Doctoral Studies & Transform4Europe: current and future opportunities
As an alliance of seven European universities Transform4Europe offers many new opportunities for doctoral students at partner institutions. On offer is not only the development of the most important career competencies, the opportunity to gain international experience and to get acquainted with the best international practices, and innovative methods. It is also a chance to build one’s own academic networks for junior researchers that in the long run can become an opportunity for continuing academic partnership.
According to the President of the VMU Club of Doctoral Students and member of the Transform4Europe alliance’s student representative council and one of the management committees (Innovative Teaching and Curricula) Tetiana Ponomarenko, “Transform4Europe is a strong impetus for Vytautas Magnus University and each partner to review their practices and establish norms and to change them in accordance with the other universities’ successful practices. Because what seems impossible in our context was successfully implemented elsewhere. In that case, perhaps we can do it too? Our Club of Doctoral Students can serve as an example. Some of the other partner universities do not have a separate body which represents doctoral students. So we discussed how we managed to get together,” said President of the VMU Club of Doctoral Students.
Ponomarenko claims that working in a team is always better. “It allows one to achieve much more than individually. We sensed this during the students’ meeting too: working together, we managed to find joint solutions or at least discuss them. This is how we learn to listen to the opinion of others, find common ground, and understand the contexts of other universities.” Also, it is important to recognise that other universities face similar problems that can be overcome by tackling them together. For instance, innovative teaching and lecturer motivation: according to Ponomarenko, here lie many human factors that are common to all partner countries.
Tetiana Ponomarenko, President of the VMU Club of Doctoral Students
Another important measure provided by the alliance is information sharing. “It is very good that information-sharing channels will be created in the future (e.g. a web platform), where we as partners will be able to see mobility opportunities or news from other universities, share them with our community and travel to learn abroad while still feeling at home because the programmes will be adapted and coordinated. What discourages students from Erasmus+ is that they cannot find similar programmes, shy away from asking for funding, they do not know whether the learning subjects will be credited and so on”, noted Ponomarenko.
According to prof. Ineta Dabašinskienė, Institutional Coordinator for Trasnform4Europe at VMU, new opportunities are available for doctoral students from this year on. Under the Erasmus+ program young researchers will be able to go on exchange for a shorter period of time, e.g. from one week to a month. Such arrangements will, in the first instance, give junior researchers with employment or personal responsibilities the opportunity to go on research or study traineeships.
In the future the alliance seeks to recognize the credits of doctoral and other students without restriction, allowing students from the network universities to travel and study abroad freely. Therefore the first step will be to implement joint studies programmes. It is likely that it will be possible to gain a variety of international experiences through simpler and more flexible means, such as short-term visits, internships, distance learning and collaboration in mixed international study groups.
Moreover various Transform4Europe initiatives, courses, programmes, and non-academic trainings will seek to develop entrepreneurial skills, and provide new possibilities to learn from businesses and other social partners as well as to establish connections in the network of seven universities.
In Europe there has been an increasing level of discussion about and application of the concept of industrial (professional) doctoral studies. In the long run partnerships with various social partners will become not an exception but a necessity. Thus according to prof. Julija Kiršienė, VMU Vice-Rector for Science and Art, is very important to alter and broaden legislation of doctoral studies in Lithuania and to take into account the accelerating changes in Europe and the world. Otherwise, we may soon find ourselves on the fringes of the European area of science and study.
In the view of Ponomarenko, in the future even more universities could join the partnership as it becomes stronger, so that even more bachelor, master and doctoral students as well as lecturers could travel, learn, obtain and apply innovative practices.
The Transform4Europe initiative is dedicated to the consolidation of the potential of its members: it aims to create a vision of future higher education and implement it in reality. The initiative seeks to transform and gradually integrate the Transform4Europe universities into a single sustainable European alliance: one with a joint management structure, support systems and a centralized service provision. Its main goal is to gain European level recognition for the alliance as a centre for best practices and as a pioneer of significant change.
