For PhD candidates, their thesis propositions are an opportunity to publicly express their professional and personal convictions about science and society. In this feature they explain their most thought-provoking proposition. This time, a proposition from Ahmad Dermawan, Public Administration and Policy, who defended his thesis on 26 October 2022.
‘As a sandwich PhD, the idea was I would spend my first nine months and last nine months in the Netherlands. The other thirty months I would do fieldwork in Indonesia. The university would fund the portion spent on campus; the local organization would cover my time during the fieldwork. Before I started, I had mapped a plan for these four years. Unfortunately, major donors unexpectedly withdrew their funding and the organization had to redistribute the remaining resources. I was side-lined.
‘I had to manoeuvre to secure other funds, but some of them required additional work not related to my thesis. My PhD was about palm oil, but now I also had to publish papers on other topics to satisfy the funders. As a result, I often spent my days on work for the funders, then the evenings and nights on my PhD. It was not uncommon for me to send emails to my supervisors at 2 a.m. In the end it took me more than seven years to complete my PhD because of the additional work. ‘Ideally, there should be a more explicit commitment from the local organization to guarantee the availability of resources to cover the work, for example, a binding contract between the university and the organization. However, from the local organization’s perspective, making a commitment to one particular staff member is not easy. Therefore, supervisors should try to find fully funded PhD positions or secure scholarship schemes that fully cover the PhD students. Then PhD students can focus on their study.’
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