Beginning the PhD often marks a new episode in one’s life. Maybe it involves moving to a new city or even a new country, maybe it means getting in touch with the German bureaucracy (there is a reason for its negative reputation) for the first time and ultimately it for sure means being confronted ...[Read more]
Archives for 2015
Helmholtz Juniors Mid-Term Meeting 2015 in Berlin
On the 20th and 21st of July, the Helmholtz Juniors Mid-Term Meeting took place at the Helmholtz Association's Head Office (HGF) in Berlin. It was the second Mid-Term Meeting ever and proved to be a great opportunity to meet each other again, to discuss the latest progress and problems, and to ...[Read more]
GÉANT – faster than light (almost) European research network
Recently, while being stuck in a traffic jam on a Friday afternoon, I listened to a radio report on the Deutschlandfunk. It was about GÉANT, the namely gigantic backbone of our European science computer network and in one way or another the reason for the fact that one often finds itself staring at ...[Read more]
Max-Planck society implements much-needed changes in PhD funding
by Stephan Körner, Julian Gethmann and Juliane Hafermann Last week, we reported about the changes in the way PhD students are to be treated in the Helmholtz Association. As could be read in the German news in March and April 2015, the Max Planck Society has meanwhile not been inactive: On March ...[Read more]
Helmholtz Association—improved conditions for PhD students
by Juliane Hafermann, Julian Gethmann and Stephan Körner (Helmholtz Juniors Survey Group) Things are moving in the scientific world: the working conditions of PhD students in two large German scientific societies, the Helmholtz Association and the Max Planck Society, will be improved ...[Read more]
Spotlight on conditions for PhD students
This blog post is a statement of the Helmholtz Juniors. Followed by media response, the Max Planck Society recently announced dramatic changes in their support for doctoral students [1]. Without notable public attention, the Helmholtz Association also released their new guidelines for the ...[Read more]
Survey Results of the 2014 Helmholtz PhD Survey
In 2014 all 6000 PhD candidates of the 18 Helmholtz centers had been asked in the 4th bi-annual survey about their main issues and the conditions they are working under. 1483 PhD students participated, and their answers can now be found in an extensive report which summarises the findings of this ...[Read more]
SOPRAN annual meeting 2015
As we all know Helmholtz Association is the Germany’s biggest scientific association and it encapsulates many research fields. One such major research field is Marine science. Recently, lot of focus has been put on marine research to address some of the major threats to the world’s ocean. Studies ...[Read more]
The “Helmholtz community feeling”
On the sidelines of the Helmholtz Juniors Annual Meeting in January, an interesting idea came up: our work would be much easier if there was a strong sense of community – in other words, if we “felt more Helmholtz”. As the well-known blue-white Helmholtz logo can be found on the websites (just have ...[Read more]
Open Access – Making Science Visible
Open Access describes a development over the last 15 years, which set the target to make science available to everybody without any charge. Since Open Access is such a great success, I want to give a short overview about history, different types to realize Open Access and the future development from ...[Read more]