It’s not just that I think this is spam, it also seems highly unethical. To make things even worse, Facebook did not provide the usual options to report the message for being inappropriate (or spam). Perhaps because it was a paid advertisement?

What a way to make money… I guess I should just be happy that I completed a great PhD dissertation myself!

I’m not convinced by the predictive power of dreams, but I did rise to the occasion during the public defense of my PhD dissertation on Friday January 10. I was feeling confident, and powerful in answering the opponents’ questions. Based on my dissertation and the defense, the committee awarded me with ‘cum laude’, a rare honor.

I am grateful for the support I received during my PhD. My supervisors Ariana Need and Henk van der Kolk gave my academic career the best possible start. My colleagues, both in my department and internationally, all learned me something valuable. My paranymphs Wouter Jans and Laurie Maldonado gave me moral support during my defense. To each and everyone: thank you!

Currently, most PhD candidates (some candidates have foreign bursaries) are employed by the university. In return for their salary they provide some administrative services and / or do some teaching. The introduction of PhD candidates on bursaries would possibly reduce their income, but additionally they do not save for their pension, lack benefits when they’re ill and are not entitled to parental leave.

These plans do not comply with my understanding of the function of doing a PhD, as formulated in the acknowledgements of my own dissertation:

Doing a PhD represents several years of supervised training, developing oneself to become a researcher capable of independently contributing to, and participating in, a scientific discipline. Contributing to a scientific discipline means that a PhD candidate is supervised to create scientific products of the highest possible quality, and does so in an increasingly independent manner. Participating in a scientific discipline entails presenting these scientific products to others, frequently discussing these with colleagues, and collaborating with representatives of that discipline.

Dutch PhD candidates are highly regarded internationally. Hans Clevers, the current president of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, argued in an interview that PhDs from the Netherlands are well regarded internationally, because they are independent, creative and critical. That’s how we currently train PhDs: as young, independent professionals. Let’s not break that system by making students out of PhDs, or by overemphasizing on efficiency.

Dutch universities (used to) pay PhD candidates not to act like students.

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This is a series on the 10 propositions that are part of my PhD dissertation. These propositions are a Dutch tradition to highlight key findings of a dissertation and some additional insights by the author. My dissertation is titled “Family Policy Outcomes: Combining Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment and Earnings Inequality in OECD countries, 1975-2005″ and I will defend my dissertation on January 10 2014. So, this series is also a count down. Find out more about my dissertation.

Contributing to a scientific discipline means that a PhD candidate is supervised to create scientific products of the highest possible quality, and does so in an increasingly independent manner. Participating in a scientific discipline entails presenting these scientific products to others, frequently discussing these with colleagues, and collaborating with representatives of that discipline. Participation also means enculturation in the norms and values of a discipline. In addition, society increasingly expects scientists to be able to explain the relevance of their work to an audience outside their own discipline. A scientific discipline is not limited to a single department, nor to a single university or even to a single country. Phd candidates should operate in an internationally oriented community.

Doing your PhD is and should be a demanding challenge. Important skills are learned from dealing with this challenge; it is easy to make mistakes, but challenging to learn to recognize ones’ own mistakes. A good supervisor allows PhD candidates to independently develop and try their own solutions to problems, while reflecting on that process. A fine balance should be found between safeguarding the candidate from endangering progress and completion of the project in time, without predefining all the decisions that need to be made.

In addition to the academic development, which should be prioritized, PhD candidates and their supervisors should identify personal training needs to be inlcuded in the training and supervision plan. Participation in projects besides the thesis, in teaching, and in administrative tasks, invest in training young academics the skills required for their future careers. Phd candidates play a crucial role in university,

The scientific progress, as well as in teaching, and should therefore be regarded employees of a university. Integration into the scientific community contributes to the professional development of PhD candidates.

Skills that all PhD graduates have in common include research- and analytical skills, the conception, planning, and management of a large and long-term project, the organization and presentation of complex information, and perseverance. All PhDs are about scientific research, but the developed skills can be applied in future careers in academia, as well as in business. With PhD candidates working on fixed term projects, they should be stimulated to anticipate their future career already at early stages during the PhD. By realizing how to apply their general skills to future plans, PhD candidates should be fully prepared for the next step in their careers.

For the last two years, I have been actively involved with the PhD Network of the University of Twente (P-NUT), including the last year as president. Recently, I wrote down my vision on doing a good PhD, which will serve as a basis for the representative activities of P-NUT. It was written on a general level, and P-NUT combines this vision with concrete goals. Here, for discussion, only the general vision on doing a good PhD is presented.

Personally, I think doing a good PhD means:

Doing a PhD represents several years of supervised training, developing oneself to become a researcher capable of independently contributing to, and participating in, a scientific discipline.

Contributing to a scientific discipline means that a PhD candidate is supervised to create scientific products of the highest possible quality, and does so in an increasingly independent manner. Participating in a scientific discipline entails presenting these scientific products to others, frequently discussing these with colleagues, and collaborating with representatives of that discipline.

The core of that statement is being trained to independently contributing to a scientific discipline.

Based on my (clearly limited and selective) experiences, I learned that in New York (US?) PhD students really are … students. This by no means is a negative comments, but it is clear that the PhDs I met have a different set of skills. Generally, my impression is that their course load results in them being familiar with a wide overview of the literature on several topics, but (at least during the first few years) are less experienced in doing research with some level of independence. It’s a trade-off: some of the exams seem to be gruesome, with students faced with the taks of familiarizing themselves with a whole field of research. This is well beyond the relatively simple exams we have in the Netherlands, but getting your hands ‘in the dirt’ while doing some actual research yourself also is quite the experience.

Also, I noticed that it is much more of a struggle to do your PhD in the US. In New York life is expensive, and most PhDs are not employed by their universities as in the Netherlands. This means you have to find yourself some funding, but also that it really is a disappointment if your proposal is rejected. Not getting those funds really means you have to rethink your options. Many PhDs also need to have a job – besides writing their thesis, that is. Many teach or assist a professor, tasks that we do in the Netherlands as well. The difference, I think, is that the workload (again, besides writing a thesis which is a pretty decent workload by itself) is much higher in the US.

If every individual is under quite a lot of pressure, I wonder how that works out in terms of being able to form an academic group. I learned of one example of a PhD only providing to help to others when being paid on an hourly rate. I understand where that’s coming from, but also wonder how it affects the livelihood of an academic community of shared ideas, discussion, and collective interest.

From the project proposal (which I co-authored):

Technological development and legislation during the last century in European countries and the United States have allowed women to gain increased control over their fertility, which coincided with the rise of the relative socio-economic position of women in this same period.

[…]

The Ph-D project consists of a retrospective, comparative empirical study encompassing European countries and the United States. The relationship between fertility decisions and the educational and occupational life-courses of women is central to this study, but the main focus is on how this relation is affected by governance and technological advance.

I almost cannot wait to start working on it, but will have to (also: Must. Graduate. Soon!). But expect me not to be able to refrain myself from starting to read a little (more) on the subject. So, if the writing on my blog will shift towards a specific direction, you’ll know why this is!