Two years have flown by. And the elections for the next PhD representatives in May of this year are just around the corner. So it’s time to look back on the first term of the first representative body for PhD candidates/students at MLU Halle-Wittenberg: What have we achieved? What remains to be achieved? How did we spend these two years? And how should we continue?

Phase of discovery

When we took up our positions in May 2022, we didn’t really know what work and tasks lay ahead of us. It was clear that we had put ourselves forward for the position because we felt that we – the PhD candidates at MLU – as a special group did not yet have our own voice at the university and that there were also some areas in need of improvement in this career phase. Both nationally – keyword “Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz” – and here at our university. After there had been several initiatives to set up a PhD’s representative body at MLU in the previous years due to this “gap” in the representation of interests, the state of Saxony-Anhalt simply solved the problem in 2021 by changing the legal basis. However, the task description was somewhat vague:”The doctoral representatives shall advise on issues concerning doctoral students and make recommendations to the governing bodies of the university. The faculty council must give the doctoral representatives the opportunity to comment on draft doctoral regulations”.Higher Education Act of Saxony-Anhalt, Article 18Exactly what these “issues concerning doctoral students” were then gradually became clear over the next few months. 

Building structures

But when you are the first committee of this kind, you have to do some groundwork. The first thing we did was to set up the blog on which this article can be read, and to create the usual ‘infrastructure’: Email addresses in the faculties and for the Spokesperson’s Council, postal address, etc. The Spokesperson’s Council is the assembly of all the elected doctoral student representatives of each faculty. Recently, we also managed to make the blog truly bilingual. After all, a significant number of our doctoral students are so-called “internationals”. Then it was time for networking – both locally, with other interest groups and institutions at the university (Staff Council, International Office, InGra), and nationally with other doctoral student organisations. We are a founding member of the Federal Association of Doctoral Students. We have also made our voice heard in (university) politics. Last summer we took part in the University Action Week organised by various organisations, gave a speech at the local event and contributed our own events. 

Visibility

Another important – and rather arduous – step was (and still is) public relations. Not only have we lobbied the key players (Rectorate, Chancellor, Staff Council, Vice-Rectorate for Research, etc.) for our interests, but we have also made ourselves known through a series of events. After all, what’s the point of having the best doctoral student representatives if no one knows they exist? Especially at the beginning, we had the feeling that the first attempts in this direction did not bear fruit. Few of you found your way to our “get-togethers” or wrote to us with problems. But at the end of the last winter term, we were surprised by the publicity and a little word of mouth. At our last event we gave our talk to a full SSR! And we have been getting more and more enquiries in our email inbox. The many different problems and requests to speak have also strengthened our belief that a PhD representative body is “needed” and that there is a lot of work waiting for our successors.  However, we have not yet found a good solution for how every new doctoral student at MLU can know from the beginning that there is a doctoral student representative to whom they can turn if they have problems.

Committee work

Regular participation in university committees also derives from the tasks set out in the legal text. Over the past two years, we have become familiar with these “regular” tasks. The doctoral student representatives at MLU have a permanent seat in the University Senate, which sometimes meets late into the evening. This is where the most important issues affecting the university – and us – are discussed. For example, the reorganisation in the course of the HEP (Hochschulentwicklungsplan), the University Development Plan. Without the work of our Permanent Representative to the Senate, we would be missing an important source of information. Our presence at the faculty council meetings of the faculties where we were elected is also important. This allows us to be directly involved in the areas where we work and write our dissertations. Important topics have been, and still are, the doctoral regulations (Promotionsordnungen) or the state graduate support programme, which affects us in particular because many PhD students depend on these grants for funding. There is definitely room for improvement. It is important to note that we do not have voting rights in either body, but we can submit motions and make comments on all matters. In the future we would like to make more use of the possibility to submit motions. 

First achievements

But what have we actually achieved, apart from the successful completion of the “groundwork”? First of all, after about a year, we have managed to get more and more requests for another point in the law: The “statement”. The PhD representatives were increasingly involved in processes and committees and were able to “tinker” with regulations that directly affect us as PhD candidates. As these processes are still ongoing, we cannot go into more detail. But we can say this much: if the regulations are finalised as planned, it will be a big step forward for us PhD students. We have also achieved a lot in terms of “visibility”. In the recently adopted University Development Plan, we have been able to emphasise the important role of PhD students in teaching and research; we have also made our voices heard in the Staff Council newspaper and through the University Press Office. However, in many of these areas we have fallen short of our potential. This brings us to the final point: participation.

Problems and prospects

If there were a full complement of PhD representatives, there would be 18 of us (two per faculty). When we started, however, there were only about 10 of us, most of whom became unreachable in the weeks and months that followed. This was and is highly problematic because, for example, important faculties from the natural sciences were not represented from the outset. This meant that there was a lack of input in terms of content, as well as a lack of specific subject cultures that had to be taken into account. This of course made it difficult to coordinate the work in the faculties, in the committees and also nationally, and required a lot of time management on our part. We also had to put many of our ideas on hold. After all, we all still have dissertations to write and many of us are still working in the institutes or on other committees. As we have already reported, we have therefore decided that our last “task” will be to ensure that at least two people from each faculty stand for election to the next PhD Representatives’ Council. We need your help to make this happen!