Graduate Center
About the Graduate Center of DIW Berlin
The goal of the DIW Berlin Graduate Center is to provide outstanding young doctoral students, from all over the world, with a research environment and an institutional training structure that allows them to develop their exceptional talents in an accordingly exemplary manner. It leads them to a deeper understanding of economic and social processes and gives them the opportunity to apply their knowledge within the professional research environment of one of Germany’s leading economic think-tanks.
The program follows a dual training approach. It offers high-level core and field courses, and on-the-job training in DIW Berlin research projects. In order to effectively link academic research and real-life policy issues, the program also offers two internships of one month each. The first internship, in Berlin, allows doctoral students to become acquainted with the political institutions of Germany’s capital city and their needs for research-based policy advice. At the same time, the political environment will provide students with crucial insight into the real social and economic issues facing policy-makers today. The second internship, in Washington DC, places students in the US capital city’s most influential policy-oriented research institutes. Here students will learn how social and economic research is organized and conducted in the US and, in turn, providing them with important critical insight into how European institutions and their activities are viewed and analyzed from a US perspective.
The Center itself is not a degree-awarding body, but a strongly institutionalized network of senior researchers, scholars and professors from Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin and the University of Potsdam, providing doctoral-level instruction and supervision leading to a doctorate at one of these partner universities. Many of the university scholars are also members of DIW Berlin or otherwise closely connected to the Institute’s research work.
The location of the DIW Berlin Graduate Center offers a unique vantage point for young economic and social researchers with a strong policy focus. DIW Berlin provides doctoral students with a wide array of opportunities to communicate with policy makers, enabling them to sharpen their proficiency in listening to the public debate and in presenting their scientific results for discussion with highly experienced research and policy professionals.
Graduates of the Center will be outstandingly qualified in the scientific analysis of economic and social policy issues: they will possess excellent methodological skills, in-depth experience handling empirical data, and detailed institutional knowledge of the economic and societal structure of many countries, in addition to the crucial ability to disseminate their research results. They will be able to present their results effectively at international congresses, publish their scientific contributions in internationally renowned journals, and successfully manage large-scale research projects.
But the DIW Berlin Graduate Center is more than an advanced training program for research excellence: it leads young researchers to an empirically grounded and unbiased approach to economic and social problems.
