This page should serve as a documentation of administrative procedures related to current and future MCh staff. Please, feel free to modify where appropriate.

Absence from work on regular working days may be due to the following reasons:

MCh staff has 30 working days of holiday per year. Holidays have to be applied for by using the form available at the copy room or the secretary. Please make sure that no project meetings etc. fall into the planned holiday period.

Since it is recreational holiday it is intended that you go on vacation regularly. The transfer of vacation days into the following year is limited.

If you plan to go on holiday for more than 2 weeks in a row, please contact the senior engineer first.

You may go on business trips, e. g. to conferences, upon request. More information can be found on the corresponding wiki page.

Subsequently, please fill out the MCh business trip form and submit it to the secretary. Immediately after your return, please submit the RWTH business trip form to the accounting office for money reimbursement.

In case of illness, MCh has to be informed immediately. This can be done by calling the secretray and/or the senior engineer, or by sending a mail to office@mch.rwth-aachen.de.

Inform target person by e-mail that the process will take presumably 4 weeks, and that they need to send

• CV,
• all diplomas (school transcripts, B. Sc., M. Sc., Ph. D. etc.),
• a copy of the identity cad/passport.

Send e-mail to RWTH International Office (dez.internationales@zhv.rwth-aachen.de) with CV and all diplomas attached to let them evaluate equivalence of the obtained titles. Prepare “Einstellungsantrag” together with Accounting Office containing:

• RWTH Application form,
• certification of equivalence,
• and ask for a letter of intent to hire the contract.
• Candidate sends letter of intent to candidate to apply for Visa.
• Ask TK to make a contract with candidate and send candidate data to TK.
• Candidate sends Visa title to MCh.

Regarding housing: Contact the secretary for help when looking for rooms/apartments at the known landlords.

Once in Aachen, you need to go to a town hall to apply for residence permit by stating “I live in XY-Straße no. XY” (i.e. letting them know where in Aachen you live). It is highly recommended to make a reservation for this action to avoid spending too long in the town hall waiting. If applicable, go to Foreign Administration in Super C to get your temporary residence permit confirmed.

There are different forms of pension funds for RWTH staff members:

• German pension fund (“Entenversicherung”). This is the mandatory insurance for all employees. It is paid have by the employer, half by the employee and is directly taken off the gross salary. Please note: Foreign staff members ARE NOT REIMBURSED after they leave. However, they need to claim at their retirement age a German pension, if sufficient payments during thier time in Germany have been made. Since this varies through the years and changing laws, please look at www.findyourpension.eu“ for details on all specific pension funds within the EU.
• VBL extra. This is an additional mandatory pension fund in which only the employer pays in. There are NO REIMBOURSEMENTS to the employee, of course.
• VBL Klassik. This is an additional mandatory pension fund in which the employlee pays in. If payments were made for less than 5 years, all staff members may ask to be reimboursed. Please note: Foreign staff members who presumably will only stay less than 5 years in Germany may file an application to be freed from payments here. This has to be carried out upon starting the job. Please ask at the RWTH staff administration for the respective application form.

If you are in need of a HiWi (which should regularly be the case) you should inform JMS and ask for potential candidates. You may also suggest candidates by yourself, of course. Once a candidate is found and willing to join our group please present him to the secretary to deal with the required documents. As a general rule we hire HiWis for initially 6 months with 6-8 hours/week. Individual exceptions can be made if necessary. The supervising MCh scientist is fully responsible for both, the scientific and the formal aspects of HiWi work:

• scheduling the lab work,
• discussing work plan,
• ensuring that contract extensions are announced to the secretary min. 6 weeks in advance,
• documentation of working hours: Personal list and Copy Room Folder
• documentation of contract data in the “HiWi planning list” excel file on the exchange server.