Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS)

The GSSS had a long-standing tradition in graduate education at the University of Bremen. It was founded as part of the establishment of the Collaborative Research Center 186 "Status Passages and Risks in the Life Course" in 1988. With the financial support of the VolkswagenStiftung, the CRC then turned into the Graduate School of Social Sciences in 2002.

The curriculum represents the three-year educational program leading to the doctorate. The BIGSSS curriculum is based on models of advanced tertiary education and follows a demand-tailored approach. BIGSSS Fellows take a mandatory series of courses, incl. research colloquia, as well as theory, methods and soft-skills courses that are mainly tailored to their research interests. The BIGSSS curriculum employs a system of credit points (ECTS).

BIGSSS is based on the collaboration among a number of outstanding research institutes at the two universities and can draw on a prodigious social-science landscape both at the University of Bremen and Jacobs University. This cooperation facilitates the early integration of doctoral students into a strong research environment, and ensures a cutting-edge research orientation in BIGSSS' curricular and thematic development.