Author: Derek Hutcheson, Vice Dean for Doctoral Education

The days are getting longer, and it is time once again to update you on developments in the area of doctoral education.

You will recall that we overall received a very positive external evaluation last year, with some recommendations and suggestions for further quality improvements. The next stage of that process has been in full swing over the winter. The various faculty (FFN, KFKS) and department (HK/FHK) committees have been evaluating these suggestions. In the next few weeks we will be drawing up an ‘action plan’ based on the outcome of these discussions that I will present to the university’s Advisory Committee on Doctoral Education in early May. Thanks are due to all colleagues and doctoral students who have been involved in these discussions and will continue to give input as we move forward with it.

Spring is always a busy time of year, and it is pleasing to hear of so many colleagues who are planning to apply for external research funding with doctoral positions included. As the evaluation highlighted, a balance of internal and external funding allows us to maintain a critical mass of doctoral students while also leaving resources for the wider range of departmental research activity. We wish you good fortune in the forthcoming application rounds. A short reminder that (as per the dean’s e-mail of 13 February), external applications that involve the potential employment of doctoral students must be signed off by the dean in good time before the submission of the application. And also, that since we are obliged by law to ensure that the recruitment process for doctoral students is fair, open and transparent, the procedures for externally-financed doctoral positions should follow the same timelines and routines as for any other post.

Talking of recruitment, we are pleased to welcome three new doctoral students who started on 1 February: Fernanda Favaro and Jullietta Stoencheva in Media and Communication Studies (MKV), and Anne Marie Schröder in Interaction Design (ID). As we welcome new members of the doctoral community, we also wish success to those coming to the end of their studies. On 3 March, Marika Hedemyr will ‘nail’ her thesis (spikning) in K3, prior to defending it a public defence on 24 March.

Over the next two years we expect between 20 and 25 public thesis defences – the busiest such period in the faculty since Malmö University was founded. This will place a special responsibility on us all to ensure that the final seminars and thesis reviews – as well as the preparations for public defences – are done in a smooth and timely manner. The reward will hopefully be a generation of new Malmö doctors, and a series of exciting and stimulating theses and intellectual discussions around them.

There are also many interesting things happening in the background. The ‘Hands-On Teaching’ seminars – which started last semester – will take place at regular intervals over the next few months and discuss challenge-based learning and the roles of supervisors, examiners and students in undergraduate thesis writing. Doctoral students will also have help in writing their pedagogical porfolios, a subject we discussed in last week’s seminar with a guest seminar by Stefan Larsson of CAKL/Kristianstads Högskola There will also be a writing workshop in the summer (19-21 June) for all doctoral students. At the university level, an external assessment is currently being carried out of the faculty’s application for a new PhD subject in Organisation Studies, initiated by the Department of Urban Studies and incorporating researchers from across the university. We await further developments with interest.

Together with the Dean and the rest of the faculty leadership, I wish all doctoral students and supervisors a happy and productive spring.