The self-organized colloquium of doctoral students at the Faculty of Social Sciences has been held regularly since 2017. The doctoral colloquium was organized for the first time by Prof. Dr. habil. Rudolf Schmitt (doctoral advisor F-S) and Prof. Dr. Andreas Hoff (Director of the GAT Institute) and is primarily aimed at doctoral students in the social sciences and humanities.

In 2018, a so-called "rotation principle" was introduced, which regulates the passing of the baton for organizational responsibility internally after a few meetings have been held. This gives each doctoral student the opportunity to expand their own organizational and moderation skills, which means that the responsibility and organizational effort that inevitably arises when planning such an event format is shared equally among all participants. As only online formats have been possible since the pandemic, the group has developed into a fully autonomous organizational unit within the HSZG via BigBlueButton since 2020, whose profile has yet to be sharpened as the right to award doctorates for universities in Saxony draws ever closer.

The PromKoll has always been open in its dealings with one another, which cannot be taken for granted. After all, it is also about empowering and supporting each other, immunizing each other against criticism to the extent that it can be taken seriously from an academic distance, but does not have an overly demoralizing effect. To this end, it is important to regularly exchange ideas with other doctoral candidates and to speak honestly and respectfully about your own research and sometimes even your own failures.

A few days before the colloquium, every doctoral candidate has the opportunity to send in their own content and work, which everyone can look at and discuss together. The meetings take place approximately every three weeks. To this end, a form of polite but firm communication culture is practiced, which is intended to encourage the progress of everyone involved in the dissertation. The first joint meetings with some doctoral students from Zittau have also already taken place. The Vice-Rectorate Research has been organizing a university-wide doctoral candidate meeting since 2021. Perhaps one day it will even be possible to establish a kind of doctoral student representation from the existing structures and thus institutionally anchor the organized academic mid-level staff in university politics (e.g. through elections).

But there is still a long way to go until then, as there is to the right of universities of applied sciences in Saxony to award doctorates.

Now that the first participant in our colloquium has successfully passed the defense of his dissertation in the cooperative doctoral procedure between the University of Vechta and the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences, we congratulate Bill Pottharst (GAT) on this success. He was able to present the results of his doctoral thesis to the public for the first time in May at the 22nd Young Scientists' Conference at Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences and won the prize for the best presentation.