On the day that a large part of their host-faculty burned to the ground three Chinese university lecturers concluded their doctorate process and became doctor in Mathematics at the UT. Not long after the overshadowed triple ceremony they returned to their home country. UT-Nieuws spoke to them two days before the ceremony.
Together with his Chinese colleague of the polytechnic university of Xian and assistant-supervisor Hajo Broersma Mathematics professor Cees Hoede supervised the doctorate process of the three Chinese PhD-students Shenggui Zang, Xiaodong Liu, and Lei Zhang. The ceremony of Wednesday a week ago ended eight months of uninterrupted stay at the UT for the three university lecturers from Xian. In the past year and a half they already spent first one month and later three months on campus. In the intervening periods they worked on their doctorate research in China. 'We call that the sandwich formula.' Hoede explains. 'In this way the candidates can get their PhD here in one to two years.' Hoede and Broersma were appointed consulting professor at the polytechnic university of Xian five years ago and have made regular visits since then. They also have good ties to the other university in the former Chinese capital. From both institutes five PhD-students have found their way to Enschede and the next two arrived last week. Hoede: 'Until now this was limited to the discrete mathematics group, but we are extending the project to PhD-research in systems theory.' As well as the sandwich formula the Chinese PhD-students are also part of a low-budget programme developed by Mathematical Sciences: the researchers do not get an aio-salary, but do get an allowance for their travel, upkeep and housing. 'Usually a faculty gets money for its PhD-students from the university or a governmental subsidy fund,' according to Hoede. 'But we do the prefinancing for their doctorate programme ourselves, keep costs as low as possible, and we collect the premium after the doctorate programme has been successfully concluded. That money pays the bills, and we put part of it in a fund to invest in new candidates. Frans van Vught was so enthusiastic about the model that he wanted to adopt it UT-wide. Your only problem arises when your PhD-candidates do not make it to the finish, for whatever reason.' But Shenggui (his thesis is on 'Cycles in weighted graphs'), Xiaodong (who investigated 'The chemistry of Chinese language') and Lei (who looked into 'Knowledge graph theory and structural parsing') did cross the finish-line. Which indelible impressions did the Chinese take home? Lei: 'This is a beautiful campus and the research facilities are excellent here. Better than in China. I also thought that the conferences I attended abroad were very inspiring. There you meet a lot of well-known theoreticians, who are not easy to bring together in China.' Shenggui: 'I had a good time her, but I am happy to be going home. I very much miss my eleven-year-old daughter. In China I will, I think, profit a lot from my PhD, because - with the title in my pocket - it will be easier to get money for my research proposals.' Xiaodong: 'I am very happy that I got this chance and am really glad with our always helpful supervisor.
Visiting international conferences was very useful to me too. Memories of Dutch cuisine? We only cooked traditional Chinese food on campus. The Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands cook very differently and are very expensive.'
