Doctoral Students at Small Institutions – Challenges and Possibilities

In Sweden, 11 universities have PhD programs in biology. Most of them are large universities with well-established infrastructure for doctoral education, such as Lund University and Uppsala University. There are also institutions that have acquired permission to examine PhD students quite recently, such as Linnaeus University. However, among these 11 institutions, there are no university colleges (”högskolor”, i.e. smaller universities). I belong to one such university, Kristianstad University (HKR). At my faculty (natural science), despite not having the authority to confer a doctoral degree, we have had several doctoral students in biology over the years, and I have supervised a few. A distinguishing feature of these students is the need to be enrolled in a PhD program at another university. The conditions for such students are therefore a bit complicated – being employed and primarily active at HKR while engaged in a doctoral program elsewhere. The arrangement poses specific demands on doctoral students, and on their supervisors. The purpose of this paper is thus to identify specific challenges and advantages faced by doctoral students at small institutions and to discuss the implications of such pros and cons for the supervision of doctoral students. Unfortunately, there seems to be no previous research contrasting institutions of different sizes (resources) in terms of consequences for doctoral students, which has been highlighted as a shortcoming (Gardner, 2010a). Therefore, several of the assertions given below cannot be confirmed by research but are rather based on presumptions or personal observations. Moreover, most content below is applicable to any discipline, although some is specifically linked to the field of biology.