Our department has both full-time (usually on campus) and part-time (off-campus) PhD students, all of them with a supervisory team of at least two academics. Each PhD student also has a third-party monitor, an academic with whom they can speak in confidence about their progress, problems, and supervisors.
Before the end of their first year (for full-timers) or second year (for part-timers), PhD students have to submit a probation report, with a literature review and research plan. Their report is discussed in a probation viva with two academics from the department. Students have to pass the probation viva in order to have their PhD registration confirmed.
Students and supervisors have to file in a progress report twice a year, to document progress made and raise any issues in need of attention. In a weekly PhD forum, moderated by an academic, full-time students discuss their research, learn relevant soft skills (e.g. how to present a poster), and attend presentations by staff members. Similar support is given to part-time students over synchronous online meetings and asynchronous forums and wikis. Presentation skills can be practiced at a yearly on-campus conference for all full-time and part-time PhD students.
All our MSc students are part-time. When doing their dissertation project, they have a supervisor and a specialist advisor, who provides further technical advice on the project. The supervisor marks all intermediate assignments, while the specialist advisor only marks some of them. The final dissertation is marked by both.
The following are my student-related roles.
Supervisor
PhD students
- Kevin Moore (part-time, co-supervised by Josef Siran and Jim Hague), Software Complexity and Quality, since October 2011
- Tezcan Dilshener (part-time, co-supervised by Yijun Yu), Software Evolution and Maintenance, since October 2010
- Lionel Montrieux (full-time, co-supervised by Yijun Yu), Model-Driven Verification and Evolution of Role-Based Access Control Properties, since July 2010
- Simon Butler (part-time, co-supervised by Yijun Yu and Helen Sharp), Programming Conventions, since October 2008
- Dariusz Kaminski (part-time, co-supervised by Jon Hall), Problem and Design Co-Evolution for Model-Driven Software Development, since October 2006
- Ángela Lozano (full-time, co-supervised by Bashar Nuseibeh), Degradation archaeology: studying the evolution of code clones, July 2005 – June 2009
MSc students
- William Harrison, Music training software, since February 2011
- Craig Hughes, Music creation with finger tracking, February 2010 – April 2011
- Rory Mooney, Facilitating the creation of music, February 2009 – April 2011
- Ireo Ostacchini, Software Evolution, February 2008 – April 2009
- Nicholas Hindle, Composing music by constraint satisfaction, February 2007 – April 2008
- Steen Jensen, XML technologies for program comprehension, February 2007 – April 2008
Examiner
- External examiner of 7 PhD candidates since 2000, at the Universities of Minho, Kent, Newcastle, Lancaster, Valladolid, Valencia and Brussels
- External examiner of 1 MSc candidate in 2010, at the New University of Lisbon
- Internal examiner of 1 PhD and 1 MPhil candidates in 2007
- Probation viva co-examiner of 8 PhD students since 2004
Other support
- Specialist advisor to 17 MSc students since 2006
- Third-party monitor of 4 PhD students since 2005