Welcome to the GCD website! We’re quite proud of the acronym, hope you like it. On the logo, it’s us, the lab mice …ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ
The purpose of this site is to share useful resources more or less related to PhD life, things to have fun with, news… It’s open to contributions, so feel free to write us!
Doing a PhD in France can be quite hard when not speaking the language, so we try to post most of the content in English. But much more things are on the PGCD page… …ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ
Origin story
The GCD was created from the observation that, too often sadly, isolation was a common denominator for PhD students. You arrive in a lab, and if there’s no social structure (like a PhD room), you’re likely to have a hard time meeting people. At best, you can find a few people in the same field through seminars, but that creates a small social bubble that won’t intersect with the others. In short, it’s not top…
To change this, we (=a small group of new science PhD students, based around Paris) decided to create this collective. The aim is to make it easier for PhD students to meet, help and support each other. We can discuss our own problems with each other, a priori without any power relationship. And as we’re not just negative, we’d also like to spend some nice moments together! Like picnics, evenings at the bar, parties, etc… or simply taking coffee breaks and going to the canteen together.
Structure
The idea of doing something germinated during the summer break 2024, and we really got going in the autumn following. It’s brand new!
The organisation is informal: we’re not an association or a union, just people who get well along. There are no offices (presidency, secretariat, etc.), we are not attached to anything, and we want to operate as horizontally as possible. It’s an experimental approach, which will probably evolve as events unfold.
Don’t hesitate to join, nor to suggest things! For the moment, we’re mainly gathering people in the Paris region and we don’t have any national ambitions, but if anyone wants to join/make new connections, everyone’s welcome 🙂
Discussion channels
We have a Discord server, open from M2 to Postdoc. It’s a kind of “online PhD room” that we use to find meet locally, share tips, go to lunch together, shitpost, etc…
We also have an email adress: petitgroupecooperationdoctorant.e.s (A) proton.me. That’s all so far!
What we’ve done so far
We’ve met up a few times at the bar, and last time we found a wild Cédric Villani! At the moment, it’s a 1 in 4 chance of running into him, one more reason to come if you’re part of his groupies.
It was in the evening, after the EDMH welcome day (the doctoral school where many of us are based), which had kindly invited us to introduce ourselves (see slides below).
Thanks to the superb sticker printer from our friends at La Distorsion, we’ve made a few little logos to stick wherever you like.
We also got a physical space at the Jacques Hadamard library where we can share useful stuff (see resources), play games, have a coffee together, etc…
