Findings and Recommendations

The PhD Programme eValuation Committee (PVC) has two main aims: (1) to evaluate and maintain the quality of the ILLC PhD Programme as well as the working conditions of the PhD candidates at the ILLC, and (2) to act as an independent confidant to whom PhD candidates can address their concerns. To fulfil these aims, every year the PVC conducts a series of interviews with the PhD candidates. This year, the interviews took place over the second half of April and the committee — consisting of Paul Dekker, Raquel Fernández (chair), Christian Schaffner, and Ivan Titov, with support from the ILLC office by Jenny Batson, Tanja Kassenaar, and Peter van Ormondt — interviewed 50 PhD candidates out of the current 63 candidates affiliated with the institute.1 The committee first asked each PhD candidate to fill in an online questionnaire to gather some initial input and then talked to each candidate individually for around half an hour.2 We discussed (the organisational aspects of) their research, the supervision they receive, the extent to which they have written publications and presented talks, the courses they have taken (both scientific and compulsory skill courses followed as part of the new PhD programme, e.g., on presentation skills, academic writing, or project management), their involvement in teaching, their organisational activities, their scientific and social contacts within the ILLC and the outside world, the extent to which they are informed about matters at the ILLC, the legal and practical aspects of their appointment, their plans for the future, and their wishes and complaints.