Explanatory note to announcement about Graduate Student Fellowship in
HISTORY AND
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENTIFIC / INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY at Roskilde
University,
Denmark (circulated 22. Feb. on Mersenne).
A number of inquiries about the Danish PhD system warrants the following
note:
1) The fellowship is intended for a student who wants to write a PhD
dissertation in Science Studies at Roskilde University. A Danish PhD
program is formally designed as a 3-year program. The appointee will
join directly at the PhD entry level and thus complete a 3-year period
of tenure.
2) Danish PhD-students usually enter after a 5-year Master's Program. My
personal experience, however, is that Danish Masters are approximately
equivalent to 4-year Bachelors/Masters from British or American
universities.
3) The generous stipend level is partly an illusion; while costs of
living are approx. like in England, the welfare state has not been
abolished in Denmark yet, so the tax level will be around 40%. Still,
Danish PhDs are reasonably well-paid -- a reminiscence from those days
when Denmark had no PhD system and the Master's degree was the final
academic degree (and a few percent took their Habilitation later in
life). Graduate students who want to pursue a PhD are therefore
considered a kind of temporary junior faculty: they are not looked upon
as "students" but generally treated as junior colleagues, the number of
obligatory courses to be taken is not very high (about 1 semester out
of the 3 years), and they are supposed to teach their own courses at
the undergraduate level.
I hope this clarifies the mysteries surrounding the Danish PhD system.
Thomas Soderqvist
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