Applicants with external funding

Candidates who receive external funding may apply for enrolment at any given time.

Before sending in the electronic application we recommend you read the information about enclosures to include with your electronic application and check the example of the budget to include with the application and the frequently asked questions.

If you have external funding for your PhD project and wish to enrol at the Faculty of Social Sciences, please send an email HRSC, phd@hrsc.ku.dk, and you will receive a reply.

Enrolling and possibly employing a PhD student with external funding

As previously stated, a department may decide to assess an application from an applicant whose studies are to be funded solely by external sources on the basis of a favourable and reasoned evaluation of the candidate's/project's academic potential. Any such evaluation will be made by one or more experts at the associate professor level.

Tuition fee to be paid by externally funded PhD students

Even if you have not been granted a PhD scholarship, you can apply for enrolment as a PhD student at the Faculty of Social Sciences if you bring your own funding for the studies from an external source. However, you will need to document that your funding covers university fees and your salary/living expenses at a resonable level for three years. The Faculty has established these guidelines in order to enable PhD students to complete a full time study programme, and to ensure that the Faculty meets the requirements of the Danish PhD order in offering a PhD programme which the students can complete in time and with a satisfactory result.

In reality, this means the University will require that the external funding covers certain fixed expenses as a minimum. For each of the three years of your PhD studies, the University will charge a minimum tuition fee of DKK 72,000, approximately EUR 9,700. This fee covers study expenses of DKK 50,000 per annum plus an additional 44% for administration and general office expenses.

This fee solely covers expenses directly related to the study programme i.e. expences incurred in connection with supervision, internal courses as well as the assessment and the defence of the thesis. Other expenses, e.g. expences incurred in connection with lease of an office at the University (incl. rent), external courses and conferences as well as travel expenses and expenses in connection with field work are not included in the minimum tuition fee.

Furthermore, funding is needed to cover salary/living expenses for three years. The minimum amount needed to cover these expenses is defined as DKK 12,300 per month for the whole study period.

There are no rules about fixed working hours/office hours for PhD students at the University. However, the student is required to have regular contact with the University of Copenhagen, participate in the activities of the study programme and become part of the research environment. Therefore, PhD students residing outside Denmark have to document that their external funding covers their travel expenses into and out of Denmark. Both Danish citizens and foreign citizens will have to document having funding for these expenses.

The documentation of each applicant with external funding will be assessed individually.