SRH Berlin is a private university of applied sciences, founded in 2002 and part of the SRH group. It offers bachelor's, master's and MBA programmes in German and English.
That institutional type determines the answer to the question most research-minded students arrive with.
The doctorate question
In Germany the Promotionsrecht, the right to confer doctorates, rests with universities. A Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften does not hold it, except where individual German states have granted it in specific fields.
So SRH Berlin does not award doctorates on its own. What it supports is the cooperative doctorate.
What a cooperative doctorate actually is
Your research is supervised in part at SRH, and the doctorate is awarded by a partner university that holds the right to confer it. SRH's Graduate Academy supports:
Cooperative doctorates with German and international partner universities.
The crucial consequence, and the thing most worth internalising:
The awarding university's Promotionsordnung governs your doctorate.
Its regulations set your thesis requirements, examination format, grading scale, publication duty and deadlines. SRH's support is real and useful, but it sits alongside those rules rather than replacing them. When you have a partner institution, read its regulations in full. Our guides to TU Berlin and the University of Bremen show how differently two German universities can handle publication and grading, and either could be your awarding institution.
What the Graduate Academy provides
More than many institutions in the same structural position offer, and worth using.
Consultation on:
- Prerequisites and framework conditions for cooperative doctorates
- Finding a supervisor
- Doctoral regulations, formalities and administrative processes
- Balancing doctoral study with career and family life
Programmes and community:
- Workshops, keynote talks and networking events
- A tandem programme for peer exchange
- Academic Lunch, a monthly forum for researcher dialogue
- Professional development covering academic writing, caregiving responsibilities, time management, mental well-being and career prospects
Two of these deserve emphasis for anyone considering this route.
Finding a supervisor is the hard part, and it is the part the Academy can genuinely help with. A cooperative doctorate needs two relationships, not one: a supervisor at SRH and a professor at the awarding university willing to take formal responsibility. Building the second from a standing start is difficult, and institutional introductions matter.
The support around academic writing, caregiving and time management is not padding. Cooperative doctorates are disproportionately done by people working alongside them, and attrition in that population is driven far more by time and circumstance than by ability.
Where the funding comes from
The Graduate Centre was created under the Institute for Applied Research, as part of the project International Research Experience @SRH, supported by the DAAD with funds from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research under the HAW.International programme.
That matters as a signal: HAW.International exists specifically to build international research capacity at universities of applied sciences. The infrastructure is funded to do this, not improvised.
The master's thesis is your entry ticket
For most SRH Berlin students the substantial piece of research writing is the master's thesis, and if a doctorate is the goal it does double duty.
A doctoral supervisor considering you will usually have one substantial piece of your independent work to judge. The master's thesis is it. That has three practical implications:
Choose the topic with the next step in mind. A thesis adjacent to your intended doctoral area gives you a supervisor conversation with something concrete in it, and often the beginnings of a literature base you can reuse.
Design it to be finished, not to be impressive. Supervisors read a completed, well-scoped thesis as evidence you can deliver. An over-ambitious project that ran out of time says the opposite, however interesting the idea was.
Consider publishing it. A thesis developed into a paper, even in a modest venue, changes an application materially. It demonstrates that you can write to an external standard rather than an internal one.
What to confirm, and with whom
With SRH, for your taught degree:
- Word count or page limits for your bachelor's or master's thesis
- Formatting: margins, font, line spacing
- Citation style for your programme
- Thesis registration and submission deadlines
- Whether a colloquium or defence forms part of the assessment
- Any similarity check, and any policy on generative AI
With the awarding university, if you pursue a cooperative doctorate:
- Its Promotionsordnung in full, in the current version
- Whether it accepts cooperative arrangements with a UAS, and on what terms
- Thesis length and language
- Examination format and grading
- The publication duty, its deadline and the copy counts
- Whether a cumulative dissertation is permitted
Do not carry figures from one to the other. SRH's thesis rules and a partner university's dissertation rules are different documents governing different qualifications.
Checklist
If you are writing an SRH thesis now:
- Length and formatting confirmed with my programme
- Citation style confirmed
- Clear whether a defence or colloquium is part of the assessment
- Topic chosen with any doctoral ambition in mind
- Scoped so it can actually be finished well
If you are aiming at a cooperative doctorate:
- Spoken to the Graduate Academy about prerequisites and framework conditions
- Identified a potential SRH supervisor in a relevant institute
- Identified candidate awarding universities, not only supervisors
- Read the awarding university's Promotionsordnung, not just SRH guidance
- Understood whose rules govern length, examination, grading and publication
- Planned realistically around work and family, since most cooperative doctorates are done alongside them
Where to get help
The SRH Graduate Academy advises on the cooperative route, finding a supervisor and the formalities. Your programme owns the rules for your bachelor's or master's thesis. The partner university owns everything about the doctorate itself.
If the writing is the bottleneck, our thesis writing support covers both stages, with master thesis help for an SRH final project and PhD thesis help for doctoral work.
