With one week to go until our General Assembly 2018 in Jena, we would like to take a minute to look back on our last successful PhD Network meeting.
This year, we introduced a new format called the “Zukunftsworkshop” in which active as well as newly recruited members of the working groups and the steering group gathered at the Leibniz Head Office in Berlin on April 24th and 25th. After having last met in person at the General Assembly in September 2017, getting together half a year later was a huge morale boost for everyone. During these two very productive days, we looked back on the goals we had set on the General Assembly 2017 to see what we had achieved and where more work remained to be done.
After our working groups on the PhD Agreement, Survey, Communication, Interdisciplinary Conference and General Assembly had presented their current progress, we identified potential topics that required the cooperation of multiple working groups and developed new concepts and projects for the future.
Making use of different formats such as plenary discussions, sessions in the individual working groups and a World Café, we found plenty of opportunities for intensive exchange of opinions and setting new milestones. We were happy to receive valuable advice from Dr. Sabine Müller from the Leibniz Association and to strengthen our collaboration with the PostDoc Network, represented by spokesperson Dr. Elena Martellato. Even the president of the Leibniz Association, Prof. Matthias Kleiner, visited us to give us his recommendations on our work and future directions we might pursue.
All in all, the two days passed very quickly and everyone left being inspired and full of motivation and we are looking forward to repeating the experience in 2019.
We would like to use this opportunity to thank all active working group members for the fruitful discussions and their hard work in the past year! We hope to see all of you in Jena next week to present the progress we have made.
For all of those who are not yet part of the network: Doctoral Researcher representatives or not – We encourage you to join our working groups and share your ideas and wishes for our network! To learn more and get in touch, go HERE.
Text: Jiaying Lin, Marie Urbicht
Title picture: participants of the future workshop of the Leibniz PhD network.