PhD students' representative 2020/21

Florian Moritz:

Since April 2017 I have been doing my PhD at the Chair of Accounting and Auditing. I conduct empirical research and I investigate the effects of regulatingon of corporate reporting and its enforcement on corporate policy (especially short-term corporate policy and regulatory avoidance).

I started my academic career with studies in Economic Sciences(B.Sc) and Political Science (B.A.) at Goethe University Frankfurt. Intermediate stops were the Universidad Nova de Lisboa and the Fudan University Shanghai. Finally, my master’s programme in Finance, Accounting, and Taxes led me to Göttingen University where I graduated in January 2017 after another stay at Gent University.
I run as a candidate for the GGG PhD students’ representative because I have had surprisingly few contact points with the GGG in the three years as a PhD student and I believe that there is a lot of potential to be exploited here. After a successful election, I would particularly like to campaign for the following topics:

- Development and cooperation in course offers: The cooperation with the other graduate schools and the Section for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education has significantly improved the course offers at GGG. Nevertheless, important offers are missing, e.g. for law students (and interdisciplinary cooperation with law students), but also courses on data mining or visualization (R, Python, Tableau). Furthermore, the course program could support onboarding for new PhD students in form of a „structured“ programcurriculum, if GGG provided a „recommended course program“ similar to what already exists for regular courses of studies. On the one hand, this would enable new PhD students to get to know the GGG at an early stagefrom the beginning, and on the other hand they would receive meaningful and early support through GGG and its partners.

- Interdisciplinarity and networking: Despite the efforts of GGG it is still difficult to establish a productive interdisciplinary discussion among the PhD students of the GGG faculties and beyond, which could also lead to interdisciplinary projects. Interdisciplinary research, with which Göttingen University adorns itself especially at Göttingen Campus, should be furthered at GGG. This requires attractive events to enable meeting and networking for members of all hierarchical levels of GGG and the other graduate schools.

- Postgraduate support: The German system of PhD education does not envisage all PhD graduates to stay in academia. Graduate schools thus have a particular responsibility to support their PhD students with planning and realizing careers outside academia. Therefore it is important to me that already existing programs at Göttingen University, such as KaWirMento, are even better integrated at GGG and further offers, notably start-up support, are strengthened.

If you support these visions of GGG, I look forward to your vote.