Organizing a Habilitation Project

1. Please consult your supervisor about your habilitation project.
2. Your supervisor will be chair of your mentors committee. According to a decision of the Departmental Council from October 2015, the chair person needs to be sufficiently independent from the habilitation candidate. This means in particular that s*he should not be your employer. Additionally, you have to name 2 further members for your mentors committee according to article 8 of the Habilitation Statutes of TUM, among them one international professor.
3. Please make a draft of your objective agreement with the help of a leaflet you will receive from the dean's office.
4. Please include into your objective agreement if you want to write a cumulative Habilitation thesis or a conventional one.
5. The draft of your objective agreement will be handed in into the next Faculty Board meeting. Therefore, please send all necessary documents electronically to dekanat (at) ma.tum.de one week before the meeting. The dean will introduce you and your project to the Faculty Board. After that you will be asked to give a short summary of your project yourself. 
6. If the Departmental Council has agreed to your habilitation project, you need to finalize the draft of your objective agreement by having it signed by the members of your mentors committee.
7. Please send the original version to the dean's office.

1. The project as a rule has to be completed within 4 years according to the Habilitation Statutes of TUM. Usually intermediate evaluation takes place after about 2 years.  
2. The mentors committee is asked to give a prognosis concerning the goals defined in your objective agreement. Here it is also possible to change and amend the defined goals. The mentors committee will hand in an evaluation if a successful completion of the habilitation project, as defined by your objective agreement, is to be expected within the time given. In a summary, they must recommend the completion of the habilitation project. Please contact the Dean's Office about how to organize the intermediate evaluation.
3.  You will receive a letter from the Dean about the successfull completion of the intermediate evaluation. 

The Department wants to get to know you, so you will be required to give a talk about the results of the habilitation project. As a rule this will take place within the Oberseminar of the Fachmentorat's chairperson. Therefore, you need to ask your chairperson for further information about the talk. The chair's secretary will send the invitation to zentrum (at) ma.tum.de.

1. The Habilitation Statutes of TUM determine the deadline for submitting the Habilitation thesis to be 4 years plus an appropriate grace period starting from the date of your objective agreement.  
2.  As soon as the Habilitation thesis is completed, the chair of your mentors committee will ask the committee members for their reviews.
3. According to the Habilitation Statutes, there ought to be at least one external review, i.e. a report by a professor who does not belong to TUM. The external reviewer is appointed by the mentors committee together with the habilitation candidate. 
4. The chairperson of your mentors committee is responsible that the reviews arrive on time and has to remind the reviewers. If the reviews recommend that the habilitation thesis be accepted, the chairperson will write a final report wherein she or he recommends the thesis to be accepted by the Faculty Board, and in addition submits her or his own scientific review of the habilitation thesis. 
5. Final report, reviews, and habilitation thesis have to be (electronically) handed in at the dean's office. The dean will decide if the performance criteria of the objective agreement have been fulfilled and will circulate the documents among the professors of the department. The circulation takes 4 weeks.
6. If the professors of the department have agreed to accept the habilitation performance, the Faculty Board will decide to accept, based on the recommendation of the Dean.
7. The habilitation process is completed by the date of this Faculty Board meeting.
8.  Please hand in the remaining documents at the dean's office: 1. Erklärung (declaration - in German only; please contact the dean's office if you need a translation, 2. Zusammenfassung (summary of your habilitation thesis), Information needed for issuing your habilitation certificate, Information for Statistics concerning habilitations required by Habilitationsamt.
9. The dean applies for the habilitation certificate. It will be handed out at the dean's office.  
10. As the next step, you have to apply for the teaching license (Lehrbefugnis) and certificate of the title of "Privatdozent" (private lecturer). Please contact the dean's office about that.
11. You will be invited to the next Graduation Ceremony. 

To hand in a cumulative habilitation thesis please note the following special regulations:

1. Please include the intention to submit a cumulative habilitation in your objective agreement.
2. Define in your objective agreement which of your already existing and possible prospective publications will be the substitute for a conventional habilitation thesis.
3. Write a summary of the results of your publications (20 to 50 pages).
4. Instead of the habilitation thesis please send a zip file with the relevant publications and the summary to the dean's office. Those files will be part of the circulation among the professors of the department.
5.  You don't have to deliver copies of your thesis to habilitation office, but the Department wishes the summaries to be available through the TUM library. A description of the upload can be found on publishing habilitation thesis. 

Overlap of a cumulative habilitation thesis with a cumulative dissertation

Under certain conditions a publication shared between a doctoral student and a habilitand may be used by the doctoral student in her*his cumulative dissertation as well as by the habilitand in her*his cumulative habilitation thesis. For further information, please switch either to the German version of this site or contact the dean's office.