GAUSS

Information from GAUSS & GAUSS Career Service

Results of our survey “Career Service Newsletter Reading Habits”

First of all, we would like to thank all 167 of you who completed the survey! The insights we gained and your very constructive and helpful comments are really valuable for us! In the following you will find only a brief overview of the major results. If you would like to have a more detailed look, please email (career@gauss.uni-goettingen.de) and we will send you the detailed information.


Our first question asked where you are based and showed that we have a very good distribution over all the GAUSS institutions across the Göttingen Campus. When looking more specifically at the different positions (e.g. postdocs, PhDs in their 3rd year or above, group leaders etc.) the distribution is similar.

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This leads to the second question – your current position. Two-thirds of you are either postdocs or at the end of your PhD. The last third is compromised of PhD students at an earlier career stage, group leaders, science managers, GAUSS alumni and others.

If you were a PhD students we also asked you if you are aware that there are two GAUSS newsletters – the GAUSS Newsletter from the Graduate School Office and the Career Newsletter. They have different contents and are sent at different times. Out of 56 PhD students who answered this question, 49 confirmed that they knew this fact.

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With our next question we wanted to learn more about your reading habits by asking how often you read the newsletter.

Approximately one-third of your are regularly reading posts while most are only scrolling through the headlines to see if something is of particular interest for them. Looking at your different positions it is apparent that postdocs read more posts on a regular basis than for example PhD students. We think this is due to the fact that some content might become much more relevant the further you advance in your career.

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When asked which category is the most relevant for you the overall results show that the Workshop and Event Category is most important followed by job adverts.

Although the most popular category stays the same if we look at your different positions, we can see some changes in the importance of the other two categories. Postdocs are for example much more interested in funding opportunities than advanced PhD students, who consider job adverts more valuable.

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Grafik5By asking if you miss a category we wanted to find out if there is anything we can add to our newsletter. Whilst over 90% said they didn’t miss anything, 8% confirmed this and most of those specified their wishes.

Based on these suggestions we will try to include more courses available on the Göttingen Campus (e.g. courses by the SUB or GWDG and any business courses which might be relevant for you). Some suggestions considered categories we actually already have as for example academic and non-academic job opportunities, mentoring programs (we only include those you are eligible to apply for) or counselling sessions, which we offer all year round. One suggestion was to include conferences, which unfortunately we cannot do as our target group is far too diverse to include all relevant conferences and it would be very likely that we miss out on many, which wouldn’t be helpful in our opinion.


Additionally, we asked if you would prefer to keep everything as it is or if you would like to change anything with regard to how and when the newsletter is sent. Most of you are very happy as it is and therefore we will continue to send the GAUSS Career Service Newsletter around the 15th of each month and in addition highlight some workshops or events by sending separate emails.


With our last question we asked you for your overall opinion and further suggestions and we were really overwhelmed that we received over 60 (equivalent to 36%) comments, which included great suggestions and very nice messages! We are currently in the process to check what we can implement and over which timeline.

THANK YOU ALL FOR PARTICIPATING!!!