Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Reviews

Even within the same institute, your experience can differ enormously based on your director and project leader, from a fantasy land to personal hell. You'll need to build some contacts to learn the real scoop. Do a lot of homework beforehand and have Plan B ready if you enter an unworkable situation. No professionalism; typical academic workplace problems turned up to 10. If your work doesn't have support, you work out the remainder of your contract writing up old results and looking for your next job. Everyone gets the same net pay but Germans get paid benefits (health insurance, vacations, retirement, seniority pay raises, unemployment benefit) while foreigners get none and have to buy their health insurance out of their net salary. Ask for a contract instead of a stipend, don't accept any bunk about foreigners having no use for the German social security system. You probably won't get a contract as this doubles your cost to the institute. Postdocs cost exactly twice as much as graduate students so the expectation is that you will work at least twice as hard. Think about that.

As a PhD student you will be expected to work full time even though you are paid part-time. Because of part-time assumption your payment is quite low for a person with a master degree ( 1.2-1.3 kEur/month netto). Expect about half of the pay you will get on junior position in the private sector. No dedicated educational program, or consistent policy of investing in personnel training. As there are no strict policies on supervision - big portion of that full-time and overtime work is in vain, just to learn on your own mistakes. You are a cheap labor, no one cares about wasting your time. It does not improve your ability to land a good job afterwards. Master graduates who who wrote their thesis in the institute have similar jobs as the PhD graduates several years later.