Category: info

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Introductory seminar for the newly elected PhD representatives : A summary of panel discussion

HYVÄT’s first effort to introduce representatives responsibilities and rights successfully took place on Wednesday 16th January in New Student House.

After an introduction about HYVÄT by Anton Saressalo the program continued with a presentation about university administration and the rights of representatives by Harri Waltari.

Anton’s presentation
Harri’s presentation

The seminar also included a panel discussion in which Mariella Aalto-Araneda, Abdelhakim Salem, Harri Mäcklin and Giovanni Canarecci shared their experiences as previous representatives. At the end, about 50 new representatives had the chance to have more free discussions in small groups based on their doctoral schools.

Please find bellow a summary of questions and answers discussed during the panel:

1.How was the workload? Too much? If yes, what could be done to adjust it?

The workload is higher the first year. It is not spread evenly throughout the year: most work has to be done when selecting new PhD students and reviewing applications for salaried positions or when organizing events for the doctoral school.

2. Did the board use English or Finnish? Was language an issue in any way?

From the experience of our panelists, the boards switches from Finnish to English when a non-Finnish speaker joins. Official documents are often still in Finnish, but usually a translation or summary in English is provided by someone on the board. If applications from doctoral students can be send in English and Finnish, this can make it complicated to review them.

3.What was it like to be on the board? Did you collaborate well with the other board members?

In some schools and programmes the atmosphere is friendly and informal. Not a lot of voting is done and most decisions are made unanimously through compromises. On some boards there is a feeling of distance between the student representatives and professors. Professors might be hesitant to organise something extra, like a symposium, until they find out no extra work is required

4.On role of doctoral schools in paid positions

The school has a certain amount of paid positions, which are distributed to the programmes. The way these positions are distributed is done differently in every school. On the doctoral school level, you try to unify between different programmes, such that there are equal opportunities despite the programme.

5.Have you been in contact with the school and programme representatives in your school? How do you keep contact with the other doctoral students?

Some programmes/schools have a Facebook page to keep contact with the students. It is important that your fellow students know that you are their representative, so that they can come to you with possible issues.

6.On issues with supervision

The go to person for problems on supervision is the coordinator of the doctoral programme. Other people are the head of the programme or the head of the department. If the head of the department is the supervisor in question, then the head of the doctoral school is an option.

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Statement on the need of disciplinary web pages

In order to keep you informed on what we are up to, we have one more thing in the field of advocacy to announce before the summer:

Because many disciplines have had their web pages shut down as a sudden and unwanted side effect of the many renewal processes at the university, the board decided to take action and write a statement where we call for immediate attention on this issue.

At present, only pages that provide information about bachelor, master, and doctoral programmes have been created, but through them it is impossible to get a clear picture of the research projects, supervisors etc. of the separate disciplines. From the PhD community’s perspective, this matter is urgent because it impacts both our current and future work and career for the following reasons:

  1. Jeopardizes the future intake of Master and PhD students:

From our experience most PhD students who have started their PhD studies at the University have found disciplinary websites the main source of information, not only about their supervisors, but also about other researchers, students and their research topics. Having an idea about the intellectual environment here can be defining for people when they make the choice of applying to the university. Lack of this information may lead to possible applicants to turn to other universities instead.

  1. Hinders the connections between research communities:

In the absence of an online presence, PhD communities no longer share a virtual space where to look up and connect to others who may have relevant experience with one’s area of research, funding, or other matters. Furthermore, as many collaborations arise from web browsing, not having such web sources make whole research communities and researchers they are made up of, invisible. This has a degrading effect on research communities and the research environment overall, and if this situation continues, it is likely that the University will fail to attract new expertise.

  1. Diminishing opportunities for public engagement:

The lack of open disciplinary websites diminishes opportunities for communicating research to the society and the wider public. Journalists, media and other experts are likely to find these web resources necessary, providing information about contact information and the more specific on-going things at the University.

  1. Impairs the visibility and reputation of the University of Helsinki:

Most other internationally recognized universities have disciplinary pages, usually recognized as departments; not having such visibility will damage the reputation of the University of Helsinki.

  1. Wasting valuable research time:

Currently, necessary information for PhD students is spread all across the web. Finding out about even simple practical matters requires extensive amounts of time, and can involve the laborious and frustrating experience of being referred from one staff member to another. This is time that could and should be spent on research.

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Statement against the new prices on PhD’s language checks

Together with The Helsinki University Researchers’ and Teachers’ Association (HUART) and the Student union (HYY), HYVÄT has made a joint statement against the decision to raise the fees of language checks on PhD’s.

You can find information on the Language center’s decision in Flamma and you can read our full statement in Finnish here and the English translation below.

The recent decision will make a language check on a PhD of the recommended 250 pages length cost thousands of euros, which would be a little less for an article based thesis, but quite costly also in this case. Even before, with the lower prices of last year the language check was so expensive that many left it undone because they simply could not afford it. It is obvious that even fewer will be able to pay the new, higher prices.

The decision is unfair because it is aimed at young researchers who often work on small grants and under considerable economic insecurity. The decision also creates a situation where researchers are in different position depending on their financial situation.

The number of researchers who write their PhD’s in English is rising because that in many fields is the only realistic language for publications, but also because the university encourages them to it. However, English is a second or third language for most PhD’s, and because of this a professional high quality language check is a vital part of finishing the thesis. A linguistically good thesis is also a merit, both for the individual researcher and the University of Helsinki. The language check should therefore be seen as a central part of the doctoral education. Good academic English enhances the spread of a publication as much as weak language hinders it.

Providing a language check for free would directly contribute to the strategic goals of the university: the development of international high quality research and publications. We hope that the language check will continue to be free of charge for doctoral students, or that it will be supported by the cooperation of the university’s management, the language centre and the doctoral schools and programmes.

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The price of language checks for PhD’s to be raised

In the beginning of this year we rejoiced over the decision to make language checks of doctoral dissertations (both monographs and article based ones) completely free of charge. This kind of unexpected good news was a wonderful surprise for all the countless PhD students who are writing in English as a second language and worrying about getting their message through to the reader in good academic English.

Unfortunately, the association has just recently heard that the decision has been reversed. Not only will PhD students from the 1 June 2017 need to pay for the language check, they will need to pay the full price. Last year the language centre offered PhD students a lower price of 8€ / first 10 pages and 6,50€/page for the rest, but from next month we will need to pay the full price of 13,60€ / page. For a monograph of 250 pages the fee could be around 3000 €, and somewhat less for an article based thesis. Given that PhD students are already working on uncertain and often insufficient funding it is obvious that not many will be able to afford a language check in the future.

It makes no sense that the university withdraws the support for language checking and at the same time encourages us to write in English – which in many disciplines is the only sensible option anyhow. Would it not be a merit for the university if dissertations would be written in not only good, but excellent English?

The association hopes that this decision will be thought through once more, and that some form of compromise in the form of a lower price could be reached if the language check cannot be offered completely for free.

Edit: The language center will inform about the change soon, likely by next week.

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Survey: Did you get all the necessary information when starting your PhD studies?

The association would like to know if the university provided you with enough information about the doctoral studies when you started them. We are also interested to know what particular information you would have needed if you came from abroad, and further, if there were any specific things you would have needed information about or help with if you came from a non EU country.

Please take a few minutes to answer this short survey by January 27th at the latest!

What sort of information do PhD students need to get from the university when starting their studies? Did you get all the information you needed?