Training & Education with TRAIL
One of the main objectives of TRAIL is to provide in high quality training and education for TRAIL PhD students. TRAIL wants to educate PhD students in order that they become excellent researchers, who prove to be able to conduct self-reliant, independent, and scientifically accountable research.
The curriculum that TRAIL Research School has set up offers great opportunities for PhD students to obtain knowledge they will need in their careers, and to develop the necessary skills. Then they will successfully finish their PhD thesis and can expect to enter the labor market in a good position, and to be sought after by research institutes, government institutions and the private sector.
TRAIL believes that good education includes providing a solid basis, enabling in-depth specialization, and broadening the horizon of the PhD student.
New Training & Education Program
December 2013
In response to the recommendations of the international peer review committee of TRAIL (2012), the ongoing development of local graduate school programs and research masters, and, last but not least, the changing needs and desires of PhD students, a redesign of the current TRAIL Training and Education (T&E) program, in terms of both the content and rules was desired.
More specifically, the following reasons fueled the need for a revision of the T&E program:
• The increasing need for a ‘core curriculum’, creating a body of common knowledge among TRAIL PhD students (TRAIL-IPRC, September 2012);
• The increasing divergence of the educational needs of PhD students with increasingly different backgrounds;
• The recognition of heterogeneity of categories of PhDs according to their formal position: internal, part-time, external;
• The need to improve the link with TRAIL Research Program (Themes: TRAnsport, Infrastructure, Logistics);
• The development of local Graduate Schools with their own rules and courses;
• The development of local Research Masters at universities, in which part of the PhD education is likely transferred to the Masters phase;
• The educational needs of potential new TRAIL partners (VU, UvA, RUG, UU, LU), amongst others in the area of OML (Operations Management & Logistics).
For more information on the set-up of the TRAIL T&E program see ‘Course structure’.
