Doctoral Process

Forschungszentrum Jülich cooperates with a variety of universities to enable doctoral researchers to graduate. They can be supervised and work at Jülich for their thesis. However, Forschungszentrum Jülich itself cannot grant the doctoral degree as the institutions that have the right to do so in Germany are the universities. Within the universities respective faculties are responsible for handling the doctoral procedure.

This means that all doctoral researchers who work at Forschungszentrum Jülich also need to apply for admission to a university faculty in order to be able to graduate. The following figure outlines the major steps of the standard formal process of a doctoral research project conducted at Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Each faculty can have its own doctoral regulations and requirements. Acceptance as a doctoral researcher must be applied for individually and can take up to several months at some faculties. In some cases, doctoral researchers are required to take additional training courses, e.g. because they graduated from an institution outside of Germany or they completed their master’s degree in another subject. That is why it is crucial to be fully informed and to contact the respective faculty at an early stage of the doctoral project. Registration is the responsibility of the doctoral researcher and should always be discussed with the supervisor. The supervisor should also support the process whenever necessary.

The advantages of an early registration are commonly that all persons involved in the project can be certain that the formal requirements at this stage are fulfilled and that the faculty supports the doctoral project. This helps to avoid self-inflicted delays in the continued formal process. Additionally, after registration at the faculty, doctoral researchers can enrol at the university so that they can benefit from the semester ticket and gain access to the university graduate centres, which offer a variety of services.

A list of frequent university partners and faculties for doctoral projects at Forschungszentrum Jülich, including links to detailed information about their doctoral regulations, workflows and central service points is available here. Please always make sure that you are working with the latest documents and versions of the doctoral regulations that apply to you.