By August 2024 the Natural History Museum (NHM) at the University of Oslo turned 25 years. Not that the entire institutions is that young, but in 1999 the NHM was formally created by the merger of the earlier Botanical, Zoological, Geological and Paleontological museums as well as the Botanical Garden. There has been some over the years a few further minor administrative rearrangements, but NHM can now look back at a history of a quarter of a century. Such an anniversary may also offer an opportunity for reviewing the institutions achievements.
One of the major functions of the NHM Oslo as a faculty of the University of Oslo is the training of of PhD fellows. Since 1999 an impressive number of 87 fellows completed their PhD, and there was a pretty good gender balance with 42 female and 45 male PhD fellows. The distribution of completed PhDs over the years is shown below.
A PhD is a very high professional education, and it is interesting to follow up what kind of jobs were taken by previous NHM PhD fellows. Since 1999, there were 37 PhDs completed in Botany, 34 in Zoology and 16 in Geology/Paleontology to reflect the museal institutions prior to the merger into NHM Oslo.
For 83 of the previous PhD fellows at NHM Oslo it was straightforward to find the respective information through google searches; of the remaining four one has been on parental leave, one is retired, one passed away and for one no information could be obtained.To structure the information, the jobs taken by previous NHM PhD fellows were intuitively assigned to six major categories charaterizing the professional tasks, namely science, consulting/administration, industry, teaching, and technical staff.
Although performed as an either-or assignment, it has to be acknowledged that some professional activities may fall into more than one category. One, therefore, must also consider that those who completed the PhD in the early years of NHM probably have found by now permanent positions while those that completed the PhD pretty recently are more likely to change the post in the future. Accordingly, the analysis has to be taken as an approximation. It became obvious that the majority of PhD fellows from NHM took positions as scientists (61.5%), but there is also a substantial fraction that took positions with administrative and/or consulting duties (21.7%). On the other hand one may be surprised that only few PhD fellows from NHM took jobs in private industry (8.5%), but certainly less surprising that all of them completed a PhD in geology.
Over the last 25 years 31 foreign fellows (35.6%) finished their PhD at the NHM Oslo. Many of them were hired because they were assessed as best qualified in internationally open job calls, while others did their PhD at the NHM Oslo in the context of externally funded international partnership programs. It is noteworthy, that many foreign fellows took jobs in Norway after completion of the PhD, only 22.9% took jobs abroad, among them only one Norwegian citizen. In other words, NHM has recruited international experts to the Norwegian workforce.
But also NHM itsself needs to hire highly trained experts, and one may ask to what extent NHM PhD fellows successfully applied for calls and were hired by NHM. Of the 87 completed PhDs 12 fellows were later hired by NHM both as scientists and consultant/administrators as well as technicians.
It needs to be stressed that the above summarized survey was not intended to be an in-depth analysis of the PhD training at the Natural History Museum Oslo, and many intereting questions remain unadressed. However, it was the intention of the survey to obtain a first, general overview. Accordingly, no confidential information was sought for; the survey only includes information that is available on the internet or in public reports.
