Home Community Sabina Lukovac Rotations in the NL-PhD system?

Rotations in the NL-PhD system?
Monday, 24 May 2010 05:20
posted by Sabina

One of the things I missed during my search for a perfect PhD-position in the Netherlands was that I always felt like there was no choice for me….actually I did not really have a choice…and that goes for almost everybody I know… It is rather that you just stay at the department where you have performed you Master internship  than you do your PhD or that you just apply for an available position due to an ad placed by the department on the Nature.jobs or Academic.transfer website…

Now I am in the USA and I see the other side of it. Here, undergrad students do a couple of rotations prior to making their choice of where to perform their PhD-study! How great is that?? Sure, we do our research in two different labs during our (medical/molecular/….) biology study, but we never have a guarantee that we will be able to perform our PhD-study in this particular lab… if we do not stay at the lab where we performed our master internship at, we have to apply for a PhD position at another lab with another dozen of PhD-students, and I am not saying this is wrong or right, but would it not be great to rotate for a while in a couple of labs and then to be able to choose between those labs in order to decide where to perform your PhD-study?

This is common in the USA, and I think it is a very good system that at least gives you the opportunity to get to know the lab and the people you will work with, before you start your PhD. How do you feel about introducing this system into the Dutch academic system?


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#3 Piet 2010-05-29 04:31
Three months is already better than 6 weeks, but I am still a fan of the 6-9 months of the Dutch (Medical) Biology internships. You can really train a student to become more independent and give their own direction to the subject (to a certain extent of course). The obvious downside is that most student only get to see two different labs before deciding what subject to choose as a PhD. In this case, rotation would be better.

I would suggest three internships of six months. That may provide the benefits of both systems.
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#2 Sabina Lukovac 2010-05-25 12:49
Most students in the USA do their PhD after their Bachelor,it's not really common to do the Master except for other disciplines. However, they rotate for a whole year (4 x three months) in the first year of their PhD and are supervised by the PI and in the lab by the postdocs. The difference is that the dissertation committee here supervises/guides the PhD student as well, through the whole process of their thesis and it's not only responsible for reading and correcting the manuscript and asking questions during the defense (like in the NL). What you describe in Utrecht sounds as a good start. I understand supervisors would like to see something in return for the time they invest in those rotations, but how about motivated PhD students in the end? This will increase the chance they will be more successful in their career, after making the right decision of what kind of research to do. And isn't this beneficial for the whole scientific community?
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#1 Piet 2010-05-25 07:16
There is actually something called a 'snuffelstage' at the end of the Medical Biology Bachelor phase in Utrecht. What they basically did, is instead of only writing a Bachelor's thesis, the students now work for two weeks at a lab and combine a lab report + thesis in one manuscript. If they do well and like the lab and the subject (and their supervisors like them), they can do a Master's internship there. The perceived success of the two week internship highly depends on the student's and supervisor's expectations, but it's an improvement I suppose.

Something like the 'co-schappen' during a medical study may be more what you're looking for. Unfortunately, very short internships (co-schappen take 6 weeks each) at a lab almost never leads to meaningful results and the supervisors (mostly PhD students) would like to see at least something in exchange for the time they put in it (other than learning how to supervise people, which in itself is a very valuable experience).

If you do implement such a short internship system however, there need to be motivated supervisors as well (and PhD students loose it real quick when a student is only taking a lot of their valuable time). I'm not sure (yet) how this is done in the US, but my guess is that most students are supervised by other students or early PhD students (which, if I understood correctly are actually still in their Master phase when they start their PhD).
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