From Student to Researcher - are we on the right track?

6th EUA-CDE Annual meeting: 'From Student to Researcher - are we on the right track?'
The Annual Meeting of EUA-Council for Doctoral Education (EUA-CDE), held at the University of Warsaw from 18 to 19 June 2013, sought to take stock of the developments in doctoral education over the last years. It focused on the question “are we on the right track?” keeping in mind the main goal of doctoral education – to cultivate the research mindset. Around 200 participants from across Europe participated in the conference. In the opening session, two different – but compatible – views were presented by Professor Francesc Xavier Grau, Rector of Rovira i Virgili University in Spain, and Professor Ernő Keszei, Vice-Rector of Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary. Professor Grau underlined the benefits of establishing doctoral schools and the crucial role of doctoral candidates in technology transfer and innovation, while pointing to certain problems in the implementation of reforms. Professor Keszei, meanwhile, talked about how the core traditions of doctoral education were still essential to providing doctoral candidates with skills for careers in and outside academia.
The meeting also included a number of smaller sessions with case study presentations, or special training for both new and experienced staff. Case studies concerned with quality assurance issues were particularly well attended, showing the continued relevance of this topic for doctoral education.
Other plenary sessions discussed the EUA-led projects on doctoral education, which have been completed in 2012-2013: the CODOC project on global trends and the ARDE project on quality assurance. The issue of supervision was also debated in a plenary session with Dr Anne Lee advocating more evidence-gathering in the area and doctoral candidate Klaudia Proniewska giving an overview of the situation of doctoral candidates in Poland. Read more...