1st Year PhD Students

Deadlines for each of the activities described below appear in the Postgraduate Timetable.

Your tasks this year fall into several key areas:

Research - at the direction of your supervisor.
Teaching - for those of you who commit to teaching tasks.
Physics Graduate School - formal physics training at an appropriate level.
Doctoral Skills - Essential training, Progress Monitoring, Doctoral Skills, and Seminars and Colloquia.

You will need to balance your time between these tasks, remembering that some are more concentrated in university term time.
Specific tasks for the first year of PhD include:

Research and Teaching

These are your primary, day to day occupation and should be considered a commitment equivalent to a full-time job. Most students will benefit from working in the departmental environment (office or lab) most of the time - here there is guidance from supervisors, postdoctoral researchers and collaborators, and peer learning and support opportunities from other students and members of the department.

Research will primarily be at the direction of your supervisor, who will advise on project direction and progress. You will also have a feedback supervisor responsible for overseeing your skills and training, who can be an independent advisor on other matters. Pastoral matters (i.e. problems not directly related to the research) can be discussed with your supervisor, with Wellbeing services, or with the Director of Graduate Studies (who acts as a departmental senior tutor for research students). Key components of research may include lab or computational work, reading academic literature, writing reports or papers, attending seminars or conferences and contributing to research culture.

Teaching is a firm commitment made by students at the start of the year, and subject to contract regulations. Concerns about teaching can be raised with your supervisor and the Director of Graduate Studies, but may be best directed towards the coordinator of a given teaching module in the first instance. In the first term in particular, balancing teaching and research can be challenging since both have steep learning curves. However this should pay off in the longer term as accumulated experience makes subsequent terms easier. Most students are advised to teach for the first three years of a PhD.

Overall, about 6 months of a 3.5 year PhD should be spent on training and development (broadly interpreted) including the Physics Graduate School and Doctoral Skills tasks, but many of these will overlap with activities already intrinsic to Physics research.

Physics Graduate School Taught Courses

See the Physics Graduate School Webpage for more details.

Graduate level modules are offered through the Midlands Physics Alliance Graduate School (MPAGS) or through local or external courses. All first year students should aim to take four units worth of modules. The overall requirement is to take six modules within the first two years, but the expectation is that a larger fraction of this training should be completed in the first year.

Additional undergraduate lectures from earlier years may be stipulated by the supervisor(s), or by the Director of Graduate Studies, to augment the student's training and fill in any gaps in their undergraduate knowledge. Supervisors must notify the Director of Graduate Studies of any prescribed lectures and, if it is considered appropriate to monitoring the student's progress, they may be examined.

Doctoral Skills

The Physics Doctoral Skills Programme is laid out in full detail on its own page.

As described on that page, its tasks fall into four compulsory categories: Essential training, Progress Monitoring, Doctoral Skills, and Seminars and Colloquia.

Essential Training

This covers the key compulsory short training courses required for all students and staff at the University of Warwick and in the Physics Department.

Essential Training Requirements

Most elements are self-training courses, delivered on Moodle, and are relatively short. Most of them only need to be completed once, on arrival, although the Risk Analysis will need to be reviewed, updated and signed each year.

You should ensure that you record your completion (e.g. by screenshotting the Moodle test outcome page or downloading a certificate where one is available). In some cases, these will need to be uploaded to the Doctoral Skills page on Moodle. You should add all certificates of completion to a personal portfolio which you should keep safe (e.g. on OneDrive).

Requirements (all compulsory):

Research Integrity Training (may be taken in second year)

Those working in particular lab areas may be required to complete additional training modules as specified by their supervisor.

Teacher Training

You must attend and pass the Teaching and Demonstrating training course. This consists of a on-line Moodle course:

All courses | Moodle@Warwick including an uploaded reflective piece, as well as attending the departmental session.

On completion you will be issued with a certificate from the Academic Development Centre that needs to be uploaded to Moodle.

Progress Monitoring

The Progress Monitoring category has three key components this year with details as follows:

Project Outline (week 4)

Each student should have received a project description and possibly a readling list in advance of their arrival. The outline should be discussed with their supervisor within the first week with a view to writing their PhD Project Outline within the first 4 weeks. This will comprise some highly project-specific material and some background material of general relevance to your project.

By week 4 you are required to submit the PhD outline, a project plan identifying goals and key tasks for the first six months and the list of agreed key texts. This will contain:

Thesis Title
Brief outline of the project (~200 words)
Introductory reading list: 5 key texts (book chapters/articles/review papers) to introduce the general field of research and get the student to start thinking about their project (bearing in mind their undergraduate background). Note that students will be asked to submit a summary of each of the texts as an integral part of the 1st year report. The key texts should help place the project in the broader context of international research in the field. As such, thesis chapters from past Warwick group members should not normally be included on this reading list (these should be read anyway!).
Confirm that compulsory essential training courses have been completed.
Initial tasks: a list of those things the student will actually do (a) in the period Oct-Dec and (b) Jan-March. These may include such things as learning new experimental or mathematical techniques, programming languages, sample preparation or changing pump oil.
6 month milestones: 2 or 3 targets that should be met in the first half year, to enable the student to gauge their progress.
Taught courses that will be attended: MPAGS, CSC, final year undergraduate modules or equivalent training.

This plan should be agreed between the student and supervisor(s); submission will be taken to mean agreement has been reached. Where the plans are not satisfactory the Director of Graduate Studies may require the student to submit a revised version and/or attend an interview.

Progress Report (six months)

After approximately six months students will prepare a report that demonstrates their understanding of the field of study and that they have made a reasonable start to the specific project. This exercise is designed to help students focus on where their work is leading and put it context, as well as practice preparing a substantial scientific report: some of the material may well form the basis of the introductory chapters in the final thesis or serve as a useful reference during the remainder of the training period.

Preparing the report is an integral part of the PhD training programme, so students and their supervisors will need to agree on a working schedule that both allows the student time to complete the report yet does not interfere with the ongoing programme of research. As most of the background reading and data analysis should be completed during the normal course of research, the additional time required to write the report should be approximately one week of full time effort. A 1st year research report is to be submitted by the date requested. It should:

review the chosen project field, putting the work in context of the published literature
detail the research methodology being used
report how the research work is beginning, including results obtained and problems encountered
discuss the implications of any results obtained, how they relate to previous work and comment on any anomalies. If the project has not reached the stage of generating significant amounts of data, more emphasis will need to be placed on the relevant design/building/theoretical aspects.
show where the research is expected to lead in the next 2 years, including contingency plans for any potential delays/problems that might be encountered (approx 1 page)
briefly review the 5 key texts. For each, summarise the main content of the text and describe its relevance and importance to the work in your project (0.5 to 1 page each). It is expected that these texts willalsoappear in the main body of the report as sources/references.
Give details on how much of your Doctoral Skills Module 1 work you have completed and any Transferable Skills modules you have enrolled on.
Include any MPAGS modules (or approved alternatives) you have completed.
Include a gantt chart, outlining direction and structure of project, and an outline budget (for conferences, travel and other research expenses).

The report should be approximately 5000 words, in addition to the gantt chart, budget and 5 pages of key text reviews. The budget, literature review and contingency planning will ultimately be uploaded to a different skillsforge task to the progress report, and you should structure your report accordingly.

Progress Interview (May)

After the report has been independently assessed by the feedback supervisor and the Director of Graduate Studies, an interview will be scheduled to discuss progress. This will take place from the 2nd week of May 2027. You will be informed individually of the exact date. Your performance to date, as evidenced by the report and the interview, will be graded as “Satisfactory” or “Not Satisfactory”. Students graded “Not Satisfactory” will be required to complete further tasks, the outcome of which will determine whether they can proceed to the second year of the PhD.

On the basis of all the evidence of achievement to date the Head of Department will decide whether a student can continue into the second year with a PhD registration. In cases where progression is not allowed students may be allowed to write up their work for an MSc or be asked to withdraw.

Doctoral Skills

The Doctoral Skills category consists of a list of tasks on Moodle that should be completed throughout the year.

Doctoral Skills Module details

At the time of the 1st year progress report your Doctoral Skills tasks on Moodle will also be reviewed. Subsequent reviews will take place with the annual progress reports in the Autumn Term.

Additional Information: Conference Budgets and Presentations

PhD students will normally attend at least one UK and one international conference during their training period. This will give you experience of presenting your own work and meeting the experts in your particular field. The Department has allocated certain funds for each student to pay for the registration and travel expenses - consult the postgraduate office if you do not know your budget code and total. There may be other sources of funds for students who want to go to more conferences, especially if presenting a paper, but these are not guaranteed: look to your research group's grant portfolio (consult your supervisor), ask the conference organisers to waive the registration fee, apply to the Institute of Physics, Royal Astronomical Society or other charities.