3rd 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 Third year of PhD include:

Progress Monitoring:

Progress Report and Research Plan (start of year)

As in the second year, students are asked to produce a short research plan at the start of the year. It should consist of not more than 2 pages (500-1000 words), outlining progress to date and a plan of work, including appropriate milestones, a gannt chart and a refreshed budget. Any problems that threaten to delay thesis production should be highlighted together with proposed solutions.

This plan should be agreed with the supervisor and uploaded to SkillsForge by Week 4. Submission of the plan will be taken to mean agreement has been reached between student and supervisor. 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.

Thesis Plan (end of year)

If your studentship is funded for <3.5 years, students need to prepare a thesis plan and submit it via SkillsForge approximately six months before the end of their funded period. If you have funding for 3.5-4 years, or are self-funded, such a thesis plan is due at the start of your 4th year.

As with the progress reports and research plan, the plan should be agreed with the supervisor and submitted via SkillsForge. Submission of the plan will be taken to mean agreement has been reached between student and supervisor.

The reason for producing a plan are to demonstrate :

there is suficient material to write about
the student has thought about the structure of the thesis and the approximate length of each section
the timescale for finishing

The thesis plan should contain:

a list of chapter headings down to sub-section level
a rough indication of the number of pages for each section (see note on thesis length)
the state of each section (e.g. % complete, in draft form, data awaiting analysis, experiments completed, experiments failed because …, more experiments needed, not thought about yet)
for the incomplete parts, especially experiments, an estimate of when they will be done should be included
a schedule of work, indicating a timetable for completing the thesis
expected submission date

The length of the thesis plan is not important compared to the information contained. It will probably be more than one side of A4 but less than 5.

Students who do not expect to submit before the end of their funded period will also need to consider how they will be supported and must remember that the thesis must have been submitted by the end of their registration period which is at most 4 years after your start date (regardless of funding period).

Doctoral Skills/SkillsForge Portfolio

You will need to continue updating your SkillsForge portfolio. This will be reviewed together with your research plans for the year.

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
Networking: record interactions with those outside your immediate project
Oral presentation: Prepare and deliver a short presentation and reflect on experience
Teaching and Supervision: reflect on teaching experience
Career Development: consider career pathways.
Problem solving: describe a problem and its solution encountered during research.
Ethical Principles: reflective piece on ethical implications of work, its conduct or its dissemination.
Skill Transfer

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 that third years will be working on a research paper and will look for evidence of this during progress monitoring. This overlaps with the
We will also look for evidence that students are presenting their work to external audiences (e.g. at a conference).
We require students to produce or update a CV and website describing their work during the third year.

You should again perform a Training Needs Analysis to identify your strengths and areas requiring further development, both in respect of the specific project and more general skill development.

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.