Career prospects

Career prospects

The IS Master's programme provides a solid basis for a PhD study for talented students interested in carrying out IS-related research at a leading international level.
The above-listed Master topics and courses give a good impression of the topics IS researchers at the VU work on, usually in national, international and EU R&D projects in interdisciplinary collaborations with other research institutions and with industry.
 
Periodically, the faculty offers a number of PhD student positions. Additional PhD opportunities are available every now and then due to specialised research projects acquired by VU's IS staff and financed by external funds.
 
Graduate students with excellent grades are invited to apply for one of these positions. A PhD student position is normally awarded for four years, during which the PhD student is expected to finish his/her PhD thesis. PhD students are supervised by a full professor, whereby daily supervision may additionally be carried out by another senior member of the permanent scientific staff. Aside from his/her research task (which includes following specialised courses and seminars), the PhD student is also expected to contribute to academic teaching and education of BSc and MSc students in the field.
 
All PhD students are registered with SIKS, the Dutch National Graduate Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems, which is accredited by the KNAW, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and is co-ordinated by the VU department FEW/Informatics. SIKS guarantees an excellent training programme for the PhD student and a high level of research attainment with respect to the accepted PhD theses. All training as a researcher in the Information Sciences is carried out under the auspices of SIKS, http://www.siks.nl.