Doctoral Agreement
Since the winter semester 2015/16, a doctoral agreement must be submitted to the Office for doctoral affairs when registering your doctoral thesis, completed and signed jointly by you and your supervisor. This is required by the State University Law (§ 38 para. 5 LHG), as well as certain minimum contents. A template that meets all the requirements of the LHG is available on the website of the Office for doctoral affairs. Please fill it out completely and hand it in to the Office for doctoral affairs in order to avoid delays in the process and additional work for all parties involved. Fields that do not necessarily have to be filled in are marked as optional.
The following explains some of the points of the agreement that lead to frequent inquiries.
Who is your supervisor in terms of the doctoral agreement and who is your professional contact?
The term "supervisor" refers exclusively to your doctoral supervisor, i.e. a professor, associate professor or PD at the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg. This supervisor is responsible, for example, for the expert opinion on your doctoral thesis.
Many doctoral students are also supervised by an experienced member of the faculty, who usually holds a doctorate but has not yet habilitated. This is the specialist contact person, who is specified separately in the doctoral agreement.
Can I simply leave item (2) "Time and work plan to be continued" blank in the doctoral agreement because I don't know exactly how my project is going yet and don't want to commit myself?
You must complete the appropriate fields, as the State Higher Education Law requires that each doctoral agreement include a timeline.
At this point, you should plan together with your supervisor and record in writing how much time you can invest in the project on a full-time and part-time basis and how often you will meet again to comprehensively and systematically discuss the progress of your work. This also includes a so-called milestone planning, which maps the intermediate goals (e.g. completion of sampling, establishment of a method, completion of an experiment, completion of a data analysis, completion of a manuscript, etc.) you want to have reached by when.
Overall, this information should help you notice in a timely manner if your project is falling behind schedule, identify causes, and discuss any problems with your supervisor in a timely manner. Against this background, the schedule can then also be adjusted and revised in consultation with your supervisor.
What is meant by item (3) "Information about an individual study program"?
This field is also a mandatory field. Here you should consider together with your supervisor which courses, workshops or qualification measures for the acquisition of special skills for the doctorate would be useful. This may include, for example, the following offerings:
Courses on
- Literature research and management (UB)
- Copyright (UB)
- Scientific writing (MEDISS)
- Presentation of scientific data (Graduate Academy)
- Statistics (IMBI)
- Laboratory methods (TopLab)
- Laboratory Animal Science (IBF)Participation in working group meetings, doctoral seminars, journal clubs, lecture series, or continuing education events
- Participation in a partnership program
- Offers of graduate schools, graduate colleges or other structured doctoral programs