Helsingin Yliopiston Väitöskirjatutkijat (HYVÄT)

This new year begins with a new name as the association says goodbye to Helsingin yliopiston jatko-opiskelijat / Doktorander vid Helsingfors universitet / Association of Doctoral Students at the University of Helsinki, and welcomes the new name that was chosen at the autumn meeting in November 2016:

Helsingin Yliopiston Väitöskirjatutkijat
Doktorander vid Helsingfors Universitet
University of Helsinki PhD Students

The change mainly concerns the Finnish part of the name where the word “jatko-opiskelija” has been replaced with “väitöskirjatutkija”, a PhD researcher. The possibility of changing the name of the association has kept popping up since the founding of the association in 2014 and now the members who were present at the autumn meeting agreed that the time was right to change it. We also adapted the new acronym: HYVÄT.

There was a will to emphasize our role as researchers rather than our role as students for several reasons. First, and most important, research is what we do in practice. In one sense we of course are studying and also do courses as regular students, but our main task is learning how to be researchers by doing actual new scientific research in various fields. Second, the prolonged status of student does not necessarily look beneficial on the CV when we are applying for jobs outside academia after we have finished our dissertations. If we refer to ourselves as researchers it looks like we have been doing work, which we thought is a more accurate description. Third, even the university is doing away with the term “jatko-opiskelija”, although it has decided to use the term “tohtorikoulutettava”, meaning “a person who is being given a doctoral education” instead.

The Swedish term “doktorand” needed no changing because it is perfect as it is, describing the exact phase of workinglife and specialising we are going through when completing our PhD degrees. In the English version the autumn meeting decided to keep the term “PhD student” because it seemed to be the most common term, although options like “PhD candidate/PhD researcher” were discussed too.

In addition to the new name, the year also begins with a new action plan!
The main points of it are listed below, stay tuned for more information about Pub Nights and other events that will follow shortly!

Influencing doctoral training at the University

• In 2017 the association will continue to influence decision-­making relating to the doctoral education
• In the autumn of 2017 the Association will organise elections for doctoral student
  representatives for the different steering groups for doctoral schools and programmes. The association will also keep in touch with the doctoral student representatives of doctoral schools and programmes in order to stay updated on the current issues related to doctoral education and to the needs of doctoral students in different parts of the university.
• The association will continue to work towards ensuring that all doctoral students, regardless of their source of funding, have the same conditions for doing research.

Leisure activities

• The association will organise after-­work events every month as well as a couple of larger events, such as a Christmas party and a spring party.

Co-­operation

• The association will continue co-­operation with other organizations that share our interest for the welfare of doctoral students, both in Helsinki and nationwide

Communications

• The existing communication channels, (blog, e-­mail list, social media) will continue to be used to both spread information and actively collect the comments and opinions from members
• The association will work for the goal that future new doctoral students get more practical information when starting their studies at the university

In mid-November HYJO went to the autumn seminar of the Council of Finnish Foundations (Säätiöiden ja rahastojen neuvottelukunta) which had the improvement of research funding as its topic. To sum up the good news, we think it’s great that the foundations are interested in improving research funding, because there surely is much that could be done in this respect. Below you find a short resume of the discussion at the seminar – feel free to comment if you have any good ideas about how funding could be improved!

Dos. Allan Tiitta presented the values of the foundations, and said that they seek to: 1) supplement research funding and ensure the continuity of research; 2) develop higher education; 3) support new ideas and diverse research – public funding often supports projects that produce products of different kinds, whereas foundations also supports basic research, 4) support international connections; 5) support pluralism, flexibility and independence; and 6) find the most talented researchers.

Interesting especially for us PhD students is the fact that in the 2000s 9/10 PhD students were working on private grants instead of university funding.

Dos. Tuomas Heikkilä (director of the Finnish institute in Rome) talked about “The value of humanities research in Finland”, a pamphlet he recently wrote with Ilkka Niiniluoto. You can download the book for free here. The point he made was that among Finnish research, humanities are ranked the highest, according to the QS and world university ranking. In addition humanities are also highly valued in Finnish society. In other words, there is no reason why humanities research should be regarded as anything but top notch! According to Heikkilä humanities researchers have a lot to give when complex contemporary challenges need to be solved, because humanities can offer tools for forming a more tolerant and democratic society. Therefore he argued that researchers should reach out to society much more than they do, in order to make themselves heard. In practice this means both popularising research and taking a more active part in decision making in society.

Dos. Leena Suurpää, director of the Finnish Youth Research Network, also pointed out each researcher’s responsibility and right to act also as a citizen, because: 1) doing science is power: 2) doing science is politicized; 3) scientists are non-governmental actors; and 4) science is not detached from society. In addition, she pointed out how problematic it is that the opinion of an individual citizen and the research-based position today are likely to receive the same weight in media. For all these reasons it is important that researchers engage in civic activities more than they now do.
In accordance with these points she hoped that foundations would fund research projects that widen our worldviews, and strive to safeguard the freedom of expression of scientists. Also foundations could allow new kinds of cooperation between the fields of science, art and social boundaries; support the “knowledge- activism” of researchers; and not punish researchers for working also outside of academia.

Also Reetta Räty, who has worked as a journalist in a research group, talked about the importance of making the research results  understandable more broadly in society. She too pointed out that we, the researchers, need to find ways to affect the level of public debate so that scientific knowledge is not treated as any other opinion, but as science in both media and decision making.

Prof. Anu Koivunen, university of Stockholm, talked about the best practices of research funding in Sweden and what we could learn from them.
The main difference between the Swedish and the Finnish system is that in Sweden all doctoral students are full members of the academic community. When doctoral candidates are accepted, they are employed for their entire post-graduate studies, with all regular employee benefits – no wonder Koivunen described it as “the world’s best job”. In Sweden training of researchers by poorly-financed or part-time doctoral student positions is seen as a demerit for the university. The consequence of this system is that there are a much fewer doctoral students compared to Finland, which is not an entirely good thing. In comparison with the Finnish, fragmented research funding (of especially PhD students) the Swedish system does however in many ways look, well, like the best job in the world.

During the discussion the same questions that had been raised by earlier the speakers were debated. Researchers whished that:

• Transitions between the scientific community and society at large would be possible, because they would facilitate the labour market of researchers
• Funding periods would be stable and long enough, because the current fragmented and short-termed funding leads to a situation where researchers apply for funding only to write new grant applications – there has to be time to do the actual research too!
• Foundations would support also teaching – research is not the researcher’s only task
• Foundations would simplify and harmonize the application processes

If you want to find out more about the Council of Finnish Foundations, check out their home page: http://www.saatiopalvelu.fi/en.html