Applying for PhDs in Germany

[Seatbelt Blue]

I'm an American incoming masters student trying to chart a rough path ahead. My fiancee and I will need to move to Germany after I finish my degree for her career, and so if I'm interested in pursuing a doctorate (theology is my field), I'm almost certainly looking at German schools to do so.

 

Does anybody have any advice on where to look, what I'll need to have accomplished, etc, before pursuing this?

[fuzzylogician]

At the very least, you'll need to have a complete Masters and you'll need to have a research project in mind. You should also find potential advisors in the area you'll live in and contact them. A PhD in European countries is usually research heavy and requires little to no coursework. You essentially get hired to work on a certain project, sometimes through a funded project your advisor might have (and then you work on a question that has already been defined for you by your advisor) and sometimes not. Either way, you're expected to quite independently work on your own project right from the get go, so you need to be able to formulate research questions that you think you'll be able to answer with the tools you'll have by the time you graduate from your Masters degree.

[Duna]

Hey there,

since I have no clue about theology in general, I just googled around a little really quick and I suppose most theological doctorates are still Dr. theol. and do basically work like fuzzylogician described: You figure out which area your interested in, look at research professors do, contact them and suggest topics, then hopefully find someone who will work with you and then you enroll...

However, I am pretty sure you will need some sort of proof that you have sufficient knowledge of Latin, Greek (old Greek, I would guess) and Hebrew.

But that's just what I got from skimming through really quick

[ohgoodness]

Not your field at all but you could look at a call like this from the uni. at mannheim to see what they usually want in germany.

http://gess.uni-mannheim.de/CDSS/Admission/CDSS_Application_Intake_2013.pdf

A fair warning about germany and their system - alot of the good schools are located in woeful places, dredful cities, horrible regions. I would scout, scout, scout everything about the school/place but I even thought about going

(this is from a Swede and my generation does not like Germany (excl. Berlin) so I could be wrong...)