Stefan Skupien, coordinator  for Open Science of the Berlin University Alliance, discusses the value of Open Science and accessibility of scientific products both to academic and non-academic actors. During the interview he explains what Open Science is and how it could be used by new doctoral researchers while working on their thesis.

Highlights

„Science as knowledge and knowledge of society should be open to society, and everyone should be able to use it“

„(…) it’s just pragmatic to share research results to others, because then they can use it and makes it to get better science“

Stefan Skupien, coordinator for Open Science of the Berlin University Alliance

Transcript

Welcome to the podcast. I would love to have you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do.

Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. I am Stephan Skupien. I am the scientific coordinator for Open Science of the Berlin University Alliance, and I work at the Center for Open and Responsible Research that is part of the Berlin University Alliance. As you perhaps know, the Berlin University Alliance is a new project of an alliance that’s constituted of the Freie University, Humboldt University, TechUniversity and our University Medicine Hospital Charité. And I am responsible for the topic Open Science, working closely together with colleagues who work on research integrity on good scientific practice. And we developed a cluster of activities that I will be happy to speak about yes.

So, my first question for you is what is open science? What maybe I’m sure a lot of most of our listeners have heard of open science before, but you could maybe give us a brief overview so that we’re all on the same page. What do you mean by open science?

We mean by open science, basically a movement of researchers and others who want to let me start over. Okay. So basically, by open science, we mean a movement that emphasizes the value of accessibility of scientific products. Mostly scientific products that are financed by public funds. So, there are several arguments for open science. There was one very interesting study done about 10 years ago and the authors tried to cluster different approaches to open science calling it schools of thoughts about open science. And one would for example, be a pragmatic school. What you find maybe in some fields of research and climate science or in geological science or in computer science is that it’s just pragmatic to share research results to others, because then they can use it and makes it to get better science. Another one would be a democratic argument is that. Science as knowledge and knowledge of society should be open to society, and everyone should be able to use it. You also have the moral argument, or the ethical argument is to say that you’re obliged to open your research because it’s funded by us as scientists.

So, there are different schools out there with how you can justify open science. It’s also an international movement. It’s carried on by several actors especially among research funders lately. But also, the UNESCO recommendations on open science are a document of reference, and they include very several practices by open science, we try to cover the whole research cycle from the input of ideas to the output of research results. And we try to understand open science also as a bundle of principles and the principle that we emphasize in our mission statement are inclusion and cooperation as one set of principles. Then transparency, re-usability, accessibility. And validation or so, yes, those are like, try to always bring forwards and strengthen through our activities. And they cover the whole research cycle, and they also affect a lot of other aspects of the research community.

Thank you. Excellent. If I am a doctoral student and I’m thinking about open science or not open science, what would you say the benefit is of doing open science versus maybe the alternative where I’m not doing open science why should this be interesting to me or why should I get excited about it?

That’s a very good question. So, I see two major benefits. The one is it improves your own science your own scientific work. And the other one, it helps you to be in contact with the scientific community, but also with any other user outside of the scientific community. I am myself a social scientist by training. But now in my work, I have come in contact with a lot of different disciplines and some disciplines, for example it’s very common that you being given a problem or puzzle by someone or by your supervisor or study. And they say could you just replicate the study just to see whether it works or how does it work?

So, you would want to have access to protocols. You would have wanted access to the data so that you can replicate it. And here we come to the inner academic aspect of open science is that more to at least accessibility to good research results or to good documented research result helps you to improve science. And in general, because it improves the quality of science there have been some crisis and some disciplines replication crisis and psychology, but also some of our life science experts say that if there would be more openness, we would save a lot of time to develop medications. For a and we could plan our studies better.

So, it, and the other thing is that many of the researchers want by themselves to solve also problems that are posed by society, like we call it grand challenges and individual university alliance where you have to work together with non-academic actors. And if you have a good documented and accessible research results, be it like publications or data, then you can share it easily with other actors like NGOs, civil society, administration, industry, and others to solve societal problems.

Yes, those are the two major aspects I see are the benefits. And of course, you learn a lot, you take a lot of skills that you can apply in other fields as well.

It’s really an interesting point. You said, skills you can take in other fields. It sounds doctoral researchers who are involved in open science are learning how to communicate with people that are not just in science, but also outside of science. Did I understand that correctly?

It can be one aspect of so that’s where the overlap often science comes with science communication. But some of the for example, a lot of people talk about research data at the moment, and it’s very tedious work to prepare. And it’s how you produce in physics you produce software that is specifically designed for your own research question. And then maybe you leave the department because you have a job, and you don’t work on your thesis any longer. If you document the software level and you leave it at your institute where you did your PhD, then someone else can actually work well with it. And that is at the moment that documentation and where to keep it is still not embedded, but of course it’s a lot of work. And takes more time to actually have good quality documentation of research results. But it can, it’s of course still linked to the benefits that I talked about earlier.

So, my next question is say that I really am interested in working. Openly having this open science approach in my doctoral thesis and my P. I. is sceptical. What are some of the challenges that I might face there? How might I navigate that? That discussion with my PR with my supervisor to get them on board and more excited, especially maybe a generation of supervisors who haven’t had that much experience with open science.

Then that’s also a very good question. And I can recommend that is to look into the practices of your research culture and see if you meet others at conferences and who and find. Allies who already have good practice in in open science practices documenting research data or publishing preprints in fields where preprints are not yet. That often you used like in the humanities, for example so you could find examples and make an argument that it’s already been used, and it’s led to these benefits and we should use it as well. Of course, very often the supervisor is also the one who has an overview of the field and who knows that you have to work.

On this topic now to get to the next step. And it’s very often a time question. But I guess there are a lot of arguments also within research cultures or disciplines that you could use to talk to your supervisor about what you could to, for example, publish a preprint or pre-register a study in a field where it hasn’t been done before. For example, the German Association for Psychology they have an open science working group and they try to set standards for the whole field. That’s psychology, but you will also find similar working groups in other fields. Where it’s not common to publish preprints or pre-register or to put your metadata in a very high qualified documentation somewhere. But yeah, that’s what would be my advice.

Thank you. So, at the beginning, you mentioned a little bit about what the Berlin University Alliance does and what you do to support open science. And I want to come back to that. And just hear a little bit more about maybe what does the Berlin University align to? What do you specifically do to support researchers and maybe to support doctoral researchers in the open science process?

The Berlin University Alliance was founded by the four institutions that I mentioned, and all of these four institutions already have high levels of expertise and research integrity questions and good scientific practice and providing open access infrastructures, for example, for publications. And we build on these and the idea of the Berlin University Alliance is to create a, like a kind of a common ground where we can exchange, where we can use synergies of our approaches and where we could add. If there’s a complimentary issue at Freie University and at Humboldt University, you could meet, for example, and could use the resources of the other partner. Specifically, we support trainings you will find on our website, you will find each, for each semester, you will find a list of courses that we collect from all partners and where we make sure that we also say that it’s open to others. Where, for example, if you want to have a general introduction into research data management. You could go to Freie University if at your institution at Humboldt University, there’s nothing available at the moment. So, this is one opportunity, for example, but there are also other courses on open science practices. And we also established a master’s course, which could also be interesting for PhD students if you are in need of credits or general overview about how science works. And there we talk a lot about research integrity and open science, and we try to embed it in coursework for students. So training is one very important thing.

Then the other one is where you could benefit is in our networking activities. We have regular meetings where we present case studies of open science and research integrity. We can also invite you to apply for our fellowship program that is for students and also doctoral students who are interested in either inviting guests. Or going out to some institutions where some open science practice is very frequently used and you want to learn from it. So that’s this mobility team you can use as, and we provide information about open science in Berlin monitoring it to some extent, the Berlin science survey will give you also a good set of arguments for discussing open science in your institute or with your supervisor by providing arguments, for example, about the value of open science seen by the scientific community in general, or where you where it’s just a need to improve the support system for open science lately. And that I would say in this podcast as well, if you’re interested in, and if your contract, It’s long enough we established an ambassador program, which is also open to doctoral students and there you will get training, you will get a small fund for organizing events yourself, and you can showcase your own work in open science and you will be able to network with colleagues from different disciplines across the Alliance and across Berlin.

That’s also open to doctoral students. We will send out the next call in March next or next year, so 2025. And you are invited to become open science ambassadors for your faculty. But you can also contact us already now if you want to contribute to the activities of the ambassadors that will work during the next year at doing this year 2024-25.

Was that okay? Do you want to know more about it, Amanda? Should I get more of what we do?

Yeah, that’s perfect. Yeah, that would be wonderful.

I was talking that there’s already a lot of expertise within the universities, for example the technical university has a very strong emphasis on transdisciplinarity that including non-academic actors in the formulation of research question and into the research. And they provide some services to organize such research that you can also access and they have a team, a dedicated team that is supported by the Berlin University Alliance, but works in and also at Technical University which you can use to open your research and also as a doctoral student. And we have a funded project in the digital humanities, where we could link you to, to the researchers either in engineering or digital humanities, where you could find also inspiration, new methods. Also, there is for, also for doctoral students the Crest Center for responsible research at Charité. They are organizing an annual summer school and open science at the Oxford-Berlin summer school, which you can also apply for and attend, where you will be given insight into a lot of specific technical questions, but also in overall general discussions.

What do you think? So, if I we’re thinking about whether or not I want to do open science. I have all these cool resources. I can reach out and maybe learn a little bit more about it, get involved with it. But maybe I’m still a little bit uncertain. What do you think if, say I’m a doctoral student today how does getting involved in open science help me in my research career? So, a lot of the benefits we talked about, or you talked about so far are about, for science, for society. What about if I say, okay, I really want to be successful. I want to stay in science, or maybe I want to go into industry, but I want to, stay in research. What is the benefit of getting involved in open science for me as an individual right now when I think about my future.

I said earlier that Open Science is a movement that’s carried by a very different set of actors, like individuals, institutions, and there you will find first examples of how far you can get if you apply open science principles. If you learn certain techniques that would allow the transparency and reusability and validation of your research results, which makes your own research better, there are within the practices of publishing preprints or publishing diamond open access, which means that there’s no barrier to at all that you don’t have to pay. And the reader doesn’t have to pay. That means diamond open access also increases your reach. We could also say that publishing open access at all increases your citation, which then again increases the response to your research. And you get in contact with new, maybe interesting research questions. So content wise, it improves the thing that you want to do the thing that you want to study and the work around it. And you, as I said earlier, you learn a whole lot of new skills. And Open Science is also driven by the technical advance. The whole accessibility is fostered by the digitalization of research.

And it’s maybe you could understand Open Science as an adaptation process to these new digital tools that are part of our research anyway and making it easier to access large data sets. You learn a lot of skills about programming, for example, in some disciplines, or you learn skill that you can then later transfer to others to other areas in your career, also apply to other methods and things just because open science is very much driven by the new tech, the tools available.

Thirdly, there are funders at the moment major funders also who expect you, if you write a grant proposal to say something about your open science practice. And the better you can explain your open science practice, going beyond okay, I publish open access because I have access to the financial funds of my university library gives you thumbs up or gives you an advantage to others. We don’t yet apply open science principle as profoundly as you would do after your PhD. If there are changes not so much in Germany, but in other international funders like the EU, that they really look at the open science section that you have to fill in and grant proposals. And it’s not just a nice to have, but it’s also giving you points in the overall Judgment of your grand proposal.

So, it’s also giving you skills and experience to showcase in grand proposals and in future research. Additionally, within this movement, there are several initiatives taking up in trying to think about how we can change or how we can alter the whole evaluation system of individual researchers trying to get away from publications and high citation impact. To more, to other diverse products. And then it could be that in the future, that some universities that are interesting for you that are a good spot to, to be because you would learn, you could apply because they have an open science policy, and they are very visible in the open science community.

You could say that I already did that, this and this with my own research. So, I’m very, keen to also expand my open science knowledge. You could also apply with more reasons to this place on the ground that you share the values of open science, the same universities and funders and public administration actors are thinking about how to get away from the focus on publication would also mean that you’re free to present other results.

As I said earlier, tedious work is necessary to prepare the documentation of research data. And that work is still not as much recognized as publishing an article or doing what they in life sciences say it’s very much needed is why is why are so, few people doing public why let me start over. As in the life sciences, that’s a big issue to publish negative results meaning that you follow the hypothesis, but it didn’t come out as you expected. And that itself is also a result for the overall scientific knowledge generation, but it’s not being incentivized to publish negative results because that’s okay, it didn’t work.

But if we shift away from the positive publication output would focus on Oxford journals or nature journals hit to other products of science, including negative result publications or taking care of repositories or being editors in diamond open access journals. In smaller settings will allow you to present yourself in a more diverse way than usually your career is being portrayed at the moment. And that again could lead to better research quality all over that if we have these very negative impacts. Be they intended on unattended to publish as much as possible. And then you start publishing in yeah in ways that are not conducive for the whole enterprise of producing scientific knowledge, like salami tactics or others actors for maybe not equipped science systems, let’s say in in countries such as Ghana or Ivory coast and others where they don’t have the funds to publish in Oxford journals open access for 3000 euros you could help to generate infrastructures that they could use that are equally recognized and your field with diamond open access, so that they don’t have to have another barrier. Previously, they couldn’t read the research because it was too expensive to buy subscriptions. And now it’s a barrier to publish research and to be visible in the system by having to pay for gold open access, for example. So, your work and your investment in your individual investment in open science. Values and practices also help others and that again comes back to you as a positive effect. I assume.

Thank you. So, I have I have a question. So, the second to last question would be what haven’t I asked you? So, is there something that you really want to share with the listeners of our podcast that you think they need to know, maybe about, about your work or about open science in general, about the Berlin University Alliance? What haven’t I asked you that you think we should hear?

At the moment I could use this spot to encourage you to just reach out either to us or to any of our colleagues at Berlin University Alliance, because many of the topics can relate to open science and research integrity. I mentioned the transdisciplinary approach at technical universities but also, we are in close contact with our colleagues from the international offices who having who are organizing a networking and trainings also for organizing research with researchers from less advantaged science systems and they also touch on the topic of open science. So, I would like to encourage you to just reach out if you have a question and use the Berlin science survey as an in your thinking about open science. You can also join several networks in Berlin. We have a map on our website. We’re trying to map the open science activities so that you can just join them.

Or if you have, if you know of a working group on open science in your research culture specific or in the disciplinary groups just reach out to them because very often they can give you a very specific information about how to deal with Open science or publishing your data or reusing data or doing replication studies I assume this is something that you will learn at least doing your doctoral studies anyway, but we also try to. Bring it into teaching much further even bachelor or master studies. So, if you want to teach open science, please also reach out to us in your courses, we can think about providing content or think about providing some sort of material either, either using what’s already out there, there’s an open science online master’s course. I hope I say it right. But and that can be used as a resource also for your teaching and that will bring you again into very fruitful discussions with students about the value and the benefits of open science. Otherwise no, I don’t think I, we forgot any major question.

So, I have one more question and maybe you can decide if you have an answer, it’s great if you don’t. We usually ask people in the podcast; we like to ask people who’ve done a PhD or done a doctorate. If you could go back to the beginning of your doctoral studies, knowing what you know now, maybe about open science or just in general, your experience in the work that you’re doing now what advice would you give yourself if you could go back to the beginning of your, meet yourself at the first day of your research? What would you tell yourself and what guidance would you give yourself for the doctoral process?

In general, or focused on open science?

You can decide.

I guess I would also think about applying open science principles more constantly and or at all publishing my research data, which was text which was copied from libraries in Ghana. And I could have transcribed the text better and shared it with my Ghanaian colleagues. So, sharing with the research partner would be like one, one thing I would advise myself.

The other more general thing is that writing consistently or writing frequently and using like different methods that are available since already a long time. For example, experimenting with what we call in German Zettelkasten. It’s a method to structure knowledge in a way that it can be reused at the end. And then also instead of writing only like in the second half of the PhD. So, those are two things I would advise myself.

And the third one is I had the privilege I was very lucky to be in a graduate school that was interdisciplinary, and I learned a lot from my colleagues. From the philosophy side, from the legal from the law side and from the historical side. And that was very fruitful for my own thinking. So, if you’re not in an interdisciplinary setting, which I doubt because I get the many interdisciplinary credits called at the moment. Just yeah, look out for other disciplines and follow their discussions. Even if you’re interested in natural sciences or in life sciences, because that is always a broadening of the horizon that can eventually lead you to new ideas transfer of metaphors of concepts of theories to your own thinking. And if I advise myself on the first day of the of starting the PhD, it’s yeah, use this source of the knowledge of the other disciplines by default.

Thank you very much. Thanks so much for sharing that with us. And also, for the information on open science. And we will link to many of the things that you mentioned in the podcast website. So, if you are looking at this on the website, you can find all the links below and please feel free to reach out if you have any other questions about, about open science at the Berlin University Alliance. So, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

This interview was conducted by our trainer and co-host of the podcast, Amanda Wichert

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

Audio

Download or listen to the audio version of the podcast here.

Links

Find useful links on managing „crises“ during your doctorate here.

transcripT

The interview is held in German, the following transcript is translated.

INTRO

Welcome to the podcast of the Dahlem Research School, where today you can expect an interview with Christine Eßmann-Stern, the Women’s Representative and Gender Equality Officer at one of the departments of Freie Universität Berlin.

I’m Dr. Marlies Klamt and I’ll be your host for today’s episode.

To give you an idea of what to expect from this episode, I would like to give you a brief summary in advance. My interview partner Christine Eßmann-Stern shares exciting and sometimes very humbling experiences from her everyday life as a decentralized women’s representative and gender equality officer with us. We talked in particular detail about the abuse of power by superiors, as this is one of the most common reasons why doctoral students turn to her.

We also talk about what she thinks can be done to ensure that there is less abuse of power on the part of professors and leaders of working groups.

Ms. Eßmann-Stern explains what usually happens after someone has contacted her, why she doesn’t always speak or can’t speak to the heads of the working groups and what consequences you can and can’t expect if you contact her.

It turned out to be a very informative interview, which can be encouraging, but also shows where the academic system can still be upgraded to ensure more justice and fairness in science.

And I don’t want to say any more in advance, but we’ll start directly with the interview.

INTERVIEW

Welcome to the podcast, Ms. Essmann-Stern. Could you please just briefly introduce yourself so that our listeners know who they are dealing with today?

Yes, with pleasure. My name is Christine Essmann-Stern. I am the decentralized Women’s representive and Gender Equality Officer at Freie Universität in the Department of Biology, Chemistry and Pharmacy.

As you have just said, you are the department’s Women’s Representative and Gender Equality Officer. What is the most common issue that people approach you with in this role?

Abuse of power is definitely at the top of the list. This means that academic staff and postdocs are discriminated against, stalked and bullied by their superiors as a result of abuse of power.

You’ve already mentioned a few examples, such as stalking or discrimination. But what exactly is abuse of power?

Research assistants and postdocs are dependent on the head of the working group. This means that doctoral researchers are dependent on evaluations and are sometimes put under pressure. In other words, they are told that if you don’t do this and that, you won’t get these and those benefits. It goes as far as shouting at them, putting them under pressure by saying that if you don’t do this or that, then I will no longer support your project and you can do it all on your own.
This also concerns vacation, which everyone is entitled to, including doctoral candidates and postdocs. They’ll be told, if you want to apply for a leave, it’s not possible, our project must continue. But the fact is, you have the right to take leave. This is recreational leave. You don’t have to say why you’re taking this leave. But the AG leaders sometimes simply refuse, even though you are entitled to it.

Now you’ve just said that the head of the working group says, for example, if my doctoral researcher doesn’t do as I say, then I won’t help them any more and I won’t support them any more. What is it that they might be more or less forced to do ?

A lot of working group leaders don’t get on with their doctoral researchers expressing their own opinion. There you can find a lot of pressure. There are so many different problems that I learn about. Every employee is entitled to turn to me if, for example, they feel discriminated against or are constantly being shouted at. And if that happens and the person comes to me, then I first listen to them, try to advise them and then, with the consent of the person who comes to me, I contact the head of the working group.

When I do that, the hammer usually comes down immediately afterwards. For example the head of the working group saying that there’s someone here who has betrayed me. Everything is anonymous, which means that the AG leader doesn’t know who was with me. I also just say that I’ve heard that…
Of course, they keep asking who it was, even though they know it’s confidential, and that I don’t have to tell them. Then a team meeting is held in the working group and then the leaders might say, that someone betrayed them, and they could have come forward, and as long as the person who did it hasn’t been found, they won’t support the doctoral researchers any more.

It is very profound, because when doctoral researchers come to work with us, the supervisor enters into a contract with them. This means that they sign up to being a doctoral supervisor and they have to continue to support these people. And people forget that it is the right of every employee, i.e. every member of staff, to turn to me. And it’s always very difficult to criticize the AG leader, because they often misunderstand or do not want to understand. There’s also a lot of narcissism involved because, of course, many AG leaders think they are doing everything right. But if they don’t listen to what I say…
After all, they’re not slaves, they’re employees, for whom the head of the working group also has a duty of care. And that is often forgotten. And a lot of people sit with me crying because they just don’t know what to do.

Most of those who have these problems are undergoing psychological treatment because they usually come too late. Either because they don’t know that we exist or what we are there for. We don’t just sign contracts as decentralized Women’s Representative and and Gender Equality Officers, we also try to solve problems and concerns, to negotiate, to discuss things with people, preferably together. But the is often the issue of fear involved and they do not want that.

So it’s a difficult thing that I do, but I often have a good feeling when it turns out well. And that also makes me happy when someone comes up to me and says that everything worked out wonderfully, that my working group leader is completely different. They understood the problem. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen that often. I try to move people if it’s no longer working at all in this working group. I then sit down with the administrative management or the Office of Faculty Recruitment and Appointment Strategy directly under the Executive Board and say, well, we have this and that problem and we have to move this or that person on.

You have already touched on many, many different topics that I would like to go into them a little more deeper. First of all, let’s go back to the situation you’ve just described. Let’s assume that I really do have a professor sitting in front of me who says in the team meeting that as long as I haven’t found the person who has betrayed me here, based on his feelings, I won’t supervise anyone else here. That’s basically a refusal to work on the part of the professor. And if this happened in front of witnesses, as was the case in the example you described, is it still acceptable for the university to allow such a person to remain in their position?

Not really. It’s a very big problem as far as university lecturers are concerned. I can talk about the problems, I can pass them on, but there are usually no consequences. And that’s actually what bothers us all decentralized Women’s Representatives at the FU. We can try, if we get permission from the person concerned, to talk to them, to the heads of the working groups. We can pass it on to the administrative management, but nothing happens. In other words, nothing happens from the top. Of course, you could also go straight to the Executive Board, to the HR department.

It’s just that I’m only doing this internally for the time being, i.e. within our department. I also want it to stay there, I don’t want it to be passed on to the staff council or the HR department. That’s why I actually try to do everything I can beforehand to ensure that we sort it out internally in our department. Unfortunately, usually not much happens. The administrative management may talk to the person, the university lecturer. But there are no consequences. And I think that in such a case of refusal to work, as you said, he has entered into a contract with the doctoral candidate, he has had the doctoral reseracher employed and has agreed to be the doctoral supervisor. Then this person must supervise the doctoral candidate. And I also consider that a refusal to work.

And I always think that if it were any other employee, we would have already received something from HR, a warning or I don’t know what. In other words, there have to be consequences for such cases. And unfortunately, they are very, very rare. I have a lot of conversations with university lecturers, especially with controversial working groups, where I know there are often fires. But I don’t get anywhere because this narcissism gets to me. People don’t realize that they make mistakes themselves. This self-reflection, what am I doing, do I need to change something, that doesn’t happen, instead I’m always being told that I’m doing everything right here, that my work group is doing well. Apparently not, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many people coming to me. And of course I’m very perceptive when several people come from a working group. Then there’s something to it.

I listen to both sides. But when four people or so come from the working group and say, well, our working group management does this and does that and I have minutes of their discussions then also emailed to me. Then I know that something is wrong. And that means we have to do something to change it. That’s a very important story. That’s why I’m also in favor of every university lecturer, whether they’re long-established or newly appointed and will be leading a working group, getting some kind of coaching or attend a workshop beforehand. How do I lead a AG? What are my duties? What are my rights? Also administrative matters, which is also very important.
As I said, it does not concern all university lecturers , but there are some where the staff keeps coming back and saying that something is wrong here. So there must be consequences also for university lecturers. And there has to be a workshop or whatever, because I have to get a driver’s license if I drive a car. I also have to be trained to lead a AG.… I’m a leader, I have a responsibility, a duty of care, so I have to be trained in advance. How do I deal with it? What do I do? That’s actually what I would like to achieve.

I think that’s a great idea, also mandatory for new professors or for those starting out.

That’s actually coming soon. I know that it’s in work for newly appointed professors. But as I said, we still have a lot of long-established professors. And it does not work like that, they think I’m up here and you’re all down there and you do what I say. And if you don’t, I’ll get loud or you’ll face some kind of consequences if you don’t get your act together. That doesn’t work. We work together. We are employed by Freie Universität. Our working group leader is put in front of us, in quotation marks. That’s why it’s our supervisor. And we all have to treat each other well. And that’s not always the case, unfortunately.

Do you have any ideas, or perhaps there are already some in the pipeline, on how to detect and prevent such abuse of power more quickly during a professor’s entire term of office? Without waiting for people to turn to you once problems have arisen or, as you have now described, for several people from a working group to turn to you when the fire is already burning. How could you perhaps introduce a kind of quality control on a regular basis so that such things don’t happen in the first place?

Well, that’s very difficult. We have so many working groups in our department. Biology, Chemistry and Pharmacy is the largest department at Freie Universität. And there are so many working groups in each individual institute that it’s impossible to control them. This means that in order for me to be able to do something and to find out I am of course dependent on the employees, on everyone, whether it’s another employee, a doctoral student or a postdoc or a technical assistant, whoever. Otherwise I would never find out.
I believe that the number of unreported cases of abuse of power is very high because people are afraid to make it public. One way of possibly curbing it would perhaps be to make it compulsory to attend a workshop once a year. What has changed in that year? What else can I do? Is there any new law? Most people don’t even know that yet. Maybe if something like that would be compulsory. That wouldn’t be bad at all. Once a year it would be compulsory for university lecturers to attend a course on how to run a working group, how to deal with employees. I think that would be good.

But otherwise, if that doesn’t happen, we can’t control it because we can’t see it. And if no one approaches us – out of fear or for other reasons, or a doctoral candidate says, oh, gosh, I’ll get through the three or four years here and only realizes afterwards that he’s actually become completely ill as a result – if they don’t come to us and we really do treat everything confidentially, we don’t need to name names, I don’t need to go to the heads of the working groups either. Of course I’d like to change things. That’s why people come to me. But if the person says to me, no, I don’t want to do that because I’m scared…
Of course I always try to say, oh, come on and I’ll try to convince them. But many people say, no, please don’t, the conversation has actually already helped me, where I can look for help elsewhere, for example, psychological support. But if that’s not the case, then there’s nothing we can do because we have no insight into how the heads of the working groups treat their employees.

You have already mentioned several times the fear that academic staff have when it comes to approaching you in confidence, if there has been a case of abuse of power. Could it be that, in addition to this fear, which I am quite sure is also very present in many people, also simply be a rational consideration and to say, okay, if I now turn to the Women’s Representative and Gender Equality Officer and also allow you to turn to the head of department or the head of the working group, then I can expect this or then I have to expect that in the worst case there will be no consequences at all. And that’s not unlikely, but there could certainly be negative consequences for me as a person or for the working group as a whole, because the professor might feel that he or she has been stepped on the toes and perhaps treat people even more unfairly?

Yes, there are two problems. Of course, people don’t know how it will end, what the consequences will be, which is often very disappointing. Because they come to me, let’s say, they give their consent, I can go on, I talk to the head of the working group, but they realize that there are no consequences at all. And in return, the head of the working group is then on the case and says, watch out, not like this. I do what I can here. I do everything I can to help you progress here so that you can complete your research project. I help and do and do, and that’s the thanks I get.

I understand those people. It’s not that I don’t understand. It’s just that I always think that together we are strong. Of course, as I’ve already mentioned, that it is really bad that there are no consequences. You run into walls. There was a case of a working group leader where it was quite extreme. He was also spoken to at a higher level. And then it was said that the man was simply overworked, that’s why he reacted like that. And then they simply gave him one or two more employees. For me, or let’s say for the people who came to me, which wasn’t just one person, it’s like a slap in the face. This person treats employees really badly and, because the poor man or woman is supposedly overworked, he gets two more employees. I think to myself, that’s like getting another sweet when I’ve made a mistake. And that’s the big problem.

Sure, the person may be overworked, and I may have a certain amount of understanding for that, but it doesn’t help the employees.When I lead a working group, I know that it has so and so many employees. I can’t shout about it or freak out or, because I’m unbalanced at home, take it out on my work group. I mean, we all have bad moods from time to time, but it’s not anyone’s fault and certainly not the employees in a working group. And if there are no consequences, and here we are again, but instead sweets, then the WG management won’t learn anything from it. Then the WG management will say to itself, well, okay, then I’ll just go and talk to a higher authority. But so what?After all, I did get one or two employees out of it. That’s not a consequence for me, it’s a reward.

Yes, and it also sends out the wrong signals.

Right, right. And then I always don’t know what to say to the people who come to me with their problems and worries. Of course I tell them that I’m completely dissatisfied. And that nothing else is happening, and that it’s taking forever. The process from the day they come to me until something happens or doesn’t happen takes forever. It takes months before the person has time, before we can have a new conversation, before he or she answers. There are discussions without end. And I think that in a certain case, i.e. according to the degree of severity, for example repeat offenders, in quotation marks, consequences should really follow quickly. And it’s not enough to have a conversation with an administrative manager. It has to happen at the very top so that the person realizes that I’ve made a mistake here, I have to change something, otherwise the consequence might be that I’m no longer allowed to lead a working group. Something like that, for example.

What are your experiences with the people who come to you, how well do they know about their rights as academic staff?

Not at all. No. The thing is, they apply when there are calls for applications for doctoral candidates. Then they apply and are accepted. But I don’t think there is enough information beforehand. What are my rights and obligations? There should actually be a kind of handbook for everyone who starts working at Freie Universität, where, for example, there are emergency numbers, i.e. for sexual harassment, which Women’s Representative is responsible for my area. There is the SPDG group, for sexual violence and discrimination, where you can go to. There are many contact points at the FU, but very few of them are known.

A year or so ago, when I listed them all together, I had posters and flyers printed and sent them out. I sent them to the first-year students, for example. We always have the first-semester introduction where all the students come, and I put them in their goodie bag so that they know about them. But doctoral students, they don’t actually get anything.
They start out and we assume that most of them have already studied with us, completed their Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, are now doing their doctorates and now let’s see. But they should also get an introduction. So, where can I go if I have this or that problem? What are my obligations as a doctoral student? What are my rights?

And there should be some kind of manual containing all this. It doesn’t have to be a big book. Who likes reading thick books? It’s like having a homepage with 1000 subpages and I’m looking for something and just can’t find it because I have to click through so much. Then you just don’t feel like it anymore. So you have to reduce it to a minimum. Yes, write down the rights and obligations in bullet points:What do I have to do at the beginning? Where do I go if…? There should be something like that. But I know that this is already being discussed with the central Women’s Representative and Officer for Gender Equality of the FU, that we want to propose this to the Executive Board.

Yes, I think that’s a great idea. Or I could also imagine lectures or fireside evenings, for example. Where things are perhaps a bit livelier and where people are pointed out to those things again. With a book like this, you might have a look at it as a reference book if you really have a problem.
But if you’re made aware of certain things from the outset, for example through a lecture, that you might not even be aware of, that problems could arise during the course of your doctorate, then you might have created a different level of awareness. And then in connection with that: If the problem arises that your supervisor doesn’t want to sign the leave request for the third time and the leave now expires if you don’t take it, then the next step would be to do this and that. Or then you can make use of this and that assistance, contact this and that person.

Yes, I think the problem is time. The fact is that most academic staff work 50 percent when they are hired. But it’s also a fact that a research assistant is actually 100 percent at the FU.

Is that legal?

It is legal, yes. So actually 50 percent of my work is for the FU and the other 50 percent I’m writing my research paper or my dissertation. So that’s combined. So I would say it’s not not legal. But of course it’s at the beginning… You see 50 percent advertised and you’re actually working 12 hours for your employer.
And if vacation is being refused, because we have to be here and as quickly as possible, then you can imagine about the time… If they ask, that they would like to go to the workshop here or I want to inform myself, some working group leader would say there is no time for that. You don’t have time because you’re still behind or you have to work a bit faster. It’s not that easy either.

We have the Graduate Center here. Doctor Alette Winter does an excellent job. All doctoral candidates can go there for advice. She helps, she is also a coach. She does a great job. But some people don’t even know that this Graduate Center exists. Because, as I said, I always have the feeling that I don’t like clicking through emails and the homepage. So I don’t look or type into Google, where can I go as a doctoral candidate at the FU? That’s simply not done.

Everything should be much more transparent. There needs to be more communication. With a flood of emails, most people skip a lot of them or delete them straight away if they only see the subject line. Poster notices, yes, are actually good too, but they don’t reach the target everywhere. I don’t have the right solution yet. But I think the more we communicate, also with people such as doctoral candidates, students and other employees, who also have their problems, be it that they want to be promoted and don’t know how to do that.

So there are so many questions and sometimes perhaps too many places to go. It’s like a maze. Where do I go now? What do I do now? Is this right or is that right? What does she even do? Can she help me? I have to be careful here. If my employer finds out, there will be consequences.

That’s why I would first suggest a handbook for everyone who is newly hired. And, of course, there are always offers from the Graduate Center of the FU’s continuing education program. Workshops, further training on the subject of abuse of power, how do I get through my doctorate? So all these controversial topics that are always listed there, that people are made aware of.
There are mailing list where I can only reach doctoral candidates and postdocs and I send them something like this at regular intervals. For example there is further training for your doctorate here. Because they don’t see anything in their flood of work. They have to take care of their research project, they have to make sure that they please the head of the working group, that everything works, and at some point they also have a private life. Then they write their dissertation, which is all very stressful. And so you don’t really have an eye for anything else and try to get through these years. Only sometimes with consequences that wouldn’t have been necessary if they had gone to a contact point sooner.

I think that a nice addition to the handbook you mentioned could also be something like this podcast, for example, where you conduct regular interviews because you can also consume it on the side. You don’t have to be totally focused on it. You can also listen to it on the train, for example. And then it’s a nice addition. A simply different way to get in touch with this topic and to do educational work or to get information from the scientific staff. Have you personally had any experience of abuse of power?

Yes, unfortunately. I’ve been at Freie Universität for 40 years. The problem was simply that this appreciation, that you actually do everything you can, and even more as a secretary. Well, I can only say that as a secretary. As a Women’s Representative I am independent. I don’t have anyone reporting to me. But when I work as a secretary, I always have problems with the head of the working group, with disputes, and unfortunately I’ve had that experience. That also made me very ill at times.

Thank you very much for sharing these personal experiences with us, even if they were unfortunately not so pleasant. What are your plans for the future?

I would like to retire next year, but I would like to continue working at the FU as Women’s Representative and Officer for Gender Equality on the side, because that is the office that is so close to my heart. To support people in their worries and problems. To achieve things, to change things, to simply tackle everything that is not running smoothly or is unfair. Even the things that are always swept under the carpet. Because I can present myself to the outside world with all sorts of things. A homepage, paper is patient. But as decentralized Women’s Representative and Officer for Gender Equality, we can see what it looks like on the inside. What problems are there with the employees of the FU, in their working groups, wherever. And that’s where I’d like to be able to continue to carry out my duties in a supportive way and to be able to let people become happy again and for them to be able to say that you’ve helped me so much. That is also support.

I don’t just give advice and try to solve problems and concerns, I also provide funding for conference trips and printing work for dissertations. Because a research assistant or a member of staff doesn’t earn that much. That means I also support them with babysitting, which was extremely difficult during the corona period. It was difficult to continue working during the corona period, especially during the lockdown. And then I said, okay, you have to go to the lab sometimes because some test or project has to be done there. Find a babysitter and I’ll pay for it with the funding.
I also do lab exchanges or students who take part in excursions and simply can’t afford the 150 euros, for example, but the excursion has to take place or is part of their studies. Then of course I also fund them. And that’s all I can do to help people get through their work or their studies and relieve them of a few worries. And that’s why I would like to stay on as Women’s Representative and Officer for Gender Equality for at least another two years.

Ms. Christine Eßmann-Stern, thank you very much for this interview, but also for the important work that you do, which I think you do with a great deal of passion.

Yes, thank you for this interview and I hope many people listen to it. And maybe one or two of them will have the courage to come to me and discuss their problem with me.

We will definitely link to you again on the podcast website, as well as to the Women’s Representatives and Officers for Gender Equality in the other departments.

That would be great. Thank you very much.

OUTRO

That was the interview with Christine Eßmann-Stern. Please note that we recorded this interview last year, i.e. in 2023. So when Ms. Eßmann-Stern speaks or has spoken about next year, then she was referring to the current year, i.e. 2024.

And while I certainly hope that you yourself aren’t struggling with abuse of power, at least now you know who to turn to if that should ever happen, or if you hear about it from someone else. Remember that Christine Eßmann-Stern is the decentralized Women’s Representative and Officer for Gender Equality for the departments of biology, chemistry and pharmacy, which means that if you are doing your doctorate in another department, then check out the website for this episode. There we have an overview page for everyone and you can find which FU’s decentralized women’s representative and Officer for Gender Equality is in charge of you. On the page you will also find a link to the other episodes of the DRS Podcast. I am Dr. Marlies Klamt and I’m pleased that I was able to accompany you through today’s episode as presenter. Thanks for listening and see you next time!

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

This interview has been conducted in German. An English transcript is available at the bottom of this page.

Prof. Dr. Christian Lammert, Political Scientist and winner of the DRS Supervisor Award 2023, talks about the importance of good supervision of doctoral candidates, his plans for the prize money and the changes in his role as a supervisor over time. Other topics include the often lacking self-confidence of doctoral candidates and possible reasons for the dissatisfaction of many doctoral candidates with their supervision. Professor Lammert also reveals what he believes is the ideal number of doctoral students that a professor can effectively supervise at the same time.

Highlights

„One cannot make a single-lane plan for the supervision of a dissertation“

„It is important to not only know the topic and methode of a dissertation during the supervision, but also the context of each candidate because one can only supervise correctly and see the necessary next steps to bring people to their degree within these three to three and a half years.“

„I have noticed for me that at a point where I supervised more than six doctoral candidates at the same time, it became a little bit more. For this reason I would probably say, three to five is a field that one can handle well. Everything else and the supervision could suffer.“

from our interview with Prof. Dr. Lammert

Audio

Download or listen to the audio version of the podcast here.

Links

Find more information on the supervision award of DRS and the past winners here.

English transcript

INTRO

Welcome to the DRS Podcast, the podcast of the Dahlem Research School at Freie Universität Berlin. I am Dr. Marlies Klamt and I am excited to host today’s episode for you. This episode is part of a series of interviews we have conducted with the winners of the DRS Supervisor Award, a prize awarded for excellent supervision of doctoral candidates.

In this episode, I talk to Christian Lammert, who is professor of political science and was one of the two winners of the Supervisor Award in 2023.

We talked about what good supervision means to him, how he plans to use the prize money and whether and how he has changed as a supervisor over time. But we also talk about the lack of self-confidence of many doctoral candidates, especially women, and about why doctoral candidates are often not satisfied with their supervision and how he thinks this can be changed.

I also found Professor Lammert’s answer to my question about the maximum number of doctoral students that a professor can supervise at the same time very interesting.

I don’t want to tell you any more in advance, but we’ll start with the interview straight away.

Professor Lammert, please briefly introduce yourself to the listeners of our podcast. 

Yes, I am a political scientist and have been at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University of Berlin for over 15 years now, where I hold the professorship for North American political systems. 

And in this role, you also supervise doctoral students who nominated you for the Supervision Award. And you didn’t just get nominated by them, you also won it. Do you remember the moment when you were informed that you had won and what was your first thought?  

Yes, I remember it pretty clearly. I took my cell phone and checked my e-mails and got this e-mail. You get it by e-mail before it officially arrives by post. And at first I was a bit skeptical and thought, what is this again? Nowadays you’re always very sensitive when you’re told somewhere that you’ve won something. But when I saw that it was all very solid and that I knew the senders by name at least, I have to admit that I was really happy and satisfied because I was also surprised. I didn’t know that anyone had nominated me and I think getting a prize like this, which is about mentoring other doctoral students, is something really nice and that’s why I was really pleased. 

I can imagine that. Also that you were suspicious at first, as I always am when I think I’ve won something…. In addition to this non-material recognition that you have just mentioned, there is also prize money of 2,000 euros, which in turn is intended to benefit the doctoral students. Do you already have an idea of what you will invest this money in?  

Yes, I already have an idea. That was always a point that many doctoral students raised. When we met regularly in a larger group to discuss the individual projects, we usually did this at the institute. And people have always suggested that we could get together somewhere outside of Berlin for an overnight stay or two and not just talk directly about the projects, but also talk a bit about the broader environment of science and what it means to become a scientist in the first place, to exchange ideas a bit. And I think I will use at least some of these funds for a retreat like this.  

On the other hand, which is always very important for our doctoral students, especially when you have such a broad spectrum of topics and, above all, methodological approaches in your work, and if I’m not so well versed in certain methods, is that you then organize special method workshops where you invite people so that the candidates can get the necessary grounding from the methods side.

That sounds like two very nice ideas. Firstly, the retreat as a team-building measure and then the methodological training. I’m sure your doctoral students will be delighted. And the special thing about this DRS Supervision Award is that the award winners are nominated by the doctoral candidates themselves, as you have just mentioned. Why do you think your doctoral candidates or one of your doctoral candidates nominated you? And what makes the way you supervise doctoral candidates so special?    

Well, I reconstructed it a bit afterwards and found out who specifically nominated me when I asked. People or the nominee didn’t tell me that beforehand,  but then she was particularly pleased that I got the award. Why was I nominated by the candidates? Yes, I don’t really know and then you ask yourself, it’s not the first time you’ve supervised doctoral students, I’ve been doing it for over ten years now. Why did you get the award now? You also think about that maybe you weren’t so good before, but now you’re better. 

But I think it always has to do with the specific contexts and I would also like to relativize my role a little. This candidate came from our graduate school. We have the Graduate School for North American Studies at the Kennedy Institute. And there it always has to do with which group comes together, how comfortable they feel and how the whole thing, the whole social context is right. And I already know in the year that I received the award that this group worked very well, that there was also very intensive contact among the candidates outside of the graduate school. And I think that’s always part of making people feel comfortable overall. And if they then consider whether it might also have something to do with the supervisor, then I’m pleased when they come to that conclusion and express their trust in me afterwards.  

What constitutes good supervision for you?  

Yes, I believe that good supervision is about engaging with the respective candidates. I don’t think you can have a one-way roadmap for supervising a dissertation. It also depends on whether they are candidates who are at the graduate school, whether they are individual doctorates, whether they are people who want to stay in academia and articulate this early on, or whether we sometimes have people who come and say I primarily want the title. I’m already on my career path, but a title like that helps me. These are different approaches that you have to consider when dealing with people and you have to find that out early on. 

You also have to get to know the candidates early on to know whether they are people you have to put under a bit of pressure because they need deadlines, because they need intensive support. Are they people who need to be slowed down a bit? I’ve also seen people take on far too much and then overwork themselves if you don’t intervene. So I think that in addition to the basic supervision in terms of topic and method, it is important that you also know the candidate’s context well, because only then can you provide good supervision and take the necessary steps to get people to graduate in these three, three and a half years. 

Is that something you specifically ask or does it come out anyway if you know each other well?  

I don’t ask that specifically. I would find that … That would somehow be a breach of trust and it would also make it seem as if you really had a pattern that you were using. So we meet regularly with the doctoral students to discuss things. But we also meet up after such meetings or at the beginning or end of the semester to go to the beer garden together and talk about other things. And then you get to know the people a bit, also in the group, when they are at the graduate school, how it works there, how they work together, that they tend to motivate each other. It can also happen that a group like that blocks you or makes you anxious because you think you’re not smart enough. So I think you always have to observe everything closely at the beginning and then you’ll realize that. I think a questionnaire like that would be counterproductive.  

Now you mentioned earlier the surprise when you won this award and that you wondered why it was at this precise moment in time. Do you think that the way you supervise has changed over the years and that you are a different supervisor today than you were ten years ago?  

By all means. Or let’s say I hope so, at least. But of course you learn from every supervision. It’s also an intensive relationship that you build up with the candidates here. And sometimes you realize that something didn’t go well. There are always conflict situations. And then you always ask yourself, why is that? Are you too close? Are you giving people too much freedom? Do you have to intervene more in terms of content? Are you putting too little pressure on them? You always realize that afterwards, hopefully in most cases in between, that you can still make corrections. 

But that’s always the case at the end of any promotion, when it’s finished, and then of course you review it again. If it could have gone faster, if it could have been done differently. You also notice whether people are satisfied with the result. And that usually doesn’t stop there. That’s what it’s all about and you have to discuss it with people at an early stage: What should happen next? And that’s always a nice indicator, where you realize that you haven’t done everything wrong and, above all, that the candidates haven’t done everything wrong, if there are employment prospects afterwards and you can also be supportive, for example in publishing the work. And if it all works well, then you have the feeling that you’ve done quite well. And that’s been happening more and more recently. And then I think that you’ve also learned from the examples before. 

Yes, great, I’m pleased to hear that your doctoral students are finding employment well there. And that is definitely a point that I will come back to towards the end of the interview. But what would interest me right now is whether there are or were one or more people or perhaps experiences that have shaped the way you support your doctoral students today. 

I’m now thinking about the positive things, whether I had candidates. Yes, I think it’s more when there are problems that you start thinking about what you can do better. If everything goes smoothly, I always tell that to the people, if you think it’s going smoothly, then I won’t intervene much, apart from the normal feedback rounds that you always have. But if you notice that something isn’t working, then of course you try to improve it. For example, I had … I mentioned earlier that sometimes dissertations are submitted by people who are not planning an academic career at all, but who need it for their job.   And I also had one candidate who was always very short on time because he was of course also very involved in his job and had to use his vacation time and that is of course also a high stress factor. And I hadn’t taken that into account and sometimes I think I put him under a bit too much pressure and expected too much. And now I also know that I have to ask people beforehand exactly how much time they really have and how they imagine they can manage the whole thing in parallel with their dissertation and their job, because it’s an immense burden. 

Another problem that I often see is that some people lack self-confidence and you have to discover that early on. Sometimes female candidates try …,and there it really is often a gender problem. In my experience, women are often more insecure, not in general, but more often, there is a tendency to question their own performance. They question themselves much more often than male candidates do. And you also have to recognize this early on and signal to people that if they are insecure, they should get in touch immediately. And sometimes they don’t. And you have to develop a sense for when people somehow run into a dead end because they don’t trust themselves, so that you recognize this crisis situation early on. I think I’m sensitized to the fact that I can recognize such things earlier and that I can support them so that they don’t run into this dead end. 

Yes, I think that’s a very important point about self-confidence and I think it’s wonderful that you also have an eye on it, because it’s also something that people don’t necessarily dare to address on their own. 

Exactly. 

Unfortunately, not all doctoral candidates are as satisfied with their supervision as yours. According to a study by the Leibniz PhD Network, the satisfaction of doctoral candidates with their supervision also decreases over the course of their doctorate. Do you have any ideas as to why this is the case? 

I would emphasize two factors. On the one hand, I would want to criticize myself and my colleagues a little and perhaps also the university system, that traditionally, and this is only now slowly changing, you are not prepared to properly supervise such work, to deal with people over such a long period of time. That’s a social skill that you have to have. Of course, it’s also a professional skill that you have to have. 

And many of my colleagues, and sometimes I don’t exclude myself from this, think that if you have the technical expertise, you’ll be fine. And then the candidates just have to fall back on this professional expertise. And I believe that the university should offer more support at an early stage, perhaps even for young academics, when it’s clear that people are aiming for an academic career, in terms of what supervision looks like. The FU already has a very good program that is voluntary and is mostly used by people who are already better mentors than others. But here you have to consider to what extent you can create incentives for professors to voluntarily train themselves to provide better supervision. 

The other thing that I think is a problem is the overall work overload and the expectations in the scientific landscape in Germany. And that’s a big difference. I know this from American colleagues or Canadian colleagues who are under much less pressure to acquire third-party funding, to write these applications. And in this system, of course, there are also incentives to exploit such doctoral candidates a little for other purposes by having them co-write such applications and incorporate their expertise. Of course, this can also benefit people for their future career, but my experience is often that you actually distract people, that you also increase the pressure, because then there is a completely different set of expectations, which can then become problematic in such a relationship of dependency. 

And here you should simply say that if someone supervises a lot of doctorates, you first have to make sure that there aren’t too many. So I sometimes ask myself, what is the maximum number of doctorates you can supervise at the same time? If you have a graduate school like this, that’s something you have to ask yourself so that everyone still benefits from it. And then you also have to give people a bit of support so that they can use sufficient resources to provide good training. Because that is the future of universities and science, that we produce good young talent. And sometimes this is treated a bit neglected in the overall concept of expectations in science. 

Where would you personally see the limit for how many doctoral students you can supervise at the same time? 

Well, I’ve often thought about that and there is even a minimum number, I would say. So I would say that if you only ever have one candidate, that can be problematic because you might become too fixated on them and then people don’t have any colleagues with whom they can exchange ideas. They can also talk about the supervisor, the supervision. I think it’s also important for people to have an environment outside of this relationship with the supervisor where they can talk about the work, but also about the situation. And that’s where three people are really good. And I noticed that when I was supervising more than six doctorates at the same time, it became a bit much. That’s why I would probably say that three to five is a field that you can still manage well. Everything else suffers in terms of supervision.  

How many doctoral students are you currently supervising?  

I currently still have three. This is partly due to the fact that we are now out of DFG funding for our graduate school, where we had twelve doctoral scholarships every year at the beginning or for almost twelve years, with three of them sometimes going to our department, where you were also involved as a first or second supervisor. And this is currently being cut back because the DFG funding has come to an end. And I now have two remaining cases. That sounds a bit negative. In other words, people who are already a bit past the doctoral period, who still want to finish, but who are both already working. And another individual doctorate that is being processed. And the next one will have to wait until after the graduate school. That’s another strategy, looking for funding in order to supervise such projects again. 

How do you think universities can deal with the fact that there are now supervisors who either – which unfortunately also happens – don’t actually fulfill their duties of support and don’t provide assistance or are perhaps even toxic? 

Yes, I think there needs to be massive intervention here. I don’t know how you can introduce such a warning system. Berlin now also has the Dahlem Research School, which mainly looks after doctoral students and programs on how they can be improved. There are also representatives of the doctoral candidates in it and I think that contact options need to be found here so that such candidates can also address problematic supervisory relationships, which can be problematic in very different ways, either you are ignored, exploited or there are other forms of abuse, so that this can be addressed. And then, of course, you would have to have committees that discuss such things and possibly also draw consequences and, in case of doubt, if there are extreme violations of the obligation to supervise, also temporarily restrict the right to award doctorates for certain people or recommend some kind of further training so that such things don’t happen. 

But I think there is a lack of contact persons at the universities for doctoral candidates to exchange ideas in such cases. I think the institution of the Graduate School has actually been a very good step forward here, because it has enabled candidates to exchange ideas with each other. Because sometimes you don’t even realize that you’re in a problematic supervisory relationship if you can’t exchange ideas with others. But if you discuss it with others, and that happens in graduate schools like this, then you’re more likely to have the courage to articulate something. But then of course you also have to do that, because you can’t leave the candidates to find a new supervisor on their own with all the effort and distraction that this entails from the actual doctoral project. So there has to be intensive support from the university.  

Yes, I definitely agree with you and in my experience, it’s often not a lack of contact points, but rather a lack of consequences. I have already conducted an interview for this podcast with the central ombudsperson of the FU and with the women’s representative of a department. And what came out of that was actually rather… Well, they are available as contact persons, for example, but that often nothing happens when a complaint is made and that is of course also a deterrent for future doctoral candidates, other early career researchers, etc., when you see, okay, someone actually complained, but in the end nothing even came of it. 

Exactly, exactly. But sometimes, even if you have the places, many of the candidates don’t even know that they can go there with such problems. You always think that something must have really happened. But there are also more subtle forms in which this support can be exploited, in which people are put under psychological pressure for whatever reason. And then, as I’ve also heard from conversations with doctoral students, they often don’t even know that this is a case that should definitely be discussed with gender officers and ombudspersons. So I think it would be important here, when someone starts a doctorate, to communicate these options openly and perhaps provide addresses and telephone numbers as a kind of handout on who to contact in which cases.  

That was exactly the topic I discussed with the Women’s and Equal Opportunities Officer. We’ve already talked about what constitutes good support and what constitutes less good support. But to come back to this point, good supervision doesn’t just involve the supervisor, but of course also the doctoral student. What is particularly important to you when you talk to potential doctoral candidates and what do you think they should bring to the table, both on a professional level, but perhaps also on a personal or other level?  

That’s a good question. And that’s also something I always try to make clear to people at an early stage in discussions about what it means to write a doctorate. We also have some candidates who ended up at the graduate school, who we got to know beforehand during their studies. Some have even completed a BA, a Master’s degree with us at the Kennedy Institute and then a doctorate, others just a Master’s degree, some come from outside and apply. You have to talk to people early on about what their ideas are, what it means to write a thesis, a doctoral thesis, what they think they need to invest in terms of work.  

So if you write a doctorate, you need over three and a half years, some people need four years, some people only need three years, that’s also possible. You have to be extremely disciplined, but you also have to – and I think it’s very important because most people find this very difficult – be careful not to start exhausting yourself, because sometimes you’re not in any normal context where you’re off work or where you know you have to finish it in 14 days and then you’ve done something and then something new comes along. You have a big project ahead of you and then you think you have to work 24 hours a day. It’s also a discipline to say, I’m not working now. And you have to talk to people at an early stage to discuss strategies for structuring your day so that you can put down the keyboard in the evening with a reasonably good feeling and say, that’s it and now I’m going to do something else. So you have to have the discipline and the sense not to exhaust yourself.  

And what is very important is that people have to work on a topic. A colleague of mine once put it like this: you have to have an inner fire for it. So you have to have a real interest in the topic. If you notice that these individual doctorates, who usually only want a title, come to you and say, yes, I’m a bit interested in this and that area, could you perhaps give me a topic to work on. That’s never a good starting point. So people have to try to come up with their own idea that really interests them and has the nutritional value to feed the candidates intellectually for these three years.  

If that’s not there, then you have to question the whole thing early on. And I think that’s also very important, and that’s more the role of the supervisor again, to tell people honestly quite early on that it might not make sense to go through the three years and waste the time, and then you end up with a degree that doesn’t qualify you to stay in academia or you might not get a degree at all. 

So that’s also something I always do. I observe people very, very closely at the beginning and after six months at the latest, if I think it doesn’t make sense, then I communicate that. These are moments of crisis, of course, and you have to be very sensitive, but I think it’s also fair to the people who invest so much time in working on a project. 

I can hear that you have also done this in the past, that people have suggested that you drop out of the doctorate, right? 

Yes. 

And how was that received? 

It’s usually not well received. Especially when people have already received a scholarship. I had a candidate whose Master’s thesis I supervised and it was a very difficult project, with emotional crises where you had to spend hours in the office providing psychological support because there was such a crisis of meaning. And then there was also a candidate who came back at some point and said, I’ve got it under control now and I’d like to do a doctorate because she was also in a certain context where she would actually have been able to access materials well in terms of the topic, but after just a few months I realized that it would start all over again. Nothing has changed. And I told her that too. And that was very emotional again. But then she realized that too and dropped out of the doctorate. 

And do you know whether she continued elsewhere or actually finished with it? 

No, she’s no longer doing her doctorate. She ended up at an international organization and is now working in the field of human rights policy. 

I also asked so precisely because I could well imagine that if someone tells you that you’re not suitable for a doctorate or that you’re not doing yourself any good by doing so, that this will initially meet with resistance …  

I wouldn’t put it like that either. I think that would be too harsh. I couldn’t do that. Of course, I always say that I try to ask, is that really what you want? And how do you envisage things continuing like this? Don’t you think that this will happen again, especially if you’ve already seen the experience with the Master’s thesis, that it will rob you of the same strength again and then you’ll get people to do it. I would consider it an affront to tell someone that you are not suitable for a doctorate. At that moment, I would also consider my competencies to have been exceeded. Once I’ve accepted someone as a candidate, I can ask whether they really believe they can do it on their own or whether another path might be better. But if they say no, this route is better, then as a supervisor I have to accompany them on the best possible path and hope that I can get them through. Also with further training courses that are offered in the university context.  

I didn’t mean to accuse you of being too direct and you have a sensitive way of approaching the conversation. But I can still imagine that it’s a big shock at first when you’re told that the other person doesn’t necessarily see you where you used to see yourself. 

Yes, that’s right. Yes.  

Do you often receive initial applications from people you don’t even know who would like to do a doctorate with you? 

Yes, we get that quite often because we are also one of the few research and teaching institutes at the FU where everything is done entirely in English. This means that we get an incredible number of unsolicited inquiries from people from all over the world. And you have to take a look at how well-founded the interest really is and also the discussion as to why these people have now asked me. With most things, you can tell from the cover letter that it’s a collective letter and only my name is written at the top and then you ask a few colleagues and then they say yes, I got them all. 

In such cases, I always say no straight away. I also say no to candidates that I don’t know and where it doesn’t fit thematically. For example, if they … I’m mainly responsible for domestic policy in political systems at our institute. I also get a lot of requests from people who want to do something about American foreign policy. And if there’s no justification as to why I’m an excellent supervisor, then I always say no, because for me that’s also a sign that people haven’t really looked into the options for supervisors. But we do get a lot of requests like that. 

And how can I increase my chances there, apart from the things you have already mentioned now? Of course, I should send a cover letter and make it clear in any way why I think you are a suitable supervisor for my doctoral thesis. But will it help if I send you a short exposé? Would you like to have a long, elaborated exposé to see that I have worked my way into it? Or is it really about the topic first and it must be clear why the person is contacting you?  

No, that’s absolutely right. So a brief description of the project, that’s what I need. That’s what most people send. That’s not usually what is lacking. Of course, you can talk about the quality of these proposals, but if someone has just finished their studies and develops an idea like this, then it’s okay if it’s still a bit cloudy. So that’s what I expect. I expect a cover letter that makes the motivation clear. And it shouldn’t contain generalities like „the FU is one of the most prestigious universities and that would be good for my career“. 

But you also have to have dealt with the content a bit, why the institute, the FU, the Kennedy Institute and why I would be suitable as a supervisor now. Then I actually also expect people to have looked into my research a bit, to what extent they can benefit from it. That sometimes happens, motivated students do that. I always find that quite good, because then I can also assess for myself that people have thought about why I should be the supervisor. So this information has to be there and there has to be a project idea that really has the potential to bring something surprising to light or generate something new in terms of knowledge.  

If something is missing from that, then I am always very skeptical and ask again. And I would say that if you then ask so critically why I should supervise it or why the Kennedy Institute is so suitable: In 50 percent of cases, you don’t get an answer at all. And then you also know that it was perhaps a collective email. So it should give the impression that you already have a specific project idea and that people have thought about why I would be a good supervisor.  

Yes, it’s also interesting that when you ask back, that you don’t even get an answer, because people are obviously looking for a job or a place to do a doctorate. 

I would like to come back to the topic of self-exploitation, which you mentioned earlier, because I find this very important in the university context or in the academic world in general. And unfortunately, this self-exploitation and working around the clock is something that is often exemplified by professors. How do you perhaps try to set an example against this? I’m thinking of things like availability outside of working hours or something like that. Do you have certain rules that you perhaps even put into words directly? Or do you behave in a certain way to show your doctoral students how they can or should manage their time? 

Yes, that’s absolutely part of it. I don’t just do that with doctoral students. I also try to make it clear to people on my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree courses that I write directly in my syllabus how they can reach me and that I generally don’t answer emails after 6 p.m. and before 8 a.m. and also don’t answer emails at the weekend. I then tell the doctoral students the same thing, with the exception of course, unless it’s somehow an emergency. And by emergency, of course, I mean that you somehow think … That’s also something that happens very often, that people are in the third year of their doctorate and suddenly find a publication that does something similar. And then the big crisis of meaning begins. So I said that in emergencies like that, where you really have doubts about the project, you can contact me in the evening or at the weekend. 

But like this I also try to signal that scientists are allowed to call it a day. That’s how I try to set an example. I always say quite openly and honestly that I’ll tell people when I’m going on vacation, when I’m not available and that they can still email me if they have any problems, acute problems of course, but otherwise they should leave me alone. And I also try to give people strategies on how to manage to stop working. So what I always tell people, for example, is that they should stop working from late afternoon around 5 or 6 p.m., and of course that also depends on what kind of candidates they are. Of course, I’ve also had PhD students who are night owls, who don’t get up until 11 and work until two in the morning. That’s fine if that’s what they have to do. I don’t want to forbid them to do that.  

But when they finish work, a good tool is always to briefly write down what you’ve done that day, in bullet points. So that you also have some reassurance that it wasn’t wasted time and at the same time to make a note of what you’re planning to do the next day, what the to-dos are, two or three points. Because the moment you’ve done something like that, you can also finish. If you haven’t written it down, then you keep thinking about it. So I try to teach people things like that, techniques like that, so that people have a certain distance from their work. And I think it’s also part of it and that’s why I also said that you often go to the beer garden with a group or have dinner somewhere in a restaurant, that it’s not just the dissertation, but that people also realize that there’s a life besides academia and that you have to set an example for people. 

Yes, I think it’s very important and thank you for sharing this technique, which is almost like a ritual to bring the day to a close and to say goodbye to one day and get in the mood for the next or to make it easier to start the next day. 

We’ve almost reached the end, but I have one more question to pick up on the topic from the beginning. You talked about the fact that doctoral candidates also have very different career aspirations. Let’s assume that someone is aiming for an academic career and wants to become a professor later on. What advice would you give this person? What should they definitely do to ensure they are well positioned? 

Yes, that’s always part of the discussions I usually have after a year of the doctorate, when I also see that people really have the potential. Then I try to make it clear to people that it’s not just a good job, but that you also have to present yourself specifically with this first work in certain scientific communities where you want to be recognized later. That you need to think about this early on. And that is precisely …. I can only speak for political science now, but if you are a political scientist doing a doctorate at the Kennedy Institute, for example, you have to be careful that you are not seen as an Americanist. 

People need to learn early on that they have expertise that is in demand in the scientific field in addition to the topic of North America, which is very prominent here. And you have to think about this at an early stage. Is it party research, is it federalism research, is it certain methodological approaches that you refine and that the USA is then just a case study that is important for the academic profile, but does not offer any future options as a unique selling point. The next question is how and where you have to publish, how many articles should you try to place somewhere during your doctorate, which conferences do you go to in order to form networks, how important are such networks.  

So I try to discuss this with people at an early stage. If they are already reasonably confident in their project, we usually get them to write their first proposal for a conference on a smaller scale, and then I go to the conference with them. Then you go there together, so it’s also a kind of safe space when you present your results for the first time. And then at some point you push them to the big conferences. 

And you have to be careful that it all works, but I’ve only had very good experiences so far. We once had six doctoral students at our institute who applied for such conferences. We always give practice presentations so that they can present their papers in a small setting and then get feedback so that they are more confident when they go out to compete with others for ideas. I think you have to make it clear to people early on what the risks are. What does it mean to live in this postdoc phase with great uncertainty as far as employment prospects are concerned for up to ten years? Some are even longer, having to move from one externally funded project to the next. You also have to prepare people for this so that they don’t enter the academic world with too much idealization.  

That sounds like a wonderful accompaniment and a wonderful introduction to the difficult situations that you are then exposed to. Professor Lammert, I would like to thank you very much for your time and for this interview. 

Yes, of course. 

OUTRO 

This was an interview with Professor Lammert, who won the DRS Supervisor Award in 2023. If you enjoyed this interview, you are also welcome to listen to the other interviews we have already conducted with other award winners. You can also find the link to the Supervisor Award on the website for this episode if you are doing your own doctorate at the FU and have a great supervisor you would like to nominate. 

That was Dr. Marlies Klamt for the DRS Podcast, the podcast of the Dahlem Research School of Freie Universität Berlin.  

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

 

Professor Dr. Cornelia Reiher was one of two recipients of the Supervisor Award 2023, an award presented annually by the Dahlem Research School for exceptional supervision of doctoral researchers. In this episode, Professor Reiher talks about what good supervision entails for her, how she supports her doctoral researchers and what she expects from them. We also talked about how she and her doctoral researchers dealt with the challenges during the pandemic, which particularly affected them due to their field research in Japan. Professor Reiher emphasizes the importance of recreational breaks and a good work-life balance in order not to lose creativity in the scientific creative process.

HIGHLIGHTS

„You can’t be creative and productive 24/7. That’s why these recovery phases are immensely important, especially for creative ideas. I think a lot of people, myself included, have the best ideas in their free time and not when they’re staring desperately at a screen.“

„The most important factor is not to lose the passion and enthusiasm for the project.“

From our interview with Prof. Reiher

AUDIO

Links

For more information on the excellent supervision award that is annually awarded by the Dahlem Research School see here.

TRANSCRIPT

INTRO
Welcome to a new episode of the Dahlem Research School podcast. I am Dr. Marlies Klamt and I am happy to accompany you through today’s episode.
In this episode, you can expect another exciting interview with one of two winners of the Supervision Award, Professor Cornelia Reiher, who is a Japanologist at the FU Berlin and won the award in fall 2023.

In this interview we talk about the following:

How she plans to use the prize money

What is generally important to her when supervising doctoral researchers

What challenges she and her doctoral researchers, who are all doing field research, have faced during the pandemic and how they have dealt with these challenges

What she wishes from her doctoral researchers

Why she herself completed her doctorate on the train

And how she assesses the situation of doctoral researcher parents – and I can already tell you, more positively than I would have thought.

I also found her attitude to work-life balance, which we talk about at the end of the interview, particularly interesting.

I hope you enjoy listening to it now.

Prof. Reiher, please introduce yourself briefly.

I am a professor of Japanese Studies at the Free University of Berlin. My work focuses on the society and politics of contemporary Japan. And I deal with two larger topics. One is food and nutrition in Japan, but also culinary globalization. So I also have a project on Japanese cuisine in Berlin.

At the same time, the other is Japan’s rural areas. I am particularly interested in finding out how rural areas in Japan are changing against the backdrop of demographic change.

The two topics combine the larger issue of migration, i.e. on the one hand transnational migration of Japanese people to Germany, for example, and on the other hand urban-rural migration of Japanese people within Japan, as well as the role of transnational migrants in rural Japan.

Another topic I have dealt with a lot in recent years is qualitative methods in Japan research. It’s more about how do we actually research Japan? And in this context, I have also published a handbook that doctoral researchers also like to work with.

This is already the perfect segue, because even though that sounds like a very exciting field of research, we are going to talk about something else today, and that is that you have won an award for the exceptionally good supervision of doctoral researchers. How many doctoral researchers are you currently supervising?

There are currently five. Two are in a DFG project and the other three are at the Graduate School of East Asian Studies, where I am PI.

How did you find out that you had won the DRS Supervision Award and what was your first thought?

Well, I received an email and thought, oh wow, I’m really pleased that my work has been recognized. Especially from the doctoral researchers who were allowed to nominate me. In other words, it’s really nice when doctoral researchers are satisfied, because that’s not a given. After all, a doctorate is a fairly long-term, difficult and not entirely easy undertaking. A time with many ups and downs. And if the doctoral researchers then feel that they are well supported by their supervisor, i.e. by me, then I am extremely pleased.

I think that was a very nice recognition that comes with the award, but it also comes with a payout of 2,000 euros, which is intended for the further promotion of young scientists. How did you use the money, or how do you plan to use it in the future?

Yes, I think there are two big issues for which there is never enough money: proofreading the dissertations. One of my doctoral researchers is a native English speaker, but they all write in English. This means that it’s always nice to have the English proofread by a professional at the end if there’s a bit of money available. That’s one option I’m thinking about.
The other is, of course, conference travel. Because when the results are actually available, it’s nice to take them out into the world and present them to a specialist audience. So those are the two thoughts I have at the moment. I will discuss this with the doctoral researchers to see what their needs are.

I think that’s two great ideas and of course it’s also great that you then want to discuss this with the doctoral researchers. Can you still remember the first doctoral researchers you supervised and what it was like to suddenly be on the other side and guide someone in their scientific work? And what challenges, but perhaps also what wonderful moments can you remember?

This is quite a good time for this question because next week the first doctoral researcher I have ever supervised will be defending her dissertation. That was a bit of a lengthy process, because maybe I can say something about corona afterwards. This has been a very, very difficult time for Japanologists, especially those who have to conduct field research in Japan. I came to the FU in 2014 to teach at the graduate school and to get involved. That means that I was already involved in teaching doctoral researchers before I was officially allowed to supervise the first doctoral student, so it wasn’t the first time that I was allowed to supervise and advise doctoral researchers.
But being the first doctoral researcher of my own was of course a very intense experience. It wasn’t an easy path for either of us, precisely because of the many ups and downs. At some point, we ran out of funding and then, or actually especially during the pandemic, field research was not possible, so we had to go through some ups and downs together, not only intellectually but also personally.
After all, it wasn’t just the doctoral researchers who were handicapped during this time, but of course also the researchers who were already a bit further along. That affected me just as much as my doctoral researchers. And in this respect, I am very pleased that, despite these many hurdles and obstacles, it has now come to a successful conclusion.

Then I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the defense goes well next week. And I will ask you the question about corona and Japanese studies, but first I would like to talk a little more about doctoral supervision. I would be interested to know how you rate the importance of good supervision for the success of a doctorate.

Well, good supervision helps when there are problems, of course. I assume that most doctoral researchers are motivated to start because they are interested in working on a research topic in depth. This means that intrinsic motivation is usually very strong, especially at the beginning. But then, of course, such a doctorate proceeds in phases. Before the field research, most doctoral researchers are still in relatively good spirits, optimistically happy that they are now doctoral researchers. Especially in connection with the graduate school, you get to know a lot of new people, the Dahlem Research School offers fabulous workshops and then suddenly you’re all alone in the field.
And it may not work out the way you had imagined. Maybe nobody wants to conduct interviews, maybe access to the field is difficult. There are all kinds of intercultural problems that can arise and perhaps personal problems, loneliness, whatever. And I think it’s important to have good support. So that there is a relationship of trust, that you can turn to your doctoral supervisor to talk about it openly, to address it.
At the same time, however, and this is the strength of the graduate schools, I also point out, for example, that peer groups are very important because doctoral students never have this experience alone. And then simply getting support from other doctoral researchersis important. Interestingly, however, sometimes doctoral candidates in this situation don’t even realize that this is a possibility and that they can provide the impetus. And this also applies to the other phase after the field research, which is often very enjoyable, actually analyzing and writing the data. It’s quite a lonely process at your desk, after you’ve been on the road a lot and perhaps had some great adventures, to then say „make writing social“, i.e. write together, get together in writing groups, meet up, you don’t have to go through it alone. That’s an impulse that a good tutor should also give.
And of course I read everything I receive and comment on it openly and honestly. And of course that prevents situations in which a dissertation is submitted and then perhaps fails because nobody looked at it beforehand.

Yes, I agree with you 100 percent. Both in terms of the fact that you don’t have to do a doctorate alone. I always say that you don’t have to do a doctorate alone, just write your thesis alone. But also that it is good to exchange ideas with each other and that the supervisor is not the only person who can provide support.
Do you think there are also areas where it is not appropriate for them to provide support, where you say that the person doing the doctorate has to do it alone?

I see a doctorate as a process in which you learn to conduct research independently. And that of course also means that you have to establish contacts in the field independently and of course be able to work independently with the data and acquire certain methodological skills yourself, for example, if you don’t have them.
Of course, there are all kinds of offers for this, which I can also point out. But the work of data collection and data analysis can, of course, only be carried out independently by the doctoral student with support.

In my experience, the vast majority of doctoral candidates have problems with the fact that they don’t have enough accountability, i.e. commitment. Have you established structures to regularly review the progress of your doctoral students or do you say that this is now an area that is their responsibility?

Here I would differentiate a little between doctoral researchers at the graduate school, who are ultimately committed to themselves and their sponsor, and doctoral students who are working on a research project. I have to write a report at the end and I have to present the results and they are employed directly by me. I make sure that certain milestones are met or achievements are made. More so than with doctoral researchers, who can actually work on a free topic at the graduate school. But if I don’t hear anything for a while, I ask. At the same time, the graduate school also has milestones. So sometimes papers are due or literature reports and things like that, so you have to be careful that the doctoral researchers don’t get lost.

If you had to describe in one sentence what kind of supervisor you are or would like to be, what would that sentence be?


Good supervision means that you adapt to the needs of the doctoral candidates.

And thinking the other way around, what does your ideal doctoral researchers look like? What expectations do you have of them? What skills should they have, but perhaps also what human values?


Yes, ideally doctoral candidates are creative, passionate about their subject, interested and full of a thirst for knowledge and ideally friendly and cooperative.

That’s a bit different for everyone. I think your colleagues would perhaps give a different answer, but that’s exactly right. If you think back to your own doctoral studies, what influence do you think your relationship with your supervisor(s) back then had on how you work with doctoral researchers today and how you lead and guide them?

I myself did my doctorate in a Research Training Group and I can say that I really appreciated this experience of working together, and in some cases suffering through the doctoral period. That’s why it’s so important to me to encourage doctoral students today to get together with their peers, with their fellow researchers, to exchange ideas, perhaps even to plan their first publications together, to organize workshops. And perhaps also to be aware that these are the networks that may endure and become important in the future, regardless of whether they work in academia or perhaps outside academia.


Do you see a change in the function of supervisors of doctoral researchers? Do you think that supervision is different today than it was perhaps ten or 20 years ago?

Well, I only have one German doctoral researcher, all the others are international doctoral candidates. And I think that, on the one hand, there is certainly a change over time, but on the other hand, there are also different doctoral cultures that we have to deal with. I think that the expectations of supervisors are sometimes very different from what I experienced myself. I had a lot of freedom. I also didn’t expect my doctoral supervisor to read everything I sent. I always knew that the professors I was dealing with at the time were all very busy.
Today, the expectation is more that doctoral researchers want to play it safe in my opinion, prefer to ask again, want to be absolutely sure that they are going in the right direction, don’t make any mistakes. And I would perhaps also like to see a little more self-confidence and a little more freedom to be creative and solve the problem yourself first, or perhaps with the help of peers. In other words, to dare to be more proactive again.

I find it very exciting that you have just mentioned that your working group or the group of doctoral researchers that you supervise is very international. How do you deal with the fact that there are perhaps very different expectations and approaches?


This is a work in progress. Our working language is English. And we come across problems from time to time that I would never have thought of. The only thing we can do is to talk openly with each other and explain how the German university system works, perhaps also how the job market works, and hope that the next problem, which is sure to come, will be addressed just as openly. And I believe that a basis of trust and direct communication is also important here. Sometimes that works more, sometimes less well.

But all your doctoral researchers are on site with you in Berlin when you’re not doing field research in Japan?


Yes and no. So perhaps we will also have to address the tiresome issue of funding. Some of the doctoral researchers whose scholarships or positions have expired and who are not yet finished are no longer on site. So at the moment I’m in a phase where only three of the doctoral researchers are still here on site, two are no longer, so in principle we are now doing more of what we practiced during the pandemic, namely communicating online. At the same time, these are also the strategies that we practiced during the field research. In this respect, it no longer seems so unusual to me, but is really, really helpful.


Let’s stay directly on the subject of funding. What challenges do you see, or perhaps you have seen, during corona, but also now in particular?

Yes, first of all, scholarships are of course rare, especially for foreign students. The graduate school where I am a PI receives DAAD scholarships and China Scholarship Council scholarships, but these are not available to everyone interested in doing a doctorate, for example not to German citizens. And secondly, you can of course raise third-party funds to supervise doctoral researchers. But these then expire. This means that the duration of a doctorate is clearly limited, usually to three years. And for projects with intensive field research, this is actually relatively unrealistic and almost impossible to achieve. And that’s why it would of course be nice if the FU were to put a little more money into the graduate schools if it wants good doctoral researchers, but also good supervision.

Could one solution then also be to narrow down the projects? In other words, not to do without field research, but to make the project smaller overall?

Yes, but a doctorate should also have a certain level. You certainly have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. Generally speaking, you never use all the data that you bring back from field research. Even if it’s tempting, of course, it won’t work. It’s also my job to curb some of the enthusiasm, to say, look what you have here, you can actually leave it as it is and save the rest for papers. But in the end, it just takes time. We work with Japanese informants, Japanese-language sources. So on the one hand, we have to take the foreign language component into account.
And on the other hand, field research is also something that you can’t plan well if there are problems somehow, that you can’t get access to the field, that the timing is perhaps also bad because it’s a time when no one can talk to you. Then you have to be a bit creative. I think the pandemic has also opened up many new opportunities for us that we perhaps hadn’t even considered before, namely that you can also conduct online interviews, that you can even do digital ethnography.
So these are all newer methods that, I believe, also benefit doctoral researchers. At the same time, what you just mentioned, namely the problem of too much data, does not solve the problem at all, but actually increases the amount of data and many doctoral researchers naturally feel overwhelmed by it, and here it is important to try to narrow things down by talking to each other.

Do you do that in addition then, the online interviews for example, or could that also replace the field research on site?


That depends on the topic. I have a project that I am currently supervising, which is mainly about what policymakers say about rural revitalization policies, so I don’t think you have to be on site. There are also a lot of written sources, policy papers and so on. But if you want to find out how people do certain things in their everyday lives, then it makes a lot of sense to be on the ground. We have now done a lot of hybrid ethnography. This means that we conducted online field research during the pandemic and were able to go back into the field afterwards.
And it’s very interesting to observe the differences. In other words, what you learn when you look at the online representation of various practices or online practices and what you don’t see. For example, sometimes you don’t even notice that people might be neighbors because it’s never been an issue. And many things that you would otherwise not even notice, you can actually only notice on site. That’s why I would argue in favor of maintaining field research, on-site.

Yes, you’ve just said a lot about the situation during corona. Perhaps we can still talk a little more in detail about what the particular challenges were in your field, i.e. in Japanese Studies, during the pandemic and how you dealt with them?

Yes, with pleasure. Japan is one of the few countries where there was a complete ban on non-citizens entering the country between 2020 and 2022. Our project started in October 2020, so it was a challenge to get the doctoral researchers to Berlin in the first place. After a week in which I think we actually saw each other here on site, there was a new lockdown and we were really only able to meet online for six months.
That was of course difficult for many reasons. On the one hand for motivation, but also of course for getting to know each other. And especially for international doctoral researchers who were new to Berlin, it also meant that they didn’t get to know anyone and felt quite alone.
I then tried to solve this with a study group. We met online, sometimes every week during the pandemic. Since all of my doctoral researchers have something to do with migration and rural Japan, it worked out quite well and we invited more and more people or they somehow found us, so the study group became bigger and bigger, and more international.

And then we started a blog at the same time, so that the doctoral researchers, even if they couldn’t go into the field yet, could at least start writing small posts about what they had already read and what we had discussed, which helped them to get into writing, so that there was simply the feeling that a text was being created. And of course it was also a very good exercise. But there were always crises. The Japanese government briefly opened the borders, but closed them again immediately afterwards. This naturally led to a lot of uncertainty and increased psychological stress in the group.
And then we simply tried to support each other. We organized a small online Christmas party. So it was really more about giving social encouragement again and again and reminding people how we could perhaps carry out the project by other means. And then we came up with these digital tools. And that was good that we were able to continue the project at all, that the doctoral researchers were able to continue their doctorates, even if they were fortunately all able to travel to Japan again for real field research in 2022.

And what delays did this cause? For some, it must have been almost two years, if you actually wanted to fly there at the time when the borders were closed?

Yes, that is not yet entirely foreseeable. We now have some work that is still in progress. I think it will take one to two years. There’s also parenthood, which often happens during a doctorate. In this respect, several factors have come together that have been challenging. But the great thing is that I also saw how wonderfully the doctoral researchers coped in the end, even though they may not have felt that way when it was difficult. So I think we really made the best of it and, above all, discovered new methods that we wouldn’t have thought of before. And I think we all grew together. And I thought that was very, very nice.

So in the end, the result was a positive one, even if the general conditions weren’t exactly ideal.

Well, if you now apply the criterion of rapid completion, then certainly not. But when it comes to intellectual growth, then I would say yes.

Yes, and above all, you have now described it in such a way that you have developed strategies and methods that can be continued and are conceivable in the future, perhaps only as a supplement, which you would not have thought of before.
Fortunately, there was no pandemic during your own doctorate. What was the biggest challenge you faced during your own doctorate?

Well, I already had one child when I started my doctorate and then had a second and then my scholarship came to an end at some point. And then I had a full-time job in the last year in another city and basically finished my doctorate on the train. I don’t think that was so easy in retrospect. But I think that might be a good thing, because I can then show my doctoral researchers that it’s possible. So yes, perhaps as a positive example, even if ideally everything is a bit easier.

Of course I didn’t know that, that you did your doctorate with two children. Perhaps you have some special advice for doctoral researcher parents?

Very difficult. My general impression is that parents are better organized in their doctoral studies. I believe that the procrastination time is simply not there. In other words, if I can shovel four hours off, then I work more concentrated during those four hours because I don’t know exactly when I’ll have time again. That’s why I believe that doctoral researcher parents, if they have a good support network, are actually not in such a bad position. And of course you have to ensure a work-life balance somehow, find a balance, allow yourself to do nothing for a day.
So I think that’s the biggest problem anyway, that a lot of time is wasted being ashamed that you haven’t done anything. That’s okay. And then you might feel refreshed and get a lot more done. And it’s not just assembly line work. There are days when creativity doesn’t flow and it’s difficult. And then it’s okay to say, okay, I’ll take a break for today and pick my child up from daycare earlier and do something nice and then things will work out better tomorrow. But all the small and big disasters when the child gets sick and there’s a deadline, how to deal with it successfully, I don’t think there’s a magic formula. Unfortunately.

I am a great advocate of taking regular vacations and days off. I mean regularly, every week – not the vacation, but the days off, to simply recharge the batteries and then move forward better and with more energy. How do you see it? Have you ever had to send a doctoral researcher on vacation? Do you say that’s their responsibility? Or how do you talk to your doctoral researchers about the fact that time off can perhaps also be an important thing, and one without a guilty conscience?

Of course, I can’t send anyone on vacation, but there have been situations where doctoral researchers who are extremely exhausted, especially during field research, have given feedback that they can’t do any more. And then, of course, I’ve told them to take a few days off. I see it the same way you do. It’s extremely important. You can’t be creative and productive 24/7. And that’s why these recovery phases are immensely important, especially for creative ideas. I think a lot of people, myself included, have the best ideas in their free time and not when they’re staring desperately at a screen.

Yes, I absolutely agree with you. Is there another important point, an important area that I forgot to mention, that we should definitely talk about today?

Yes, I think it is perhaps important for doctoral researchers, when they are desperate, to simply remember again the passion with which they started the project and the curiosity. I always find it helpful to perhaps take another look at the first synopsis. Most of the time you end up there again in a roundabout way anyway, which I find very interesting. So I think it’s always good to remember why you started, even if it’s difficult at the time. The most important thing is not to lose your passion and enthusiasm for the project.

I think that’s a very nice thing to say at the end. Thank you very much, Professor Reiher, for this interview.

Thank you very much.

OUTRO
If you enjoyed this episode, please listen to the other episodes as well. For example, there are more interviews on the topic of good doctoral supervision that you can listen to and also an episode in which you can find out what you can do as a doctoral candidate to build a good relationship with your supervisor.
This was Dr. Marlies Klamt for the DRS Podcast, the podcast of the Dahlem Research School of Freie Universität Berlin.

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

To decide whether or not a doctorate is the right choice for you is not easy. This episode is meant to assist you in the decision making process. It will explore the pros and cons of doing a doctorate, what kind of motivation can contribute to a happy and successful journey, and other factors you should take into account.

Highlights

„You won’t be the same person after finishing your doctorate as you have been before“

„A pro and con list alone will most likely not help you make your final decision.“

„Distinguish between what you want and what other people think is good for you.“

„Don’t forget that making a decision can also involve setting conditions or exclusions.“

from our episode with co-host Dr. Marlies Klamt

Audio

Download or listen to the audio version of the podcast here.

Links

Find useful links to this and many more topics.

transcript

1. First question. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you enjoy doing scientific work?
2. Second question. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you enjoy reading scientific texts?
3. Third question. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you enjoy scientific writing?
4. Fourth question. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much did you enjoy doing your master’s thesis?
5. Fifth question, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much of your time and energy are you willing to invest in your doctorate?

Your host for this podcast was Dr. Marlies Klamt

In this episode we talk to Dr. Anselm Spindler, a writing coach and workshop facilitator. He shares tips and ideas for how to manage academic writing, how to deal with common challenges when writing your thesis, and what to do if you get stuck. We also talk about some of the writing events the DRS offers and how they might benefit doctoral students.

Highlights

„….share your writing with more people more often and sooner and use other people’s feedback to work on your text and to reflect your writing. Don’t just sit there and work on your own for a very long time and at some point in the end submit it. But yeah, talk to people about your writing and it doesn’t have to be your supervisor or even an expert from your field. In a sense, it could be anyone and it will be useful for your writing process and for your actual text“

from our interview with Dr. Anselm Spindler

Audio

Download or listen to the audio version of the podcast here.

Links

Find useful links on the subject of today’s podcast and more resources for help during your doctorate here.

transcript

Welcome. If you could start off by telling me a little bit about yourself, maybe a little about your background and what you do now.

Yeah, sure. Thank you for inviting me to your podcast. My name is Anselm. I live in Frankfurt, the southern one from your perspective, not the eastern one. And I got my PhD in philosophy. And I also used to work as a research assistant at Goethe University in Frankfurt, where I used to teach and do my research. Nowadays, I’m a freelance coach and workshop instructor, and I mainly work with PhD students who write their dissertations in any one of a broad spectrum of academic disciplines.

Excellent. So, when you think about how you got from doing your doctorate to working as a coach, could you just tell us a little bit about that process or that transition? We’re going to talk about writing in just a moment, but I’d really love to hear a little bit about your career before we get started.

I think the word transition is spot on. It was a big transition for me. At some point during my doctorate, especially in the early stages, I was really thinking and wanting to be in an academic career. So, at some point, I really thought that I will be in the university my whole life basically. And that’s why I’m doing the PhD. But things went a different way. And I went a different way. So it’s a combination of these two factors. And I really enjoy what I’m doing now because I’m still in contact with the academic world. And I really like writing and academic writing specifically. At the same time, I feel I’m in a good place because I am no longer working in the academic world. Because I think it it really wasn’t for me in certain aspects of it anyway. And yeah, it was a big transition.

Thank you. So when you think about writing, what motivated you to work with students who are stuck or having challenges with writing. And maybe you could tell us a little bit about those challenges that doctoral students face. And a little bit about why do you think that this is something that you enjoy working with?

I think the main idea behind my work is that the workshops create a space where you can talk openly and freely about your writing process. And I always felt that this space was missing in the academic world, or at least very rare. People talk a lot about their writing or their text in the academic world, at least in my field in the humanities. But they are typically very complicated and charged situations. So you’re talking, giving a talk at a conference or you’re presenting your work to a funding institution, or you’re talking to your supervisor who will be grading your PhD. And so these situations tend to be a little bit overloaded. And I felt, and it’s my experience from what people report in my workshop, a simple space where you can talk about your writing without having to present your work to others, without being judged or graded is really helpful and is really surprisingly rare in the typical working environment of PhD students and it was in my working environment back then. So the idea was just to create this kind of space.

When students come to you and they say that I’m having trouble with writing or I’m stuck, what’s really happening? What are the problems that they’re facing? It’s a big word, I’m stuck. But what is it really that makes people get stuck when they’re writing?

Yeah, it is a big word, but I think it’s really accurate in the sense that people do feel stuck. And it’s really unpleasant for them. And the roots of the problem are really varied. You have been asking about challenges. In my experience, there are two main challenges, you could say. The first one is – it’s logistical, if you will. So simply finding the time to write in a demanding working environment, which the university is. And the other challenge is a little bit more psychological, I think. It has to do with dealing with expectations. And also with the simple fact that a PhD is a kind of exam. You and your work will be evaluated. And for most people, the stakes are really high in terms of their academic self-understanding, in terms of academic careers. And also in terms of the personal energy and time that they invest. And that can make the writing really difficult because so much is coming together when you’re writing a PhD. It’s not just any old text.

So imagine that I’m a student and I’ve come to you and I have a problem. Maybe I’m having trouble writing the actual text, maybe I’m having trouble finding time. Maybe I feel frustrated as you just said with this feeling of, oh, it’s got to be really good. Do students often know what they’re dealing with, or do they come to you and just say, I don’t know what’s going on?

That’s a really good question. I think, because many people who find that their writing isn’t going as well as they would like, they have a certain tendency to focus on solutions. So what do I need to do in order to get back to into the flow of writing? And I think I find it very understandable because it’s an unpleasant situation to be in. But my approach is to invite people to simply start by talking a little bit to me or to someone else about their problem and really describe it in detail. What is it that’s not working? How often does it happen? What could the possible causes of the problem be? And I think there’s a variety of reasons why people do get stuck and sometimes they are, a bit more mundane. Sometimes they are a bit deeper actually. And it’s really worth spending some time investigating what is my situation, how do I feel? Sometimes people overlook how they feel in a particular situation. And like I said, it’s a challenging working environment and it can have all sorts of effects. I think once you started to investigate a little more closely what the causes of the problem might be, the solutions are really not that difficult to find. It’s more about really spending the time with yourself in a way and explaining yourself and situation to someone. And oftentimes people find those solutions really quickly once they’ve started to describe the problem to someone else.

That sounds like it would be really helpful. And I think it’s something that a lot of people probably deal with, being alone, but having the feeling that there’re not so many people around in their work that they can really talk to about these things. And that brings me to your workshops. So what you described sounds a lot like it would work in a coaching setting of one on one, how does it work when you’re in a group of people? And in these workshops that you have at the Dahlem Research School or in other settings, what do you do to help people who are already facing challenges with their writing?

Yeah, it really is a different setting if you compare it to the coaching, like one on one situation. And there are different workshops for different challenges, in a sense. So I’m offering workshops on specific writing techniques, for instance, and also on specific parts of the text like the introduction and the conclusion. And also, a workshop on self-organization and academic writing, which in my mind includes writer’s block and procrastination. In my mind these are connected with the broader topic of self-organization. But what my workshops have in common is on the one hand that they are really based on a practical approach so people have a chance to work on their current writing project in the workshop in one way or another. So they typically make some progress with their actual project, and it’s not just theory input to take home. And another thing is that the workshops are designed in such a way that people have the chance to get quite a lot of feedback and input for their specific writing project and their specific situation. Input from me and feedback from me, but also from their peers. And that’s the third point I’d like to make. I’m working under the assumption that the people who come to my workshops are already experienced academic authors. They have written texts, they have acquired quite a lot of knowledge about academic writing in their field, they have a lot of experience already, so they’re not beginners. Part of the idea of the workshop is to really mobilize that experience and share it with others in order to decide what the next steps in my project might be. And a lot of it is already there because people bring so much into the workshops, in terms of writing strategies, things they’ve tried out. Maybe they did work, maybe they didn’t work, but maybe it works for someone else. And so it’s a lot about sharing experience and getting feedback from other people who are also academic professionals and academic authors.

I really love that. I think that is so important also for so many researchers early in their career really second guess themselves. And I love the idea of having them support each other because I think that also, as you said, gives them the idea, reminds them that they really are experts in their fields and not all just at the very beginning. You have tons of knowledge and experience already even at the beginning of your PhD.

And also, I think it connects to what you said earlier that many people who write their PhD have the feeling that they are maybe not isolated but basically working on their own. Which may be also have to do with the fact that in academic working culture the idea is that you have to do it on your own, which is not mistaken, obviously, but it can lead to a feeling that you’re really alone with your problems and in my workshops and probably in yours as well, people discover that other people, sometimes from completely different academic fields are really struggling with the same problems. That feels good in itself. And you can also share the burden of looking for solutions. You don’t have to come up with all the solutions by yourself.

That is so important. And really, I think one of the aims of the workshops at the Dahlem Research School and in the Berlin University Alliance altogether is to get everybody to come together and experience and see we’re not alone, and there’s so much that you have in common with others, even if you feel like you’re really stuck and alone. And so that is one of the things why I really like to encourage people to come to the writing week or the retreat. And for the writing week a benefit of it is that you can join unlike the retreat at any point in your doctorate, that’s correct, right? Do you want to tell us a little bit about the writing week and what you do there?

Yeah, sure. It’s a full week. It consists of, on the one hand, writing workshops slot, rather short three-hour writing workshops on different topics that have to do with academic writing or different aspects of academic texts. And in the afternoon, it’s basically writing time for the people. The participants actually work on their texts in writing groups or writing tandems. And they can also attend coaching sessions there, which take place in parallel to the writing sessions. That’s the main idea to have some input and workshops and exercises on academic writing on one hand. And on the other hand, it may sound simple, but just time to write. And to also have connected time to write like a full week. A lot can be done in a full week and typically in their everyday life, these kinds of weeks are, for many people rather rare. They do a lot of stuff in the university and the university is very good at inviting people into all sorts of projects and attending talks and then sometimes it’s difficult to have a concentrated block of time for your writing. In my mind, it’s a way of really prioritizing your writing. My writing project is really important. That’s why I’m spending the full week on it. And that’s what the writing week in my view is really good for.

Can you tell us a little more about tandems? You mentioned that before, but I would love to hear about that. And maybe a little bit about why you think they’re useful and helpful for doctoral students.

I find that question really interesting because my impression is that sometimes people have different views about why they are useful. One thing some people say very quickly is that a writing group or writing tandem is good because it stimulates their discipline, so they stick to whatever their writing plan was. And to be honest I’m rather skeptical of the term discipline in this context because it suggests to me anyway that people are somehow unwilling to do their academic work. And that’s just something I don’t see. It’s people are doing a lot of stuff and they are certainly not lazy and that’s somehow in my mind connected to the idea of discipline. What I think, and that’s my alternative suggestion, an alternative to the discipline discourse, if you will, I think writing groups and writing tandems provide structure and resonance. And by structure, it is very simply, when will I write this week and for how long? And by resonance, is there anyone out there paying attention to what I’m doing? And I think many people who have difficulties in their writing project. They are not lacking discipline, but they are lacking and what they want is structure and resonance. Some feedback from other authors and really some structure in which to work. And if I can add just one more thought to this. Many people many PhD students are also engaged in teaching. So they’re teaching seminars and obviously and naturally they have an arranged time for the seminar. So my seminar is on Thursdays at 10 o’clock and that’s very natural because they want others to come to the seminar. And for some reason people don’t do that as often for their writing. So why not say my writing time is on Tuesdays from 10 to 12. These kinds of structures are really helpful to support continual writing habits and a writing group is the easiest way to do it because it’s fun to meet others, you have a chance to talk, you don’t feel alone. It’s very easy to arrange in times of video calls. And yeah, it’s just another way of sharing the burden of self-organization.

That’s fantastic. I love this idea that students shouldn’t think that they don’t have this discipline because I hear this a lot in my work as well. People say I’m good at this. I’m bad at self-organization or, I don’t know what I want from my life and my career. And I often think, how much time have you given yourself to actually sit down and think about these things? Or do you have time to be organized? If you don’t give yourself the time, then it can be a huge challenge. It doesn’t mean that you’re not good at it. I think this is so important. And so I want to pick that back up. It’s not that you’re not doing a good job. It’s that you’re so busy that you haven’t actually have to sit down and make space for writing in order to be able to say that you are stuck.

Yeah.

I want to ask you, what would you suggest? What kind of, we mentioned a lot of mindset, ideas or how would you change the way you think about it? Are there, setting time aside and maybe a writing group, other techniques or tools that you would suggest that students try if they’ve gotten stuck? Anything else where you’d say this, maybe one or two small things or big things that you say would be worth trying out if they feel like they’re having trouble writing?

I’ll start with my favorite one. I’m not sure if it works really well for most people, but for some people in my experience, and it’s creative writing. And it’s something that academics, in my experience, don’t do so often. And it’s something that is not just fun to do, but I think the deeper truth behind it, if you will, is that writing really is a matter of training. So if you see an academic who is pretty good at writing something, an academic text, under pretty much all circumstances, like between two seminars or between a seminar and a conference, I have one and a half hours to spare and some people are able to write something during these one and a half hours. And it’s not that they are geniuses. They might be, but I think they have a lot of experience and a lot of training. It’s a bit like like juggling or speaking French. The more often you do it and the more stuff you try out, the easier it gets. And this is also true, I think, of the transition from non-writing to writing, and that’s what many people find difficult. And creative writing, just, for instance, writing a short story, a really short one, just without any preparation, just gets you into the flow of writing, the words begin to come, and then it might be easier to work on an academic text. And it also introduces it may introduce some variety into your writing just like trying out stuff with really low stakes. And it’s fun, and I think it’s instructive.

What ideas do you have to get someone to start doing creative writing that maybe has never done that before? Because that sounds like a really great way to get into writing if you’re maybe having some trouble with it to take the pressure off of it. What are some things that you might suggest that students could do who don’t know where to start? And they say, oh, creative writing, that sounds great, but how do I do it?

That’s a great question because it has to do with creative writing specifically, but I think it’s also connected to an interesting aspect of academic writing. I think what’s really challenging is the situation where you are sitting in front of an empty sheet of paper and you have a pen and you think now I’m going to write something creative. And this in itself can be a really challenging situation because like you said, you don’t know where to start. And what I find makes this transition from not writing to writing easier is to provide some structure and a specific task just in order to get started. For instance when I do creative writing in my workshops, there are really strict time limits. Sometimes one of the exercises we do is called five-word stories and it’s short stories that people write in 90 seconds, which is an amazingly short amount of time. And the good thing is that you don’t have time to think too much. You simply begin to write and that’s actually what most academics or many academics in my experience find really difficult to simply start writing without thinking first. Oh, I have to read 68 books about the topic before I can even begin to think about writing, then I have to come up with a really good project outline and so on and so forth, which is in for academic writing. It’s the natural process but it can make it really difficult to connect with your creativity and to say, I’m simply going to start writing something and I will later look at it and see what needs improving or what might still be missing. Just setting yourself and coming back to creative writing, setting yourself small and simple and doable tasks. Yeah, a short story, for instance, which contains five keywords that you’ve picked earlier. And it makes it easier to choose from the infinite variety of possibilities that are out there. And once you have more experience, you could decide to write more freely and just go to the park with your notebook and write whatever comes to your mind.

I have a question about this idea of just writing. I know a lot of people when they start or they said, Okay, when I started writing, I felt stuck because I was thinking. Okay, this has to be really good, and I have to use it. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the benefit or not ,however you see it, of writing. Stuff that you’re going to get rid of, needs everything that I write to be good or is it okay, in academic writing if I find myself writing tons of material that I don’t use or is that not a good approach. What do you think about that?

Again, that’s a good question and a difficult one, I think, because on the one hand this idea that my text has to be really good and it has to be a text that others approve of my fellow researchers, the fellow experts in my field. I want them to maybe, even if they don’t agree with me, agree with what I want to say specifically. I want them to say that the text is simply good academic quality. And this expectation, which is justified, makes sense in the system, but it can really block up your creativity and really limit the scope of possibilities that you even consider in your research. And maybe you have tons of ideas, but you’re really narrowing down the range because you think all people won’t like that. And that’s a silly thought and it’s not going to work anyway. And getting yourself to simply start writing might be a way of exploring these possibilities and only later to really edit the text and produce what will be the finished product. And I think that’s only one side of the issue. The other is you mentioned that some people choose to write a lot of stuff that they will not use in the end. I find that a really useful technique. Partly because you’re probably be writing in two documents, if you will, literally or metaphorically. So you’re writing stuff under the assumption that not necessarily everything of it has to go into the finished text. And this can make it easier to explore things and to really find what you want to say in the writing process. And sometimes people get stuck because they are writing text under the assumption that the actual sentences they are writing will be the ones that the readers will later read and evaluate. And this adds a lot of stress to the writing process. And I think it can help to really divide the different stages of the writing process and say, I’m in the early stages. It’s about exploration and not about polishing the text or revising the text or checking it for mistakes. And yeah, that can help get into the flow of writing and really explore your ideas. And at the same time, there’s one more thought I’d like to share because some people also do use this technique of producing a lot of text and then they themselves in a situation where they have produced a ton of notes and find it really difficult to decide what goes into the text and what not – what does not go into the text and this too can be a real challenge too, if you overdo it with this technique and, so to speak, if you reduce a lot of notes, you might feel lost at some point snd may make it more difficult to come up with a text that leaves certain things out. For some people it’s hard to leave stuff aside.

I really enjoyed hearing you talk about the possibilities of doing things maybe one way or another way and I think that’s really important for students to hear because it’s often possible for students to feel like, „I’m doing it this way, but someone else is doing it that way. And am I doing it the right way?“ or, „I’m writing a lot and my colleague is only writing when they know exactly what they’re going to say.“ And I think that it’s good to hear from others that there are many ways to get to the same goal. And in connection to that, I would love to know the answer to a question. There are a lot of students in my workshops that come up and ask me, „What digital tools do you use?“ I get asked, „I don’t do writing workshops, but I get asked this question a lot anyway. What writing tools should I use? And how should I approach tools?“ And I would love to hear from you a little bit about what you think about writing tools. Do you have digital tools that you love to work with and that you suggest students test out or try, or are you more of a pen and paper person, and what do you think the benefit is of both of those or either of those?

I get that question too, in my workshops: „Which tools can I use?“ or „Should I use even?“ And I believe that you should use the tools that are useful for the specific task you have or for the specific challenge that you want to overcome. And I have two examples for that. The first one is the difference between handwriting and machine writing, if you will. You were talking about handwriting in your question, and I think it is a useful tool or it can be. Writing by hand in specific situations, because one feature of machine writing with my computer or with my laptop, is that I have the ability to edit my text while I’m writing it, and I still have a clean document. It still looks very good. And if I do that in handwriting, if I keep crossing out words and then writing something new, it gets messy really quickly. And one way to take advantage of this difference could be that you say it’s a good thing in handwriting that I can’t edit my text all the time. And that could help me to tell my inner critic to spend some time in the cafe and come back later. And during that time, I have time just to write something and to write a complete version of the text before going back and rereading it and editing the text. Handwriting can really help to differentiate between different stages in the writing process. The second example that I thought of is collaborative writing where you’re writing a text together with others. And there’s a ton of digital tools out there for this and they all have different features. In my view, it’s really useful to spend some time in the group to figure out which tool is best suited for the writing purpose and the kind of group you are. Maybe you want to work in a document simultaneously. Then there are some tools that provide this service or this function and others that don’t. So make your choice on the basis of the kind of task that is ahead of you and the kind of group you are. That would be my general thoughts on writing tools. Try to describe what you need and then pick your tool.

I think this is great advice. I feel like it’s really easy to get excited about all these apps that are out there. And then, in the end, do we actually need all of the functions? This is a huge issue in productivity. You can really easily feel like, „Okay, now I’ve got to learn this app and I don’t actually need it, or do I even need all the things that it’s offering me?“ So fantastic.

Can I add something to this? Because you’re making a really important point, in my view, because sometimes it is suggested that these tools are useful and making things easier, but sometimes it’s the opposite. They make things a bit more difficult, and it’s only later in the process that I even know or learn about that. And one example that just came to my mind is that I once had a PhD student, or she was a postdoc actually whhen she was in my workshop, and we were talking about digital writing tools. And she said that she was writing her PhD with Google Docs and it was really late in the process when she discovered that it’s not possible to download the document once you have crossed a certain number of pages, and it caused her several heart attacks and it was nerve-wracking. She only discovered it really late in the process and it can be really unpleasant. And just the thought of having all your text deleted because of some software glitch is terrible. And so like you say, it’s not evident that all the programs help all the time. So it’s a really good idea to think about what do you want it to do, and which software really does what you do want it to do.

This is very important advice and a good approach. I think a solid approach to digital tools. So I have just two more questions for you. And the first one is. What do people say when they leave your workshops? And I’m going to ask you this, I know it’s a little bit of a challenging question to answer as a trainer, as a workshop facilitator, but I think sometimes students are hesitant to participate in workshops because they don’t know what am I going to leave with knowing how to do. What takeaways do your participants have when they leave your workshop? What do they say about their writing process or about their experience?

One thing many people do is point to a specific writing technique or an idea or a tool that they learned about or rediscovered in the workshop, and they say that was really useful for where I am right now in my writing process. And what most people say actually is that it was a good group experience for them. It renewed their motivation to work and think about their writing project. It’s a lot of encouragement and a lot of feedback they take away. And just a lot of inspiration, and that’s typically what’s coming from the group as a whole and not simply or even mostly from me as a workshop instructor. And that’s actually what most people say. It was a good group experience and it connected me again to my writing and my research.

That’s great. And I think I would say it is not always easy to do that. So I would say it does come from you as a trainer and that also underlines what you said earlier about the importance of working together in groups or group experience of talking to each other about writing. That’s great. So I have one more, my very final question for you. We usually like to ask our guests on the podcast if they were to go back to the beginning of their own experience in writing or in the university or in your case in your doctorate if you could give yourself advice. So you’re time traveling back to the very beginning, what advice would you give yourself, maybe about the writing process. Maybe about the whole thing from where you are today. And obviously we can’t change what we do in the past, but what would you tell yourself if you could time travel?

Let me think about that. Maybe, yeah, there’s a number of things, but the one that stands out really is to share your writing with more people more often and sooner and use other people’s feedback to work on your text and to reflect your writing. Don’t just sit there and work on your own for a very long time and at some point in the end submit it. Talk to people about your writing and it doesn’t have to be your supervisor or even an expert from your field. In a sense, it could be anyone and it will be useful for your writing process and for your actual text.

Thank you very much and thank you for the wonderful advice that you’ve given.

This interview was conducted by the co-host of our podcast Amanda Wichert

In this episode, we’ll hear from Anna Figoluschka, Founder Advisor, and Teresa Kollakowski, technology transfer officer at Profund Innovation at the Freie Universität Berlin. Learn what the transfer offices at the university can do for you as a researcher and find out about the benefits of having a chat with the transfer office team even if you don’t already have a clear idea of how to bring your research to the market. We also talk about how fields like social science and humanities can benefit from transfer support at the university. Listen or read the transcript below!

Highlights

„I guess, everyone who is in science or who’s doing his or her PhD right now, at least I imagine, is in science because he or she wants to have an impact. They want to invent something or find out some new things and make the world a better place. I know that’s quite often used phrase. But yeah, if you want to have an impact, society and the market need to know about your results. They have to get out of the drawer next to your desk and come to the public. And so, we will support you with that either in the way of bringing you together with companies or to support you to found your own company.“

from our interview with Profund Innovation

Audio

Download or listen to the audio version of the podcast here.

Links

Find useful links and information on life after the doctorate here.

transcript

I’m so excited to be here today with you guys. I’m going to just ask you to briefly introduce yourselves and tell me a little bit about who you are and why you’re here with us. I’ll start with you.

Teresa: Hello, I’m Teresa Kolakowski, working as technology transfer officer at Freie Universität Berlin at Profund Innovation. I support industry-university collaborations and help researchers to get in contact with enterprises.

Anna: Hello. I’m Anna Figulushka. I’m Founder Advisor at Profund Innovation, Freie Universität Berlin. I’m there for any student or alumni or PhD candidates who would like to find out if they want to found a startup. They can come up to me and I will try to find a funding program or will try to give them advice on a business model.

That sounds very exciting. I want to just start off with this question: What is Profund and what is transfer? What do you do?

Anna: I can start with the Profund Innovation institution. We are there for the transfer of research ideas into society and economy. And to find interesting and good ideas in the university and outside of the university that may be the right ideas to found a company with. So we support any researcher who comes up to us and finds a connection to our own university, to see whether they can found a startup. We are a team of almost eight people that work in different areas of that topic, either innovation management or transfer management or startup support. We have a huge, nice building in Dahlem, close to the Freie Universität, which has 25 offices for startups and labs where researchers can still try to find the right formula for their idea and where we give them support of different kinds: their workshops or coaching or an office space to work together with their team. That’s what we do.

If you guys could maybe just tell me really briefly: What is transfer?

Teresa: So I would say in general transfer means we have knowledge and technology transfer in the meaning of bringing your research results into society and/or the market. That you don’t just stay in your scientific community, scientific bubble, but that you make your knowledge accessible for other persons, for the public, for people like you and me.
That you can do either in the way of working together with other stakeholders or in the way of founding your own company.

I would love to kind of ask you guys how you got into this and I want to start with you, Teresa. How did you get into the topic of working on transfer and why is this an important topic for you?

Teresa: Thanks for that question. Well, in my master’s degree I studied science and technology studies at Humboldt University, which was about scientific results and what we are doing with them. How to generate them and what does science do for society. After that it was quite clear for me to work at a university, at a place where scientific knowledge is produced, where I can work with scientists, researchers.
So I started working as Grant Advisor at Freie Universität four years ago. There I was responsible for the Department of Veterinary Medicine and the Department of Biology, Pharmacy, and Chemistry, and supported the researchers to apply for funding at the DFG Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or the BMBF Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung for a European grant. All the stuff you can imagine that researchers have to deal with every day. I really liked that job, but I always asked myself what’s happening after that. So you have this three years project and what’s coming next. What do you do with the results? How to get it into society, into the market.
And then I saw this open position at Profund Innovation and thought: Okay, that’s my chance to change the position and support researchers not only with the grants and the basic research, but to also help them to bring their ideas, their results into the society market and do something with it, to have a use case, have an application. Do not just publish it in journals, but bring a product into the market or in the health sector, to do something good for society and heal infections or anything.

Thanks. It’s very important because in our podcast series we’ve talked to a lot of people about the challenges of the academic job market. I really like to bring this idea that there are many ways to have a career even if you go into research. And I think this is a really interesting option for researchers who are thinking about what do I do after my PhD or after my doctorate. So I’d love to hear from you, Anna, as well. What got you into this topic? What made you want to work on this with students at the university?

Anna: Well, I didn’t study at Freie Universität Berlin, but I studied communication design. And I guess that is something that made me, or influenced me in that way that I always thought I want to work on something new or find something new. That’s what designers do. They find and they organize ideas. Sowhat I did afterwards were many steps. I worked at a pharmaceutical company. I worked for an IT service company and I founded three companies as well. The last one was an app and that’s almost six years ago. Since four years I’m at Profund Innovation and I’m supporting startups. Mainly startups coming from Freie Universität. Well, ideas that evolved from research at Freie Universität, but also any others can draw a connection. That is why I’m here and I’m really happy, that it’s such a creative work. Because on the way the idea may change and I’m always happy when it comes to a complete new perspective and to find a niche in the market.

So when we think about transfer in general and this idea of starting a startup, what do you think you would say if there was a researcher, an early career researcher, who says: I see no connection between what I’m doing right now. I’m in a lab. How do I not have any cool ideas. So how is this relevant for me? What would you tell them to help them to understand to come to you guys, or maybe even that it’s worth having a conversation about transfer?

Teresa: Actually, it’s always good having a conversation because we have innovation scouts in our team. They help you to identify the innovation potential and use cases or applications that you might not have in mind because you’re thinking only of your lab or the researchers in your field. Our innovation managers will be happy to invite you for a coffee here, have a conversation, ask you if have you ever imagined that someone from another field could be interested in your results, because maybe it helps them to improve their ideas. And then, yes, sometimes you get new inputs. For instance, we had one researcher from the department of earth science working with dust in the atmosphere. And she always thought: Well, I’m doing basic research and there isn’t any application for that. But with the help of our innovation manager, we identified photovoltaic is quite interesting because the technique doesn’t work if dust is on the PVC. So that’s a use case she never thought of before. And now we think of working together with a company or bringing up a project together.

That’s a fantastic example. I would love to hear if there are any other examples that you guys can think of where people came to you and maybe really had a hard time imagining this connection between startups or developing a cool idea outside of research. And they were able to come out with maybe not even a startup idea, but just a new idea, a benefit to them talking to you guys.

Anna: Yes, I can think of another idea. There was one PhD candidate. She was at the Department of Linguistics at Freie Universität, at the Department of Romanian Philology. She was working on parts of words and found out that the pronunciation in Vietnamese is so very difficult, so different to other languages and it’s so difficult for Vietnamese to learn German. And she developed a way how to teach Vietnamese people to learn German. And then she met her later co-founder. He was a data scientist and he said, „Oh, it’s possible to train an AI on how to learn German and make Vietnamese people learn German quicker.“ And so they worked together and now found a company called Silbi. And they’re training their AI model successfully and now found investors to invest in the company. That’s another example. And, of course, we know many more because there are coming a lot of ideas into our office.

Very cool. Say, I am really new to this idea about coming up with an idea, and I’m not really sure, about how this might work. What process would I go through if I come to you? What might that look like to develop an idea into something long term?

Anna: As Teresa already mentioned, first it is maybe a coffee with the innovation managers on like: Hey, I’m working on a project at the lab or wherever in the university. Then the innovation manager would say: Hey, I’ve got a connection to an existing company, or why don’t you work in the area of renewable energies, for instance? And then, someone would come to me and we could already work on a business case, on a business model. We normally use the business model canvas, which is a training or model to easily evaluate whether your idea does fit into a market. You will find out whether there’s a target group. You will find out what stakeholders are there, which interest groups, and who would pay for the product in the end. What else needs to be done? Does it need development? Maybe a data scientist works on the development of the product or does it need a lab, or is it hardware which you need to be connected to any company in our network? We provide you with all kinds of contacts. We kind of give you homework and meet up again and again until we think: Alright, now it’s a good point to find the matching funding program. And there are quite a few different ones. There are different ones for the transfer part than for the startup part. For instance, for startup ideas there’s the Berlin Startup Stipendium. It’s a program that is for early-stage ideas. When you’ve already found: Yes, there’s the market for my idea. And you know already: Okay, I need to work on a prototype to test it in the market., then the Berlin Startup Stipendium is a really good thing. You get a grant, a stipend for up to four team members for half a year or even for 12 months. That’s around 2,300 euros. You get workshops and a lot of support from us and you get connected to our big ecosystem, which I haven’t mentioned yet. We call it Science and Startup. It’s the ecosystem of all three Berlin universities in cooperation with Charité. And we at Freie Universität Berlin have the healthcare and prevention startups in our cluster. There are two other clusters, which are technologies and materials. That’s of course connected to Technical University. And sustainability and society is connected to Humboldt University. And in cooperation with Charité we do the healthcare part. And then there’s another funding program. It’s called EXIST. There is the EXIST Founders Business Grant, which is a stipend for 12 months, which supports teams for up to three team members with a stipend of up to 3,000 euros for PhDs and material money of 30,000 euros and coaching money of 5,000 euros. And during the projects the teams are always in our house and our startup Villa and/or in other houses of other university and incubators, depending on where they apply. They have an office in the house and get access to all kinds of lab spaces and conference rooms. They get connected with mentors, coaches, and experts.

So it sounds like a lot of possibilities for people who are thinking about this. Do I need business knowledge? Like, do I have to be someone who really feels like an entrepreneur or is it possible to do this if I feel like that I’m not really sure how businessy I am. Or maybe I have one foot still in research and I’m kind of thinking about it.

Anna: Well, I’ve met quite a few researchers who started a business without having done business before. So it’s good if you are driven. I mean, if you’ve got the energy to do it. Because doing or starting a startup is kind of starting anew, like new studies at university. It’s like a whole new thing. And you need to have some energy, but best case is that you wear all hats: You’re the idea giver and you’re the business guy and you know marketing and sales. But that’s not very often the case. More often it is that you find other team members who are experienced in business or sales or marketing and we help find additional team members. It’s possible to post a job offer at the university or at our network and it’s mostly possible to find a person that fits into the team.

It sounds like you really don’t have to be the business person if you want to try this out. And it sounds like you’d be able to test it out a little bit, get to know you guys and you don’t have to decide right away that you want to do a whole startup. So I have a second question. And that would be. Imagine that I get involved and I start developing an idea. Maybe I go all the way through this startup founding or come up with this business idea, but it’s not successful. What benefit do I have as a researcher for trying this out? And maybe I tried out during my PhD or during my early postdoc phase. What is the benefit of it? If I don’t succeed, what do I get out of that?

Anna: Well, in my opinion, it is really like another education that you went through. And like you’ve had an upgrade on your education. That’s an experience that you will always need because you’ve been able to build up a network that you will probably keep for a long time and you will always be able to get back to people you met during starting up a business. And of course, if it didn’t work, maybe you will try again. Because that’s what a lot of people do. They fail once and try it again and do it better the next time. So that is, I think, what you get out of it.

Teresa: I wanted to add, that if you’re more into the transfer perspective from industry-university collaboration then founding your own startup, I guess that it’s quite similar. You get a new network because you will work with the company, you get to know people there, get new insights, also see what kind of jobs are available. Like who’s working in this company? Could I imagine myself working there? So having first contact with them. We also support you going to fairs and present your idea. For instance, we are having your prototype at this fair and then you could also meet new interesting people. Or you go to any network events we organize. For instance, we have Industry on Campus with a focus on green chemistry, where students and researchers from Berlin or any other place are able to meet startups, companies that engage in green chemistry. Just talk to them, get new ideas, new input, and learn something.

Excellent. So it sounds like there’s a possibility not just to start a company, but also to sort of talk to companies that exist to find out a little bit about how I can bring my idea into existing structures? Did I understand that correctly?

Teresa: Exactly. So there are funding programs supporting the cooperation between small and medium enterprises in Germany with universities or research institutions in general. And we’re happy to support those projects. Also, if you don’t know any company working in your field, you can tell us your idea and then we are happy to have a look if we know anyone who’s working in this field. We bring you together, have a meeting and maybe a project arises and then we apply for this funding.

Excellent. So maybe that’s also another option for listeners who are kind of interested in this startup idea, but they’re not really sure if they see themselves starting a whole company. Where they can find out a little bit more about what’s going on in the industry. If they’re not so sure how that might work, or maybe they want to bring an idea.
So you guys also do a couple of other things. You have a lot of services that you already mentioned. Is there anything else that you haven’t talked about that you think that I should know about, if I were doing a PhD at the Freie Universität and I was thinking about transfer in general?

Teresa: We also organize a lot of competitions. For instance, the Research to Market Challenge, where you can submit a short concept note presenting your idea and then, if you are selected, you will get through some workshops, get this knowledge Anna mentioned before, some canvas business model or a pitch training and you will have the chance to develop your idea further with the help of trainers and the help of our grant advisors. Or another competition is Forum Junge Spitzenforschung, which will open a new call this autumn and the topic will be sensors and data generated by them. There you could also hand in your recent research and hope to get funding and workshops with the trainers.

It sounds like there are a lot of opportunities, but it also sounds like something where you could get really important skills, even if you don’t kind of go in this direction, even if you stay in academia. Because pitching your project and being able to get people excited about it, is something that you need to know across the board. So that sounds very cool. So what is the benefit of working with you guys versus just doing this by myself?

Anna: We’ve been in this area since 2006. Profund Innovation and the call to do transfer at university exists since 2006. So there is some experience . And we do see a lot of projects and ideas. So I think we are really a good address to go to as well as the other transfer and startup teams at other universities. So you should really just write us or call us and talk to us if you plan on developing your idea further, or if you just want to find out if this idea is eligible for any funding program. And I wanted to add a service that we offer, or at least a colleague of ours offers. Whenever researchers start, he or she should come up to us, or to our colleague. She does IP management and patent management. So if there’s any issue about where you could find out whether your idea is able to file a patent for or if you want to find out how to protect your IP, you should definitely go to our colleague Dr. Christine Reuter.

Could you tell us a little bit about this IP process and patent process? Like what is important and what are some of the concerns that researchers have when they’re thinking about this process, what might be some of the questions?

Teresa: The biggest concern is „I will lose time“, because a patent isn’t published in a journal, as PhD students or researchers are used to, but there is a different process. So most of the people say, „No, I want to publish it because I want to submit my PhD soon. I want to have the certificate.“, and there we would recommend before publishing, to come to our colleague, Christine to talk to her about your research results. And also the patent process can be quite fast. So after you have talked to her and both of you decided you have a good result, you have something that is worth to go for a patent, then you can submit together with the other persons who were involved in the process of getting this research results, an invention disclosure. After that, Christine and her team will do some research like: Are there other patents in this field? If so, what content do they have? Is your content new enough or different enough to be a new patent? Is there an inventive step in your research results? She always says, research results can be patented if the guy in the lab next door would have never expected this result. If you go to him or her, tell him or her your ideas and he’s like, „Oh, wow. That’s totally new. I would have thought if I put A and B together, it’s C and now you say it’s D. So amazing.“ That’s worth going for a patent. So you submit this invention disclosure to Christine and her team. And after that, they do some research, have talks with our lawyer, the patent lawyer. And after that we will confirm or not confirm to take it. And after that it’s published, I think, 12 months later. But having in mind that also reviews at journals take quite a while. At least in life science I know stories where a paper took two years to be published. So compared to that it’s quite fast. Not slower than a paper, let’s say it this way. And for your track record, a patent counts as a publication. So that’s sometimes important as well.

So if I publish something as a patent, one benefit of doing the patent is that I have a publication basically. What is the other benefit of getting a patent? Like, why do I want one? Why is it important?

Teresa: For most funding agencies, the probability of funding is higher if you have a patent. At least for the funding programs we support at Profund Innovation, which deal with transferring knowledge into industry. There it’s a plus point if you can show I have a patent on that.

I would love to hear from you guys if there are any examples you can share with us. We love all examples, but I would love to hear if there are examples that have a connection to the social sciences, to the humanities, because I think that’s a little bit harder sometimes for people to imagine, you know, how do I fit in here? I think it’s a little easier for life sciences. And I know you guys are specializing in the life science and the health, as you mentioned. But if you have any, and when you’ve heard about it, I would just think it’d be really interesting for our listeners to hear about.

Anna: Yes, we all love to see more ideas evolving from the social sciences. And we are waiting for it patiently, but there are examples at least. Quite a few that are from the Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences at Freie Universität. One, for example, is an app called Aumio, which is the meditation app for kids with ADHD. The founder studied psychology at Freie Universität Berlin and he was an ADHD patient himself when he was a child. And his parents were like: Oh yeah, we don’t make a big topic out of it. Just wait and see until it gets better and so on. But one day he discovered that meditation helped him a lot. So when studying psychology, he did his master thesis about that topic and did quite a few surveys and started to study on that and found out it really, really helps. So, he built up the startup idea and found team members in the business area and design. And designed this beautiful app with meditation, adventurous trips for kids. And came up with funding and made it to the health insurance company. All the big ones from Germany. That’s a well going startup right now. And there’s another idea that evolved also from the psychology department, which is an awesome app for chemotherapy. Normally, when they receive chemotherapy, they have kind of a chain of little beads and they can say: Okay,now I’ve gained another bead and I have chemotherapy one, then there’s the other therapy and I get another bead and so on. They developed an app for that because, of course, kids today find it way cooler to have a digital tool to see their progress. Developing that app, the idea giver did not only study psychology at Freie Universität but she was a nurse before. A children’s nurse at Charité. And she could also find out that of course parents were really kind of feeling helpless, supporting their kids. And then she also developed an app for parents and caregivers. So she made up a lot of content to help caregivers deal with this situation.

That’s a great example of a connection to the social sciences, because I can think of a lot of ideas where people are talking about research, where they’re dealing with, you know, what do people, how do people behave, or what do they do, or what do they need? And I also really like that idea of connecting to a prior career path, because I think it’s easy for a lot of people to think: I’ve done all these different things. How do I put those two things together?

Teresa: Maybe I can add something to that question because it’s not only us hoping for new projects or more projects in the field of social science and humanities, but also the politics are going that way. The Federal Ministry for Research and Education will publish a call for social innovations in October, November. And we will be happy to have some info sessions on that as soon as it is published. I hope to have a lot of applications from Freie Universität.

I have one more question for you, and that is: What have I not asked you that you think that I should ask you? And maybe there’s some questions that people come to you guys with and you really feel like that’s a question that you would love for everyone to have the answer to, because it gets asked so often. Or maybe there’s a question or information that you would love to share. And I’ll ask both of you.

Anna: Yeah, maybe people come up and wonder when is the best time to approach us. It’s always a question. I think we all would say: Whenever you feel like it. Whenever you think you’ve found something that is possibly a good startup idea or that could be interesting for industry partners, just give us a call.

Teresa: And maybe it’s not only the question, „When should I come to you?“, but also, „Why should I come to you?“ And there, I guess, everyone who is in science or who’s doing his or her PhD right now, is in science because he or she wants to have an impact. They want to invent something or find out some new things and make the world a better place. I know that’s a quite often used phrase. But if you want to have an impact, society and the market need to know about your results. They have to get out of the drawer next to your desk and come to the public. And so we will support you with that. Either in the way of bringing you together with companies or to support you to found your own company.

So I just want to thank you guys so much for talking to us today. We’re recording this interview in the fall, but it’s possible that it might not be published for a little while. So for our listeners, you will be able to find information about what is coming up by visiting the links, which we’ll also provide, to the Profund Innovation website. Or by getting in touch with the team at Profund Innovation. Thank you so much.

This interview was conducted by the co-host of our podcast Amanda Wichert