Paul Koenraad says he’s surprised that the list of PhD candidates who opted for an online ceremony also features many Dutch names. “I expected that many Dutch PhD candidates would opt for a ceremony on our campus, but apparently that’s not the case. It seems more obvious for foreign PhD candidates, because they’ve perhaps returned to their home countries by now, or they had to leave the Netherlands already because their visa’s expired. But perhaps those Dutch PhD candidates want to continue with the job they’ve already started.”

Each PhD candidate now gets to choose whether he or she wants to hold the PhD ceremony online or on campus still. Until April 6, the dean of the department in question had to make a decision about that. Koenraad: “Now that we’ve gotten further along in this process and had some positive experiences with the online defense of graduation projects by our Master’s students and PDEng’s, who already started doing it online immediately, we want to deal with it a bit more relaxed. It’s their party too after all, so we let them decide. The deans will actively approach the PhD candidates for this in the coming days. It was also decided that PhD candidates should once again have the possibility to request a date for the ceremony at the Office of Doctoral Presentations and Academic Ceremonies.”

Sufficient accommodation

Five online doctoral presentations took place already by now, Koenraad says. According to him almost forty doctoral presentations were scheduled to take place in the period up to the summer holiday. “In total about twenty of these will take place online. We’ve already taken some steps to ensure that we have sufficient accommodation once it becomes possible again to organize the ceremony on campus. We want to prevent people from having to wait too long for their doctoral presentation.”

Naturally, the online ceremony is much more sober than the one held on campus. Koenraad: “It’s an online meeting between the PhD candidate and the members of the doctoral committee. Besides the supervisor and co-supervisor at least four committee members need to take part. The committee’s secretary keeps the time and loudly says ‘hora est’ when the hour is over, which is then repeated by the committee’s chairman. Family and friends can’t join in online unfortunately during this ceremony.” But Koenraad says that the university is looking into ways how to make this possible.