2nd Year PhD Students

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

Your tasks this year continues to 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- 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 Second 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 place. In the first term in particular, balancing teaching and research can be challenging since both have steep learning curves if you opt to change tasks relative to the first year. 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.

Progress Monitoring

Project Progress and Planning (week 4 of term 1)

The second year is probably the most important period of PhD training. By now the project should be well defined and you will have acquired the skills required to collect, or calculate, meaningful data. As part of the Department's monitoring programme, students are asked to produce a short progress report and a brief outline of your future research directions. Combined, it should consist of not more than 2 pages (500-1000 words) outlining progress to date. If you have not yet completed your year 1 work, you should include an outline of how and when you intend to complete any outstanding tasks. Please include details of any Physics Graduate School (MPAGS, taught modules or approved alternatives) you have completed, and a plan for obtaining your remaining credits.

You are also required to develop a more detailed and structured plan of work for the next 18-24 months of active research remaining before the thesis must be written. You should include appropriate intermediate milestones and your progress in completing your Transferable Skills modules. This should be presented as a Gantt Chart.

Your Progress Report and Research Plan should be discussed with your supervisor and your feedback supervisor by Week 4 of the autumn term and then submitted against relevant skills tasks via SkillsForge.

Where there are issues delaying progress or the plans are not satisfactory the Director of Graduates may require the student to also attend an interview.

Research Talk (by end of year)

Each student should give a talk on their research during their second year to an audience of researchers with knowledge of the student's field of study. These talks will normally be about 20 minutes long, with time for questions afterwards, and will usually be presented during research group seminars or at conferences. Alternative arrangements will be made for students in small groups that don't run regular seminars - please contact us to help arrange that.

To complete this assignment you should upload 2 files to Skillsforge as part of one of the presentation skills tasks. The first is the actual presentation given. The second should be a short reflection piece (less than 1 page) on how you planned the talk, what you included and why. You should also reflect on whether the audience followed the talk, and from the questions asked whether your decisions on content were correct. Reflect on what you would do differently if you were to give the presentation again. If you'd like more help on presentation skills there is an online Moodle course: https://moodle.warwick.ac.uk/enrol/index.php?id=15718

Poster Presentation (May 2026)

In the summer term, students get the chance to display the results of their research so far to the Department (academic & research staff, postgraduate students and final year undergraduates). The format is designed to simulate a conference poster session, where many students can expect to present their results to the world. Posters will be displayed on the Physics Concourse, mounted on the usual boards.

Please print poster in A0 portrait, posters can be printed through Warwick University's New Self-service Print Portal or alternatively the department has a A0 poster printer is located in P1.69/P.170 Instructions for Poster Printing using the department printer

The Poster Presentation will likely be in the second week of May 2026

If you will not be able to attend the Poster Presentation, you must contact both your feedback supervisor and PG Programmes Officer to make alternative arrangements.

The poster should contain a brief introduction to the work and details of the research you have completed including data, discussion and conclusions. The aim is to produce something that will both convey the key elements of your work to a non-expert reader and also serve as an aid for you during more in-depth discussions. Note that reusing a poster prepared for a conference is permitted, however consider that it will have been produced for sharing with experts in your field, so it may not fulfil the requirement of explaining your work to a non-expert reader. You should also be prepared to discuss the next stages of the research and may wish to include an outline of this on the poster.

Students should be prepared to use the poster in talking about their work with members of academic staff and other postgraduates, as well as being assessed by your feedback supervisor.

The timetable for the day will be as follows;

11 am - Deadline for display of poster on the Physics concourse
1pm – 4pm - you should be available on the Physics concourse to present your poster to fellow students and staff . You will also present your poster to your feedback supervisor during a ~15 minute slot within this time.
4pm - Poster prize awards.

Departmental Colloquia and Research Group Seminars

Physics Colloquia are open to the whole department are held each fortnight during full term, on Wednesday starting at 4:30pm in PLT. These aim to bring a wide variety of cutting edge research from high profile speakers to the attention of a general audience of physicists. The level is suitable for all staff, postgraduates and final year MPhys students.

Attendance at these colloquia is compulsory for all PhD students as part of their general training programme.

In addition, the various research groups have their own seminars and it is usual practise for PhD students to attend.

Physics Graduate School

By the end of the second year we expect that you have obtained the 6 graduate credits related to attending graduate-level physics modules, and required as part of the Physics Graduate School. If you haven't completed these in year 1, then please look at the Physics Graduate School webpage and linked information about the MPAGS and other taught modules available.

Doctoral Skills/SkillsForge Portfolio

You will need to continue updating your SkillsForge portfolio as set out in the first year regulations. This will be reviewed together with your research plans for the year. Please log into Skillsforge and register for DSM2.

Centrally defined DSM tasks (set by the Doctoral College) are currently as follows:

Research planning: overlapping departmental progress review and risk analysis
Time management: a short reflection on challenges and current approach to time management
Research review: summaries of two academic presentations
Networking: record interactions with those outside your immediate project
Oral presentation: Prepare and deliver a short presentation and reflect on experience
Applications of Research: explore benefit beyond academia (i.e. industrial, IP, outreach or public engagement)
Career Development: consider career pathways.
Problem solving: describe a problem and its solution encountered during research.
Communication to non-specialists: short example with commentary
Ethical Principles: reflective piece on ethical implications of work, its conduct or its dissemination.

In Physics:

Where elements of our progress monitoring satisfy the criteria for Doctoral Skills tasks they can be used for both.
Our progress monitoring tasks overlap with the research planning, time management and problem solving segments. We also require a more formal health and safety risk assessment.
We expect at least one of the research reviews to be of a seminar or colloquium delivered within the department. The oral presentation components should include both a research talk and presentation of a poster at the second year poster session (date to be confirmed in May). If there are good reasons why you will not be present on the day of the poster session, please contact your feedback supervisor.
We expect all students to update their webpage (i.e. to have a page on their research group website which describes who they are and what they are working on) each year. This may overlap with the Communication to non-specialists DSM task.
Opportunities for oral presentations, networking, applications of research and relevant ethical principles will vary significantly by cluster and research area. However all students should find it possible to address all of these questions in different ways and should be sure to keep a record of any relevant events or interactions. If you think you do not have opportunities for these talk to your supervisor about it in the first instance, and if necessary also to your feedback supervisor or the Director of Graduate Studies.

Conference 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. There may be other sources of funds for students who want to go to more conferences, especially if presenting a paper: look to your research group's grant portfolio, ask the conference organisers to waive the registration fee, apply to the Institute of Physics, Royal Astronomical Society or other charities