two electoral council members from each department. And within these departments, we are members of the department council. There again, we’re not allowed to vote, but we are allowed to speak and make any demands on the “Tagesordnung”, on the agenda of the day. And we have to be consulted if there are any changes to the PhD regulations specifically. If the department wants to change the rules that pursuing and doing a PhD at their specific department then we have to be consulted within this process.

Thanks a lot. You already gave quite a few examples on what your actual work consists of. I would like to go even a bit more into detail. Maybe you could share an example of a time when you were able to actually influence something or make a decision that helped doctoral candidates just to make it a bit more vivid and explain more to our audience what work you’re actually doing.

Of course. I think the most vivid example is a change to the PhD regulations within the Department of Education and Psychology. We have three colleagues from this department that are members of the Electoral Council, which were approached earlier this year in the summer because they wanted to introduce a new structured PhD program within the department with a kind of more specific academic outline. And they had different questions and they wanted to involve our PhD Electoral Council, the people from the Department of Psychology and Education within this change. So there were some questions that we discussed within the Electoral Council as a whole, because we were a bit concerned. There were a couple of rules within the structured PhD regulation that concern meeting certain milestones and that PhD students that could be excluded from the structured program in the case that they do not meet certain milestones. And we were a bit concerned on the amount of pressure that this would put on PhD students who for whatever reason would maybe not be able to meet certain milestones that they had set at the very start of their projects. So we were concerned that this would add to the already existing psychological pressure that a lot of us as PhD students feel.

So our colleagues advocated to change these rules and to state more clearly that this does not mean that you cannot pursue your PhD at the department any longer, but this might mean that you could be excluded from the structured program only. We’re thus able to make it more clear how this would pan out for each individual PhD student, also not mean an end of your PhD as a whole. And now a couple of weeks later, this change to the rules and this clarification was also introduced to the draft regulation that is handed out by the Dahlem research school in case any other departments would want to set up similar structures. So we were able to make a difference within the Department of Psychology and Education, but also moving forward, we have this new draft regulation on a more central institutional level.

That sounds like a great success. Congratulations. And also like something that will make the lives of many PhD candidates a lot easier, a lot less stressful, and maybe even lead to more people actually finishing it because they won’t be excluded. As a doctoral candidate and also a “Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin”, a research assistant, you’re already in a phase of your academic life that is filled with a lot of responsibilities regarding your job, regarding your PhD. What motivated you personally to take on the additional role being the speaker of the Doctoral Council?

I think this is quite well illustrated in my case. It’s a bit of a coincidence to get involved in these situations, in these institutions. I got an email through the department mailing list that the governing body of the DRS, the Dahlem Research School, was looking for representatives of the PhD body for the law faculty. And I got involved because I was curious what the Dahlhem Research School and its governing body do and what kind of work they discuss there. So at the time, the representatives were trying to fill the gap that they had because we didn’t have the Electoral Council yet. So by the time the first election rolled around, it was kind of quite intuitive for me to continue this work and to foster the insights that I had from the governing body of the Dahlem Research School by becoming an elected member of the Doctoral Council. It was mainly this curiosity not only about the institutional level, but also to get in contact with and foster connections with people from other departments and to discuss with them how different maybe, but also similar these issues that we face as PhD students look within different department structures.

It’s obviously quite different depending on what working group, for example, you’re part of, how big these groups are, how the supervision is structured. Everything is quite different from department to department. So that is kind of what sparked my curiosity to find out how we can reach kind of more global solutions to similar problems that we have, but also to address these issues within my department that hadn’t really been addressed or not all of them had been addressed by the research assistant’s “Mittelbauvertretung”, if you will, the part that has already been established for quite a while. Because there’s some specifics to representation of PhD students, obviously that does not concern those that are working here. For example, people who are on scholarships or other kinds of financial situations. A lot of the PhD students within the law faculty, for example, work completely outside of the university. So all these different situations that PhD students find themselves in are not necessarily represented by the “Mittelbauvertretung” that we already have. So with this idea in mind, I thought it would be a good time to get involved and to address these problems with colleagues from my department, but also from other departments.

Let’s talk a little bit about the workload and the specific tasks connected with being the speaker of the Doctoral Council. How much time would you say you spend on tasks for the Doctoral Council? I don’t know, maybe on a weekly or monthly basis or whichever makes more sense. I have no idea how often you meet, how often you get together for meetings. I don’t know how much time you have to spend preparing, attending the meetings and all the other responsibilities that come with the role. And I would also like to know if you feel like being so involved in other parts of academic life has an impact on your own research as a doctoral candidate, be it positively or negatively?

So to address the second question first, maybe, I find that it’s on a personal level, it’s quite enriching to have these different insights and how other people conduct their PhD, also to hear of completely different fields of interest and what they study. I don’t find that it has negatively impacted my work. I’d rather say that it’s been very rewarding and also helps kind of focus on why I had the idea to start a PhD myself. If I am asking the same question, like what issues do I face, I always ask myself, is this something more global that we could address? So I find that it has been rewarding more than anything and also given me some new kind of push to work through my own project. That being said, how often do we meet? I think during the “Semesterferien”, during the time off in the spring and summer break, we always tend to have a bit of a break for the meetings as well. But other than that, I think roughly every 6 weeks is probably realistic. These meetings normally last 2 to 3 hours, depending on how much we have on the agenda to discuss. Preparation time for most of us doesn’t really take longer than half an hour, which is mostly reading through the agenda, looking at what other people had put in, as like these ideas that they had added to the agenda throughout the last week since we last met.

But then also of course, the time that you invest really depends on the level of commitment and amount of time that you are able and willing to bring to the table. We try and are able to accommodate any personal needs, be that care work or paid work, academic commitments and other time constraints. We are very well aware that the electoral council is just one very tiny part of everyone’s lives and they have all kinds of different things that they have to do, which are of course always different priorities. So it really depends on what you are currently involved in. We have a couple of different projects. We are currently working at the setting up of our website, which hopefully is online by the time this interview is online as well. That is something that is of course a bit more time consuming than other projects. We also have a couple of different long-term projects. We are exchanging ideas and communicating with different Berlin universities on raising the scholarship, the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium, which is focused on the Berlin area. So that’s kind of a more long-term project, which doesn’t take away as much time on a weekly basis, but it’s still a very important and time-consuming thing as a whole. So there’s all kind of different fields that we are involved in. We have a colleague who is going to be part of a working group on diversity and anti-discrimination within the Freie Universität. That is a project, for example, that is going to take probably like six to nine months where she is going to be in a couple of meetings, which take two hours. So you can kind of feel out what you’re self-interested in and how you can get involved and what kind of time you’re able to bring to the table. So there’s all kinds of different levels if you want that should be able to fit anyone who is interested in getting involved within our Doctoral Council. So we’re trying to give everyone something that they’re interested in and able to accommodate time-wise.

Let’s imagine that one of our listeners is doing their doctorate as well. And after listening to our interview, they say, well, that sounds great. I want to form part of that. How could I get involved? How could I reach out to you? And are there also opportunities for someone to contribute or start working with you even if they’re not formally elected?

Of course, we’re very, very interested to hear from all kinds of different PhD students. If they have any ideas, any projects, any suggestions that we could address, just reach out to us via email or via our hopefully online website. You can find our email address on the website. Our email address is promovierendenvertretung@fu-berlin.de. You can just reach out via email. We can arrange meetings one-on-one. We can also arrange for you to come into one of our meetings within the whole Doctoral Council. We also strongly encourage anyone who is interested to consider becoming an elected member. Next election cycle is coming up in June, July 2025, next year. The term is going to be for two years. If you were finishing your PhD before, that would be no problem. You could leave the official function as well. But also we would just strongly consider anyone to reach out beforehand. If you want to consider becoming a candidate, you’re not sure yet, just reach out to us via our email. We would be very happy to talk to you. We’re currently quite a small group. We represent only three of the departments and we strongly invite anyone from the different departments which are underrepresented, if I may just mention those by name: the Department of Biology, Chemistry and Pharmacy, the Department of Earth Sciences, Department of History and Cultural Studies, Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, Philosophy and Humanities, Political and Social Sciences, Veterinary Medicine, School of Business and Economics, but also Charité. If you are part of the PhD body of any of those departments, but also any of the others, please do consider becoming a member so we can actually represent the whole PhD body of the FUB going forward from June and July next year.

Thank you for mentioning all the different departments. I also think it’s very important that all the different realities are reflected and represented in a sense. Let’s imagine I want to run in the election. How would that work? Do I need to be nominated by others in the faculty or can I just announce my candidacy and fill out some forms? How does it work?

So there’s no need to be suggested or nominated by anyone. If you want, you can always ask someone else to run with you for your department. There’s two elected Doctoral Council representatives for each department. And there’s also two substitutes. So if there’s anyone you would like to run with, you can always talk to them first, but there’s no need to be suggested or nominated by anyone. Then if I remember correctly, you have to go through the decentralized electoral council, which sounds very technical, that is the body within your department that is organizing all these different elections that are going to happen next summer. They will circulate the necessary forms and they will also know much better than I do what exactly you need to fill out to become a candidate. But it’s quite straightforward. There’s like two forms you need to fill out, you put your name down and then there’s the election a couple of weeks later. So these forms do have to be filled out, I think, six weeks in advance. So that would be around April, I guess, that would all these different deadlines will be announced by the official electoral council. You can just fill it out, become a candidate and then your peers, the other PhD students, can have their votes in the official election in the summer.

That sounds pretty easy and straightforward, the whole process. So I guess you’re encouraging everybody who’s interested in just getting more information and actually consider participating. You also already mentioned how rewarding it has been for you personally. After we’ve been talking about this rather detailed process of how to participate in the Doctoral Council and how to get elected, if that’s something someone is interested in, I have another more general question for you. Looking ahead, what changes or improvements would you like to see for doctoral candidates either at your university or more broadly?

That is a very tough question. I think that is also very dependent on the realities that PhD students face, which are quite different in each department, as I mentioned. I think one very important factor for most PhD candidates and students is the question of their financial situation, how they are able to pursue and also plan their financial situation for the time, however long that, is that their PhD is going to take. I know from personal experience that of course, scholarships can be a very great way to finance your PhD, but there’s a problem of bridging the gap until you have, for example, that scholarship, until you’re able to be supported in that way.

And also it’s just not something that is realistic for all different departments. So I think the financial situation and securing financial stability on a long-term basis is very, very much important, which needs to be addressed for those that are research assistants at universities in Berlin, but also beyond. But that also comes back to the question that I mentioned earlier, that we are trying to improve the financial situations of those, for example, on the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium, which is just not competitive compared to other scholarships within Germany. That is, I think, financial situation is one of the most important.

And also I find that, at least in my department, we run into sometimes conflict of interest concerning people that also work as research assistants for their supervisors. I think that’s something that is generally a problem within academia, that you have these conflicts of interest within someone that you kind of need to pursue your project, the kind of advice that you need from a supervisor, but also being reliant on them on a kind of different level, which is more like normal work, if you will, than a PhD. Because we have these conflicts of interest between working for someone as a research assistant, but also pursuing your own project as a PhD student. I think it is very much dependent on the willingness and ability of these supervisors, but also the leaders of working groups or whatever this exact structure is, to have qualities of leadership.

And I think that’s something that should be addressed on a more institutional and more global level. I know that for younger professors, a leadership program has become mandatory, but I think there is still a lot of improvement to be made in this regard to make everyone aware of these issues that we’ve run into as PhD students and how we can accommodate them from both sides, if you will, of this equation. To be able to have clear communication, to have the ability to talk about issues and resolve those issues without feeling like someone is going to look down on the academic work that you have been pursuing and also have this culture of being able to talk about whatever it is that you’re struggling with while you are doing your projects for your PhD. So I think the financial situation and this leadership problem within supervision structures is something that we should address more globally.

I totally agree. Out of my experience, those are two of the most important aspects that can turn into challenges.

If I also just may add, that is just kind of my perspective. But as I mentioned earlier, we are very much interested to hear from other departments, from other PhD students within the university, what they think are the global problems that we can address. It’s kind of this is my perspective on the most pressing issues for PhD students. So if you have anything else to add, reach out please.

That would have been my follow up question as well, because you mentioned that those are like issues that affect pretty much every person doing a doctorate. But if you can also say something more, I don’t know if you can, but if you can, can you say something more about how the realities are different for … Or the situations of doing a doctorate can be different for people coming from different departments?

Yes, I think talking from the point of view of the Department of Law, it’s quite normal that you have PhD students who work within the university as research assistants on different kind of exact job descriptions, but most of us are research assistants here. But then we also have a lot of people that work outside within, for example, law firms. And I think, I heard that that is quite a different reality if you go into the natural sciences where access to labs, for example, is kind of more dependent on your exact involvement in a working group. And also the size of the groups that you were a part of are also very differently. For example, I am working at a chair of an assistant professor, so I’m at least until a couple of weeks ago, I was the only research assistant. I have colleagues who work with four or five other different research assistants and I know that working groups within other departments can be much, much bigger and also involve, for example, postdocs who are kind of supervising PhD students. So all these different sizes and factors make a huge difference.

41% of PhD students at the Freie Universität are international. I think the number is not as high, but still higher than most people would think within our department, for example. I think that the natural sciences as well are kind of leading with the amount of international students. So those are all kind of factors that make the reality of your PhD very, very different. Also, I mentioned having a scholarship, for example, working within a business is of course a very different reality.

Whether you had also done your undergraduate study at the Freie Universität and know the university, know people, have a more established social life, whether you’ve just joined to do your PhD, that is very different for a lot of different people. So I think it’s just like people from all over the world, from every walk of life, whether you’re the first in your family to do a PhD. All these things make a huge difference on how you experience doing a PhD at the Freie Universität.

Thank you for this very insightful overview of the different realities that there are. And I can already tell you that next year in 2025, we’re going to do an interview about the first generation PhD. So it’s great that you mentioned that as well. Is there anything that we haven’t covered yet that you’d really like to share?

Well, it’s just … The most important part for me is to again state wherever you’re from, whatever you’re doing, whatever your PhD looks like, just mention a couple of different realities that you may find yourself in. We would very much like to hear from you and hear from your perspective on doing a PhD at the Freie Universität. If you feel like you would want to become an elected member of the Doctoral Council, we would very much like to meet you, to talk to you, if that’s something that you would want to do before putting your name on the ballot. Everyone is welcome. We are very happy to have as many people from as many different walks of life join us in the next summer and to continue our work and building our profile and our idea. So yeah, just hit us up. Let us know what you want that we could address, but also put your name on the ballot and get involved.

Do I need to speak German in order to be an elected member?

No, you don’t. We have some formalities so we have to have a protocol that is in German which is binding but we are all able to speak English perfectly so it would not be a problem at all. If you are not a native German speaker or not comfortable with speaking German, we are very, very open to conducting our meetings and everything else in English.

Maren, let’s wrap up with one last question. What’s been the most rewarding moment for you so far in your role as the speaker of the Doctoral Council?

I think personally the most rewarding was the amount of people that have approached me from my department but also beyond with their different personal stories, however big or small. Not all of them lead to kind of political decisions or political issues, but it’s just very rewarding to hear how much trust people put in the work that we do as a Doctoral Council. And I hope to be able to match these expectations in the future going forward. I am also very happy with the amount of institutional support that we have gotten from Petra Knaus, the vice president of the university and Markus Edler from the Dahlem Research School as well. So just all around, it has been a very rewarding phase of my PhD to kind of have the impression that a lot of people really do appreciate what we are trying to accomplish and the work that we are trying to do. So that is very nice to hear from different people throughout the university.

Thank you so much, Maren, for joining us today and sharing all the details of your work with us.

Thank you a lot for having me.

We hope this gave everyone a clearer picture of what it’s like to be a member of the Doctoral Council. For more information about the council’s structure, visit the Dahlem Research School website. We will also include a link to the Doctoral Council FAQs on our podcast blog so you can revisit everything we discussed at your own pace. And of course we’ll include links to all the sources Maren mentioned today so you don’t have to search for them yourself. This was Dr. Marlies  Klamt for the DRS for Docs  at Berlin podcast, the podcast of the Dahlem Research School at Freie Universität Berlin. Thanks for listening and we hope you’ll join us for our upcoming episodes.

This interview was conducted by the co-host of our podcast Dr. Marlies Klamt