PhD Student Representatives

Last update: July 2024

One or more representative are elected by the PhD students of each doctoral program. PhD delegates can also be elected to assist the PhD representative in their tasks. The mandate lasts until the earlier of 2 years or the date of graduation.

The main roles are:

  • Participation in the meetings of the doctoral program committee (deals with matters specific to your program)
  • Participation in the doctoral commission meetings CDoct (deals with matters related to all PhD students)
  • Participation in the biannual meeting with the direction of the Doctoral school
  • Liaison person between the doctoral school and programme and PhD students
  • Organization of events
  • Course suggestion

More info can be found on the EDOC website, where a list of the PhD student representatives is available per doctoral program.

Contact us

If you have any points you’d like to raise, questions etc. don’t hesitate to reach us:

What we do

📣Topics we want to raise

We take part to EPFL-organized working groups, or set-up our own working groups on the following topics:

  1. Restauration
  2. Satellite campus
  3. Systemic Issues in Academia
  4. Mental-Health
  5. TA-ing

📍Our strategy

We present each of our points to diverse structures at EPFL in the same way:

  1. What do we want to change?
  2. What’s the current state of things?
  3. How do you think we should change it?

Each of these point is very important. Failing to properly answer question 2 can delay discussions and cost valuable time to different parties. Failing to find a realistic answer to question 3 can unfortunately lead to failing to provide a solution at all.

Last updates

🧑‍🍳Restauration

Discussion on-going with Bruno Rossignol (Restauration Head)

1. Gluten Allergies

What do we want to change?

🍽️ Make gluten free options always available and nourishing enough

What’s the current state of things?

🍽️ Celiacs are forced to jump between cafeterias, eat non-complete meals, or go home

🍽️ Kitchen staff is not educated about what gluten-free means

How should we change it ? 

🍽️ Simple gluten-free options are not hard to make

🍽️ Educating the staff goes a long way

Bruno’s answer:

♟️ EPFL is paying to educate the the staff from the three biggest restaurants: Piano, FoodLab and Hopper. From September 2024, there will be one gluten free option in each of these big restaurants.

2. Food allergies

What do we want to change?

🍽️ Have reliable allergen information on campus and in the EPFL campus app

What’s the current state of things?

🍽️ Allergens are not always correctly input/omitted from the allergen lists

🍽️ Allergens are not input into the campus app

How should we change it ? 

🍽️ We will contact EPFL campus app to update their interface in order to allow the addition of allergen information

Bruno’s answer:

♟️ NutriMenu is an in-development tool in charge of analysing the different menus proposed in each of the restaurants at EPFL. In Switzerland there 14 recognised allergies, 6 of them are not yet registered into NutriMenu. Gluten information should be reliable from June 2024.

3. Food price

What do we want to change?

🍽️ The meal prices for PhD students

What’s the current state of things?

🍽️ Right now, PhD students are under-utilising the restaurants on campus

🍽️ The PhD meal prices are high, especially in comparison to the staff prices who usually have a higher salary.

How should we change it ? 

🍽️ One option would be to increase the prices for the staff, to allow a decrease for PhD students

Bruno’s answer:

♟️ Right now, there are plans of changing the way restaurants are operating within EPFL. Depending on what project goes forward, decreases in price could be possible. For now, it is impossible to make any changes. 1) the increase of electricity costs has made the business barely profitable. 2) All food prices have been established for a period of 4 years, which ends in October 2025. For the foodtrucks, the next tender for food trucks will be done in September 2024.

4. Miscellaneous

🍽️ Not enough food ?

Bruno’s answer:

♟️ In the three largest restaurants, you can always ask for seconds, on the conditions that you will eat it on site, and that no protein will be a part of the second serving. 

🍽️ After 13:00 or 13:15, the most popular options aren’t available anymore

Bruno’s answer:

♟️ In an effort to reduce CO2 emissions and waste, restaurants need to plan their meal quantities appropriately, which sometimes results in a shortage of certain options, but not all options.

🍽️ There is a lack of food diversity on satellite campuses

Bruno’s answer:

♟️ Unfortunately, Bruno is not in charge of Agora, Sion or Geneva, but he is willing to have a talk with the heads of restaurations there for us!

Here are the way you can help change things in the right directions:

  1. Contact Nikita Norkin, the head of the representative working group for restauration, to join the working group, raise a point, or ask questions
  2. Contact ACIDE to inquire about vacancies on the food steering committee or restauration commission
  3. Fill in the food satisfaction survey in 2024 !

🛰️ Satellite issues

Discussion with Annalisa Buffa (Vice President for Post Graduate Education) and Philip Mair (deputy for Vice President for Post Graduate Education).

What do we want to change?

🌙 Satellite campus’s staff who live in Lausanne aren’t reimbursed for their travels, even though their duty include working in Lausanne during the week.

What’s the current state of things?

🌙 Campus staff needs to come to Lausanne to give courses, take courses, TA, supervise, be (co-)supervised, etc.

🌙 Satellite campus members who live close to Lausanne to optimise their time, or simply to be included to the EPFL community are penalised

🌙 As the money for reimbursement is tax payer money, EPFL needs to be careful on how they allocate budget

How should we change it ? 

🌙 Support for Satellite campus members, regardless of their choice of residence

Annalisa’s answer:

♟️ Right now, the idea is to analyse how much money is allocated for the journeys between the main campus and the satellite campuses for those who don’t live in Lausanne, and for those for which we have the data (but are not per se reimbursed by EPFL). If the cost is close to “abonnement de trajet”, then we could allocate these rather than allocate “per journey” reimbursements

👤Systemic Issues in Academia

What do we want to change?

🌱 Create a healthy environment where reporting issues does not backfire on PhD students

What’s the current state of things?

🌱 A climate survey has been conducted in Architecture and revealed concerning issues within the faculty. That survey consisted in lawyers being available for one hour either in person or on zoom for each student or staff to complain or express themselves about the problems within their school. They then compiled a report from all the statements gathered. 

🌱 There are no anonymous fields in the annual report 

🌱 Lab changes are often tedious

How should we change it ? 

🌱 Conduct an external audit/climate survey in all of the schools, to understand the problems of each doctoral programmes better

Annalisa’s answer:

♟️ They were not aware yet of this survey, but mentioned that the mental health survey which went into a working group mentioned climate. They will get more information on the survey and come back to us.

👥 Engagement

As PhD reps, we make a point to listen to you and raise your issues to the different instances at EPFL. 

One of our priorities is to raise engagement in representation. If you could fill this form to tell us about what would make you feel more involved, it would be great!