On a new doctoral (PhD) school in multidisciplinary engineering sciences

Szechenyi Istvan University (SIU) is one of the youngest universities in Hungary, however, the school has three century old origins. The immediate predecessor of SIU was an engineering college founded 40 years ago. In our paper we briefly summarize the two-decade history of transforming a traditional engineering college into a modern university with faculties of engineering sciences, law and political sciences, economics, health and social sciences and music. The realization of the "Bologna process" in our Faculty was presented at ICEE2008. A crucial aspect of the process of establishing the doctoral school was to intensify research activities. In the period when the School was operating as an engineering college good collaboration was set up between the various disciplines, and this close binding of different topics was kept as an organizing principle in the Doctoral School which now has three main disciplines: civil engineering, information technology and transportation engineering, while electrical, mechanical and mechatronics engineering, architecture and other related disciplines are also intensively researched. Each Ph.D. student belongs to one of these three main disciplines. There are common, mainly methodological lectures given for all of them, while there are also offered specialized ones associated to the three main fields. It is allowed and encouraged to pick up a limited number of subjects from other than the own field. Approximately one half of the doctoral research topics are overlapped, that is they are connected to more than one of the three main disciplines. In our paper we present the structure and operation of the Doctoral School, the special, multidisciplinary structure of courses, the way of training students to learn to conduct research independently and we give some statistics about research programs, lectures, especially focusing on connections between the disciplines.