In my last post I talked about PhD defences and how they vary from country to country. Sometimes the PhD defence is described as the last formal exam you’ll ever take, because it’s the highest academic qualification you can have. Well, turns out that’s true in many countries, but not all. In France, Germany and many other Northern and Eastern European nations (and also some North African nations and part of Brazil), there is a higher academic qualification: the Habilitation. And I obtained mine at the start of the summer.
The purpose of a habilitation is to show that you can lead your own research programme and supervise (and sign off!) your own PhD students. That typically opens the door to promotions to full professor (as opposed to, for instance, lecturer) or equivalent positions. Of course, in practice lecturers and research scientists without a Habilitation can and do supervise their own students… but always need to co-sign the paperwork with someone who does have the Habilitation. Which can be tedious.
Of course, France being France, you couldn’t just look at someone’s body of work and research outcomes and say “this person is clearly ready to be a Professor”. No, in France, you need an exam and a certificate. And hence, the Habilitation. It functions a bit like a PhD, in the sense that you need to write a thesis, and defend it in a public meeting in front of a committee (really just like the PhD defence in France).
The catch is … there is no pre-defined format for the thesis (in France at least!). It’s more or less free-form. So you need to write something… it just doesn’t matter what it is so long as you can feel like you can defend it in front of a committee of peers. Well… not quite peers: everyone on the committee needs to have the Habilitation too.
Although I was repeatedly advised that in the French high energy physics community, it is totally fine to just staple your last 5 papers together with an introduction and call that a Habilitation thesis, I opted to make my life more complicated. I figured that I am in an inflection point in my career: taking up the ATLAS Exotics convenership has forced me to shift perspective from my own research objectives to the bigger picture of searches for new physics at the LHC. Hence, I decided to use my Habilitation thesis to revisit my early career (from after my PhD to the start of my Exotics convenership) and see if I could make some sense of the various research threads I pursued over that time, and fit it into a sensible narrative.
It was a very cathartic exercise: it turns out did all make sense all along. It was also nice to write in a different style: I chose a non-academic tone, describing the science but also throwing in anecdotes and recollections along the way. I describe how my thoughts changed over several iterations of similar searches, and how ideas came from conversations with colleagues, and perform post-mortems on parts of my career which were more laborious. I’m very pleased with how it came out, and my committee also agreed it was a good read in their report 🙂
The defence itself went as smoothly as I could have hoped: the obligatory AV dysfunction (how many physicists does it take to make a projector work??? There is no good answer) didn’t stop my from giving a talk I was proud of, and I answered the questions from the committee to the best of my ability and, it appears, to their satisfaction. I was able to have my daughter sit through the whole thing without getting bored, and I was able to publicly thank my wife and family for supporting me in a career which brings me so much joy and fulfilment. And most of all, at the snacks and drinks we laid out afterward, I was able to introduce a whole laboratory of French physicists to the joys of typical English summertime drink Pimms… and I even got them to taste proper Cheddar and admit it was a great cheese. Surely that was the great victory of the day?
Oh, and now I can sign off my own PhD students 🙂
PS: my Habilitation thesis is public and available here.
Louie D. Corpe 