Further Funding Opportunities

Funding within the University

Zonta Prize

The ZONTA-Club Würzburg awards an annual prize to a highly qualified young female scientist. The award is usually announced for young female scientists with a doctorate in the STEM subjects (chemistry and pharmacy, mathematics, and computer science as well as physics and astronomy) and/or the life sciences. We are looking for female candidates who distinguish themselves through their scientific achievements as well as their commitment to gender equality.

Proposals for candidates or applications are collected throughout the year at the University's Women's Representative Office. The ZONTA Club decides on the awarding of the prize, which is endowed with 2,000 euros.

The ZONTA Club is an internationally active service club of professional women and has been committed to supporting young female academics at the University of Würzburg since 1995.

Contact: Gisela Kaiser (gisela.kaiser@uni-wuerzburg.de).

Further Education

Career planning for academics does not start after graduation. If you're smart about it and want to start your career with a good foundation, you can create the best possible starting position for yourself while you're still studying.

Networking - even during your studies

A keyword that comes up again and again in career planning is networking. "I'm afraid students haven't quite grasped how important networking is yet," Claudia Fink from the Career Centre at Kiel University also notes. Networking - that sounds foreign to many students at first. But we are all already in a network, even during our studies. The art is to maintain and expand this network - and to learn to give and take from each other.

Career planning means more than internships

For many students, career planning is synonymous with completing internships. The so-called internship generation goes through one internship after another during and after their studies. Often, graduates are afraid of the gap after graduation and prefer to do an internship before they register as unemployed. But students also do internships - sometimes indiscriminately - to improve their CVs. Jessica Heyser of the Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB) agrees that this is not always advisable: “Basically, you should ask yourself what situation you are in at the moment and whether an internship really makes sense.”

Soft skills wanted

What do future employers actually want? Ann Krombholz, a human resources manager from the IT sector, who herself often hires graduates from the fields of design, web programming, and the natural sciences, calls above all for so-called soft skills: "We are willing and able to teach our new employees the technical requirements, but communicative and social skills are much more difficult to learn," says Krombholz. In addition to professional know-how, generalists who have been involved in many fields during their studies are again increasingly in demand.

A lot of useful information and seminars can be found on the Career Centre´s website.