Education

Since the school was founded in May 2007, 142 BIG-NSE students have already finished their PhD (as of January 2025), while 38 are currently working on it. Considering that the first PhD students from BIG-NSE finished their PhD in 2010, the school has graduated about ten PhD students per year since then. This corresponds to the usual annual average batch size. Fifteen students have not finished their PhD yet and might never finish, mainly for private reasons. In the majority of these cases, an interesting job offer came in between, for which obtaining a PhD was not required.

90% of our alumni obtained their “Doktortitel” with either an “excellent” (30%) or “very good“ (60%) grade. Only 10% received “good” or “sufficient.” However, PhD students registered at the FU Berlin for their PhD (three alumni so far) do not get any grade.

On average, it took our students 4.3 years to finish their PhD (including the thesis defense and the 3.5 months of the “initial phase” program). The majority (55%) of our alumni finished their PhD within less than 4 years (or less than 5 years in case they had a child), but it took a few of them a much longer time to finish, increasing the average duration. The time spent on the PhD studies varies significantly from 2.3 years to more than 5 years in these few cases. The BIG-NSE scholarship holders (4.0 years) accomplished their PhD in approximately the same time as the associated members (4.4 years). For the extra months after the end of their three-year BIG-NSE scholarship, they usually received external funding from their group leader or from their university (e.g., “TU-Durchstarterstipendium”). The average age at start was 26.2, that at the time of defense 30.4 years.

Altogether, in March 2024 we could report about 861 peer-reviewed publications and patents published by 140 finished or almost finished students. 57% of them were first-author publications. 30% of them had more than one EC²/BIG-NSE author, which underlines the high level of collaboration between our students. An even higher percentage of these papers (42%) are the result of collaboration between different UniCat/UniSysCat groups.  

Many of the EC²/BIG-NSE publications were published in journals with a high impact factor (Ref: 2024): See figure on the right side.

In the last years, each student has published about six publications during or just after her/his PhD. On average, our BIG-NSE alumni have published 1,4 publications per year of their PhD. However, many of these papers get published after the student has left the school. Moreover, there are high disparities in the publication numbers per student, in particular due to the high level of interdisciplinary research in the cluster. While some PhD students manage to produce up to 20 papers related to their PhD topics (usually biologists, especially those working on spectroscopy), only a few of them (in particular engineers) have to struggle to publish at least one.

Talks/posters:

By March 2024 the same 140 PhD students had given at least* 132 talks in Germany and 70 abroad. Five of these talks received a special prize. This means that on average our students giveone talk in Germany during their PhD studies, and every second student also gives one talk abroad. In terms of posters, 233 were presented at conferences in Germany by these same students, and 94 abroad. This means that our students present an average of almost two posters at conferences in Germany, and almost one per student abroad. Several of these posters were awarded.   

* Unfortunately, many of our alumni do not answer the question about the talks they gave or the posters they presented during their PhD. Therefore, the real figures are certainly higher those given here.

Quite a few of our BIG-NSE students received an award during or after finishing their PhD. Often, it is an award for the PhD thesis itself, sometimes for a particularly good talk or a poster presentation at a conference. In other cases, it is a scholarship allowing the student to take part in a conference abroad.

Below are a few examples:

Academia

Data from 2018 show that approximately

Industry

Other

Approximately

Temporary unemployment

Finally, at the time of the survey,

A closer look at the mobility of our alumni students shows that

Moreover: