Beginning the PhD often marks a new episode in one’s life. Maybe it involves moving to a new city or even a new country, maybe it means getting in touch with the German bureaucracy (there is a reason for its negative reputation) for the first time and ultimately it for sure means being confronted with rights and duties of a supervised PhD candidate.

In order to provide advice and a helping hand when facing any of these issues – or others that I didn’t mention here – we, the Helmholtz Juniors, gathered lots and lots of information and put them into our handbook:

PHD IN THE HELMHOLTZ ASSOCIATION A HANDBOOK FOR CURRENT AND FUTURE PHD CANDIDATES IN THE HELMHOLTZ ASSOCIATION.

The name may be long but the information provided inside is to the point and well readable (my opinion at least) using short paragraphs and often a question-and-answer design.

Some may think “Hey wait, we have something similar at our center already!” That’s true. In a short survey we saw that 11 out of 15 Helmholtz Centers, whose PhD representative groups took part in the survey, already have some information material for new PhDs or foreign colleagues.

Nonetheless we think that our handbook is an additional source of information worth having a look at. It was written by PhD students for PhD students and greatly benefits from the experiences that the writers made during their time at their centers. And while the PhD info material in some centers is a bit short on content, our handbook covers a great many of aspects one may be interested in regardless if he or she is new or advanced PhD candidate.

So last words here from me: Give it a try! Read the handbook and if you like what you see: Recommend it.