Support for Supervisors
Onboarding
Beginning in 2020, all doctoral supervisors are registered with JuDocS together with the doctoral researchers they supervise. We receive this information from the institute administrations. First-time supervisors will be added to the supervisor mailing list and will receive a welcome email with information about JuDocS and the Supervisors’ Forum, which represents the interests of supervisors in various committees at Forschungszentrum Jülich.
More information on supervision roles and functions at Forschungszentrum Jülich is available here.
Qualification
JuDocS is currently developing support and qualification measures for supervisors building on concepts developed by the Supervisors’ Forum and involving Jülich scientists at different career levels.
Monitoring of Doctoral Projects
Doctoral projects at Jülich are centrally monitored, which means that doctoral researchers regularly submit reports to a committee of experienced Jülich scientists who review the progress of the projects. The reports should be discussed with and then signed by all involved supervisors. The goal of this process is to support the consistently high standards of doctoral research projects at Jülich, in order to enable doctoral researchers to start establishing themselves as independent members of the scientific community. Currently the monitoring process applies to doctoral researchers with a doctoral contract and will be extended to all doctoral researchers within the next two years.
Counselling in Supervision Conflicts and Peer Group Supervision
In order to support supervisors in the resolution of challenging supervision situations and to avoid escalation of conflicts, the Supervisors’ Forum regularly offers Peer Group Supervision.
Additionally, with the JuDocS Committee for Counselling in Supervision Conflicts, six Jülich scientists offer open-ended counselling in deadlocked supervision conflicts. Members of the committee are institute heads, experienced supervisors, and doctoral researchers who are familiar with the framework conditions for researchers at different career levels and have received basic training in conflict counselling and moderation. All requests to the committee will be treated confidentially.
You can find more general information about the counselling service here.
The contact information of the committee members can be found here.
More Information and Advisory Services
Supervision of doctoral researchers can include many different tasks and responsibilities which cannot all be covered by JuDocS. There are numerous specialized contact points at Forschungszentrum Jülich that provide focused support on different topics. A list of potentially relevant contact points can be found here.