On April 9th we heard the response of the UU board to our letter of recommendations, during a university council meeting with Anton Pijpers, the chair of the UU board.
The UU board understands most of the recommendations and they have added it to the Graduate Agenda (the general plan of how to improve the PhD phase at UU).
They were less enthusiastic about appointing a psychologist, but they said they will ensure that the social workers are sufficiently equipped to deal with PhD issues.
They will also investigate how to make transferable skills courses more accessible to everyone, regardless of which graduate school you belong to, or what your budget is.
Next steps
We are happy that the UU board agreed with almost all of our recommendations (except the PhD psychologist – the first recommendation on our list). We have agreed to re-evaluate these measures with the UU board in October, to see if they are sufficient.
However, we still think that it would be very important to provide psychological support to PhDs at UU, so we decided to start a petition! You can read it and sign it here.