FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
The choice is not limited to the professors who are contributing to the List of Open PhD Positions.
Generally, each professor of Freie Universität Berlin could become your PhD supervisor and can join the FUB-CSC PhD Program later.
To find potential supervisors, you have to check the professor's individual research interests. A good starting point is the List of the Departments of Freie Universität. You can send an e-mail with the information on your research area to the resprective professor you want to become your supervisor. If the professor is interested in your academic background, please ask the Professor to issue an informal letter or e-mail saying that she/he will supervise you in case you receive the scholarship. Please fill in the online form and and upload the letter here too.
If you have any questions, please contact csc@international.fu-berlin.de
It is not necessary to contact a professor before apply to the Beijing Office of Freie Universität. The FUB - Beijing Office will contact the professors you would like to work with anyhow and forward your application. This is part of the evaluation process. All decisions about the acceptance of individual candidates for a doctorate at Freie Universität Berlin are made by the potential supervisors in Berlin after they get your complete application via the Beijing Office.
In terms of the number of available scholarships for full-time PhD study at Freie Universität Berlin, the FUB-CSC Program is certainly your best option.
Some of the structured doctoral programs and research training groups of Freie Universität Berlin have their own scholarship programs. These scholarships are given away on a competitive basis. Calls for applications are open to Germans as well as international applicants. Calls are published yearly, in the case of some programs only every 2 to 3 years. For information about these scholarship opportunities, see the homepages of the individual programs. A suitable starting point is the List of Graduate Schools and Research Training Groups at Freie Universität Berlin.
A research proposal is not a letter of motivation, or a personal statement. It should describe a potential research project you might like to carry out.
In the research plan we would like to read about your ideas for doing research under the supervision of the professor you would like to work with. In writing a research plan, we want you to demonstrate that you are sufficiently familiar with a subject area to develop scientifically sound ideas for doing research. Please keep in mind that your proposal has to fit into the professor's research interests. Your research plan should not exceed 5 pages in length. It is not necessary to submit the research plan to the professor for approval first. You should send it directly to FUB Beijing Office together with the other application documents.
You may apply. The requirements given here are not strictly binding. If you fulfil them, you should be "on the safe side." However, the individual professor may also accept you with a weaker language test result. The supervisor can confirm that the language skills are suffient after the interview was conducted.
If you want to apply for admission to one of the structured PhD programs (click here to see the list), you don't need to apply to the Beijing Office of Freie Universität Berlin.
You have to apply to the program you are interested in directly. In order to do this, you have to go to the homepage of the program first and check out their admission policy towards foreign PhD students coming with their own scholarship, i.e. in your case a CSC scholarship. Then you should write to the contact person of the respective program.
If you have questions after having read the previous information, please contact Nicole Putbrese from the International Office of FUB via e-mail: csc@international.fu-berlin.de