Doctoral School Computer Science Documents Overview

This is an overview for the Doctoral School Computer Science at TU Graz, created to help PhD students find documents and information related to the Doctoral School.

Timeline, Documents, Forms

• Start of PhD: Supervisory Confirmation (Betreuungszusage)
  You need this for enrolment. Skip the "head of institute signature" (not needed). Co-supervision not common in CS. Send to study@tugraz.at.
• 1st Year: Get to know your research field, learn, explore ideas, brainstorm.
  Depending on the group, 0-3 papers submitted for peer review may be expected in this time frame. Ask your supervisor about this!
  Doing most/all of the 18 ECTS courses in the first year is usually a good idea. If you have leftover ECTS from Master (or even Bachelor) you may be able to transfer them.
  Success Criteria: Ask your supervisor about their expectations. For instance, when are you expected to have your first paper, second paper, how many papers in total, involvement in teaching, involvement in projects. Ideally, in written form, they might have a document where they describe their expectations and perspectives. For instance, the ISEC has a document here. I also wrote a longer document with more details my group here.
  Every year: Submit an annual progress report.
• Towards the end of the 1st Year: Submit your Doctoral Proposal:
  • Discuss with your supervisor who the committee members should be, ask them, and negotiate a proposal defense date with them!
  • Write the proposal (see PhD Proposal at CSBME for details) document.
  • With your supervisor, write a draft educational agreement.
  • Fill out the PhD Proposal Registration Form.
  Before the end of the 1st Year: Defend your Doctoral Proposal:
  • Outcome positive: Sign the educational agreement.
  • Outcome not positive: reach out to the doctoral school committee for the next steps.
• Year 2 and 3: Meet the expectations that you agreed on with your supervisor and defined in the educational agreement.
  Only a very small part of the PhD but also mandatory: the 18 ECTS, including the mandatory courses(!) and the annual progress reports - don't forget these.
  When you are done with the courses, you can ask the dean's office to check whether you are actually done or missed something. When it is foreseeable that you will meet the expectations that you agreed on within the next 6 months, talk to your supervisor about a prospective timeline for your dissertation submission and defence. You can use my thesiscomposer.php script which you can feed with your camera ready tex or pdf files. It will produce a single thesis tex file in which you just have to fill in some gaps, fix a few compatibility and visual issues, and write that e.g. 30-page contextualization.
• Finishing the PhD: Use the Road to PhD To-Do list.
  Last possibility to make changes to the thesis: 4 weeks before the defense. Also: do not send the thesis out for printing later than that because printing often takes multiple weeks.