I am an interdisciplinary scientist in the topics A and B, and obtained my degree in a non-European institution. In there we don’t have a distinction between bachelor and master’s degree. We have a 6 years long career which is considered a combination of the two, and allows you to apply for a PhD immediately after. I have colleagues in Germany doing their PhDs mostly with no issues, but one of them told me the university caused problems and ended up having to do courses, which affected her PhD work. So, to prevent the same thing happening to me, I asked to the respective office before applying to the program, and they replied I shouldn’t worry. That the committee that decides the equivalences is international and know very well that my degree is a bachelor + master’s. All of this made total sense to me, since the recruitment was promoted as an International Graduate School. I felt backed up by the respective office.
During COVID I started registering at the associated university in the faculty in the topic B that corresponded to my supervisor and, to my surprise, months later they told me my degree wasn’t enough and I had to undergo 20 ECTS (3 semestral master courses). I was completely shocked and when contacting the office again, they told me the university had made a mistake between my file and someone else’s and that they were working on it. After three months of not hearing anything, I contacted them back. Apparently, they were still figuring it out, but to make things move towards a resolution I had to pick the courses they were accidentally forcing me to take, which I found extremely odd. Again and again there were communications beyond my knowledge and I was kept in the dark, and only by asking every few weeks I got little pieces of information. I wasn’t being given the correspondence between the people involved, nor the formal documents emitted by the university regarding the evaluation of my diploma. Until we reached a point where the responsible office told me the university was entitled to decide if my degree was sufficient and that they were acting ‘by the book’ and I had to take the courses. By this point, an entire year had passed by.
This moment felt like pure confusion and frustration to me, since in the conditions of the program it says that if you don’t have the equivalent to a master’s, you only have to undergo lab rotations. But besides that, I felt I was given false and/or insufficient information, enhancing my feeling of helplessness and isolation. Every time I had to talk with the person in charge of handling this problem, I would have anxiety attacks because I would feel responsible for these issues and like I wasn’t enough to be in the program. I got told directly that my degree was insufficient and that I was just complicating my situation further. I knew this was unfair, that I had the same or more studies that my colleagues and nobody was really looking for a proper equivalence of the degrees.
I transcended my issue to studreps and authorities and managed to send a letter to the responsible faculty. They ended up responding (and I got to see that response 3 months later) that the problem was that my degree was in the topic A, or that I didn’t have past publications. They even mistook my country of origin in these communications. At this point I was being asked to do the courses to ‘not have problems in the future’ with the faculty. I just couldn’t accept anything else than a fair and equal treatment, which made me enter in a downwards spiral.
As last resource, we decided to change to faculty A and was accepted without further conditions. But I know now about similar cases to mine, where PhD students signed for the faculty that corresponds directly to their diploma’s topic and were asked to do courses/exams anyway. From the moment I applied to the program till the resolution of my issue, the entire office in charge has been restructured. And only when that happened, I got an actual apology of how this problem was handled. During those 2 years, I thought about quitting the program several times, and if it weren’t for the support of my PI and my TAC committee, I probably would have. Still many things are not clear to me. Why this being a problem that several non-European face, people in charge are not transparent about it? and why are we still treated like ‘special cases’ when the program is international?