Frequently Asked Questions

Can I do a paid summer internship at your Centre?

Unfortunately our department does not have a budget to pay external students for spending some time in our department. If you are an EC citizen and studying at another university you may try to find funding through the Erasmus program.

If you are prepared to pay for the full stay, and thus do not expect any financial aid from us, you may try to get through the immigration procedures for foreign students. If you are prepared to do, so please make this clear from the letter you send us in which you ask for the possibility to do such an internship. The steps to be followed then are:

• You take a look at the page of the group in which we describe our research
• You write an email to our coordinator Internship Coordinator indicating your research interest, experience and indication of why you think you can contribute in that area. Flooding the rest of the group with emails will be of no use to you.
• If we think we might be able to supervise you succesfully in the indicated area:
  1. We assign you a provisional supervisor, and together with him you prepare a project description
  2. Your school sends us a formal letter asking us to supervise you in the given period for the defined subject
  3. We will charge you a deposit for the first month of rent for a room (about euro $400)
  4. Once we receive this deposit we will send you a formal invitation letter
• Since we are recently flooded with request keep in mind that at any of the steps above, we may indicate that we have reached the limit of what we can handle

Can I do a Ph.D at your Centre?

Without going into issues like a possible subject, whether we are willing to supervise you etc, the most important question to be answered first is Who is going to pay for your living while you are working on your Ph.D?

There are a couple of solutions to this problem:

1. In general Ph.D. students in the Netherlands are employed by the University. As a direct consequence all regulations regarding work permits etc apply; this makes it difficult for students from outside the EC to be appointed. The University has a very few positions available, without further strings attached. Quite often however your appointment will be part of and paid by a granted project, which more or less fixes the subject of research.
2. You acquire a scholarship in one of the many special programs that are available through the EU, mutual agreements between countries etc. For students from specific countries the Dutch Government provides fellowships. More information can be found through the NUFFIC site. In this case the University charges Ph.D students EURO 12.000 per year for tuition, office space, travelling to conferences etc.
3. You pay all the costs out of your own pocket. Please keep in mind that if you register as a student and do not hold a EU citizenship or the equivalent, you will not be allowed to work in the Netherlands in order to regain your costs of living.
4. You perform your research while working for a company. See here for further details (in Dutch).

Details about admission and especially financing can be found at the website: Doctoral degree (currently defunct)

Aside from the problems mentioned above the department welcomes external PhD students, which are not employed by the university, and often work at a company. See also the information about external PhD students from the PhD Candidates Network of the Netherlands.

For external candidates, the following applies:

• To get admission to a PhD program of the university, the candidate must have obtained a Master of Science degree, or a similar qualification, see the doctoral degree regulations of Utrecht University [English] [Nederlands]. More information can be obtained via Qdesk. 
• The PhD candidate should contact one of the full professors at the department, and reach agreement about supervision.
• When the research project has been well defined, the PhD student must enroll in the Graduate School of Natural Sciences, in the PhD program Information and Computing Sciences. They are provided with an education and training program, specified in the graduate school registration form.  
• External PhD students pay a tuition fee to compensate for costs made by the university: guidance by a supervisor, library access, use of computing infrastructure, use of floor space, administration (department, faculty, graduate school).
• The tuition fee for external PhD students is currently € 3.000,00 per year. It is up to the external candidate to seek an arrangement with her/his employer about the tuition fee. In case of special programs, (for example the fellowship program of the Chinese Scholarship Counsil), or bilateral agreements (for example with the Hogeschool Utrecht and TNO),or mutual agreement, the tuition fee may be reduced or waived.
• The tuition fee does not include membership fee of a research school and costs for attending conferences and outside courses.
• Payment of the tuition fee is required from the moment a standard hospitality agreement form is signed.

For more information, please contact the research director.

What are the legal procedures to work/study at your Center?

The NUFFIC (Netherlands University Foundation for International Cooperation) maintains a website describing the current procedures.

Can I follow the program as a part time student?

We do not have an official part-time progam. You can however follow the program at an easier pace, by taking one course in each block instead of two. In this way the progam will take four years. If it is possible to combine the final thesis project with your job, you can study full-time during the writing of your thesis. Unfortunately the university charges a fixed fee per year, independent of the number of courses you take. So you will end up paying twice the tuition.

Can I study in my own time and skip lectures?

As you may expect we do not encourage this and it will not always be possible. We provide in a learning environment that builds on active participation of the students; you give presentations in seminars, you attend the colloquium, you prepare a presentation with a fellow student etc. Most courses have two slots of two hours of lecturing per week. So if you take one course per block expect to be present at the university for at least two half days per week, and to wrk at home for one and a half day.

What is ECTS?

ECTS stands for "The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System". It is a point system to expres the amount of workload required to achieve the objectives of e.g. a course or a study. One ECTS point amounts to 28 hours of work.

How much time and effort will I have to spend on the Software Technology Master Program?

Normally it takes 2 years. As for the effort, the total progam takes 120 ECTS. Typically you will take two courses per block; each course is 7.5 ECTS. There are 4 blocks in a year, so your workload is 60 ECTS/year. Each ECTS point amounts to 28 hours of work.

-- DoaitseSwierstra - 19 Mar 2007