[ILLC PhD Newsletter]

New PhD students

We welcome many new PhD students at the ILLC this semester: Marco, Michael, Thom, Gianluca, Martijn, Emma in September, and Aybüke, Kaibo, Sirin, Chunchuan and Jan later this year. We look forward to meet you! In order to help you find your way in the institute, two mentors have been appointed: Malvin and Chenwei. If you did not meet them yet, make sure to get in touch! A lot of relevant information can be found on the institute website and on our website.

Events

24	September	PhD and MoL day
		A social event with PhD and master students
5	October	PhD day
		Presentation of the PhD council and meeting with all PhDs, followed by a free lunch
8	October	USC Science Park Run
		Sports event, website
26	November	ILLC Anniversary
		Symposium and evening programme

Ius Promovendi

A group of ILLC staff have addressed a letter a letter to the Rector Magnificus, in which they expressed their views on the need to modernise the regulations that determine who can take formal responsibility for the supervision of a PhD project at the University of Amsterdam.

The PhD council strongly agrees with the proposed changes. We wrote a short letter expressing our support and adding the perspective of PhD candidates in this matter. We urge all of you to sign our additional letter to the Rector if you agree as well. See this form for more information, and to sign the letter with your name, before 17 September.

The faculty level PhD council of FNWI is currently preparing a petition on this same issue. Expect to hear about it later this year.

Join the PhD Council

We are looking for new members. Being part of the PhD council is a great opportunity to make working at the ILLC as a PhD candidate an even better experience. It's also a good opportunity to employ and further develop your social or political skills. You will gain more insight in the UvA and ILLC management and administration, and you will be able to contribute to our ILLC PhD program by interacting with the management team.

As of now, a social committee of both PhD and MoL students is in place: Ex Falso. Its purpose is to organize social events such as drinks, sports events, PhD and MoL day, in order to promote the social cohesion within and between the MoL and PhD communities. You are very welcome to get involved.

If you're interested in joining the PhD council or the social committee, let us know by dropping us a line or just catch one of us in the hallways. It doesn't matter if you've just joined the institute or have been around for a bit longer; we strive to be a representative council.



Announcements



Performing on stage	The ILLC is planning its 25th anniversary to be held on November 26th. There is an opportunity for ILLC members, including PhD candidates, to perform an act during the party in the evening. We haven't heard of people interested yet. Please send Peter an e-mail asap (in any case, before the end of the month) if you are! In case you want to find other people to form a band or other act together, use this Google doc.
Surfspot	This is a non-profit webshop for software, hardware and cloud services. You can log on to Surfspot with your UvA credentials. Make sure to log in at least once every year, to obtain free credits that you can spend in the webshop.
Minutes	We aim to make the minutes of the council meetings available through our website. Find the minutes of our most recent meeting here.
Slack ILLC channel	Slack is a communication tool that lets you have chats in public and private ILLC channels, as well as private chats. It can be a nice addition to e-mail, especially for communication in small groups. We set up a free environment and you can register there with your @uva e-mail address.
Facebook	If you are on Facebook, make sure to join The ILLC page, Ex Falso and The MoL Gang, which are used as informal communication channels in the institute.

From the Management Team

This section contains information by the ILLC Management Team. Raquel as director of the PhD Programme is the main contact person. Email her if you have any questions.

In this first PhD Newsletter, we would like to let you know that the PhD Programme has put in place regulations concerning industrial internships. You can find them here. We hope that this will make things clearer for those of you who are considering gaining experience outside of academia and wonder how this can be combined with your PhD trajectory.