Master Thesis In German Universities Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

Every so often, i receive inquiries about research positions, graduate and post doctoral in my department, the faculty of technology. Many inquirers will not know the structure of german university research groups, so it's worth a few words of explanation. This structure is common at this level of detail also to swiss german and austrian universities. The main difference in hiring practices between german universities and those in the us and uk is that there is no department wide hiring of junior research personnel, either `graduate students' or post doctoral. Each professor either has his own `group' as i do or is the `assistant director' in the group of another professor.

The research group has its own research interests, money and personnel, independent of other groups in the same faculty. My computer science colleagues in bielefeld have groups working in bioinformatics and sequence analysis, neural networks and connectionism, robotics, pattern and image analysis and speech understanding, and knowledge based systems. One qualifies as a teenager to attend a university by obtaining the abitur. Signifying successful completion of one's course of studies at an `academic' high school, a gymnasium 0 . There are other schools for those deemed at an earlier age not to be sufficiently qualified in one sense or another for `academic' work as a teenager.

One must not necessarily continue in the same vein as in high school it's not as narrowly circumscribed as studies in the uk in the early 70's for example, when i went to university. I wouldn't have obtained a university place in the uk to study biology, for instance, let alone english literature. University students in germany pursue a course of studies which is lengthy in comparison with their counterparts in the us and uk, but which terminates in a six month more or less project of original work which is called a `diplomarbeit ' `diploma work' , a diploma thesis. Studies are mostly planned by the faculty for completion in four years, but it is not uncommon for students to take six years or longer to complete.

Roughly corresponding to lower division and upper division studies in us universities. Hauptstudium courses consist of specialities offered more or less at will by the various research groups. Students must take some physical science courses as a minor, because our degree is actually in `scientific informatics' we don't offer a pure informatics degree.

To take an exam, they must have participated in six to twelve weekly hours of course or seminar work seminars normally count for two weekly hours, courses for two or four and find a professor willing to examine them in that accumulated work. Seminar work consists in giving a talk oneself in the seminar meeting on a chosen theme, and completing a more in depth paper on the topic. There are regulations on the distribution of general topic areas one may be examined in during the course of the hauptstudium.

After successful completion of grund and hauptstudium comes the diploma thesis work. Students are commonly in their mid to late twenties when they finish their studies. My experience is that diploma thesis work is equivalent to, and can often be better than, theses written for master's degrees in us and uk universities 1 . Students who obtain a diplom degree by completing their studies and their thesis work often show their accomplishment professionally by appending `dipl inf ' `informatics diploma ' or `dipl ing ' `engineering diploma ' to their names 2 . To attain a doctoral degree in germany, as in the uk, it generally suffices to write and successfully defend a thesis under the direction of a professor. To be a paid graduate student in germany, one must apply for and obtain a job as `scientific employee' wissenschaftlicher mitarbeiter male or wissenschaftliche mitarbeiterin female 4 .

Law of Persons Past Exam Papers

These are regular employment, for a fixed length of time of usually two to five years but some such jobs, for example at gmd, the german national computer and informatics research organisation, may be tenured. During one's employment, one works on the topic assigned by the professor directing the research group. At the end, one may write up one's thesis and defend it to obtain a doctorate 5 . After the doctoral degree, someone working on an academic career will normally have to write a post doctoral thesis called a `habilitation ' this is also the case in france and some other european countries. This is usually accomplished by obtaining a `senior assistant' position, normally seven years, dependent upon successful completion of a mid term review. This position normally comes with some teaching duties, and on the career ladder occupies roughly the same place as a position of assistant professor in the us.

Argumentative Essay Huck Finn

However, in contrast to the us, to be promoted to a tenured position one normally has to obtain a professorial position at a different university. So paid doctoral candidates or post doctoral researchers are hired as `scientific employees' by the professor who leads the group which has the position available. The work will be more or less specific, fitting with the research needs of the group, or with the contractual needs of the research project. Post docts working on their habilitation often have considerable leeway if their jobs are not bound with a specific project contract. At full universities, there are two professorial grades, and in more traditional universities these grades will be bound to directorship or assistant directorship of a research group. The research groups are more or less autonomous as regards the research they do and the courses that their members offer for diplom students.

Professors must normally be `habilitated', that is, must possess a habilitation degree, although in engineering subjects such as computer science `informatics ' as it is often called in europe , `equivalent experience' will count. While affidavits from other professionals are always required, it is often required also that these professionals must be professors themselves 6 . There are two grades of university professor, c3 and c4, corresponding to salaries.

Dissertation Phd Philosophy

Your remuneration is standard, depending only on age, and to a minor degree on the cost of living in the city in which you work. The only way to increase your salary, other than by getting older, is by obtaining a ruf. Your current university is then empowered to offer you a standard increment to your current salary or may decline.

Papers on Operating System

The professorial hiring process in universities involves committee work, interviews, evaluations by others, deliberations, and further evaluations of the process and the results by state officials, before an offer is made in a letter from the minister of the land concerned. It could seem rather unfortunate that any prof who wishes to better hisher salary must involve so many others in much work to no final benefit to themselves. This situation is ameliorated somewhat by the evaluation process, which assigns a preference order to the top candidates, so that if someone declines, the hiring committee just moves down the list without having to repeat all the steps.

To use this method, a prof would have to join industry and then get hired back also not unknown. Once one has obtained the status of professor, one may enjoy the freedom to work like a dog, to go political, or for some to just plain goof off on serious research that the requirement to teach the courses of one's pleasure, 8 hours a week for about 30 weeks, and to attend occasional faculty meetings leaves one. I use the term `high school ' here in the us sense, to mean a school for teenagers of both genders, persisting until the end of legally required education. In germany, the `high schools' hochschulen are the universities universit ten and polytechnical universities fachhochschulen .