Role of doctoral schools

Doctoral schools facilitate the training of PhDs and prepare them for their career pursuit.

They provide PhD students with a multidisciplinary culture within the setting of a coherent scientific project.

They contribute to the coherence and international visibility of the supply of doctoral training institutions as well as the structuring of those sites.

Doctoral schools, as part of their program of action:

• implement a policy of choosing doctoral students based on explicit and public criteria that organize, in the setting of the institutional policies, recruitment for the contracts assigned to them, including doctoral contracts;
• ensure the quality of supervision of doctoral students by the research units and teams, in compliance with the thesis charters and by implementing them. They place doctoral students in the best conditions to prepare and defend their theses;
• organize scientific and intellectual exchanges between PhD students, possibly within a college of the doctoral schools of the institution or the site;
• offer doctoral students the training to help their research and professional projects as well as for the acquisition of a wider scientific literacy. Such training should not only permit the preparation of PhDs for research in the public sector, industry, and services but, more generally, for any job requiring skills acquired through the practice of research. It can be organized with the assistance of other public and private organizations;
• define a device for the continued support of the career of PhDs, both in public institutions and the private sector, established in relation with organizations or associations that contribute to the same objective and including, where appropriate, an assessment of skills;
• organize the monitoring of the continuing career of PhDs and, more generally, of all doctoral students they have received;
• provide a European and international framework, in the context of actions conducted in cooperation with higher education institutions or research centers abroad, particularly through the promotion of international co-supervision of theses.