Below you find some guidance as to how to fill in different parts of the ISP, concentrated on the parts where we tend to receive questions or notice discrepancies during the ISP meeting. For any further questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

Administrative information

• Make sure you connect to all the people (yourself, supervisors, Director of PhD studies, Head of Department, PhD administrator) and with LUCAT ID. "Administrator" means PhD administrator, who is Patricia Felix. Note: if you are coming from abroad and do NOT have your personal number yet at the time you are filling your ISP, please keep the last four digits empty.

Third cycle programme

• Supervision: It would be good to clearly state your plan/current status of interaction with your supervisors.
• Ethical guidelines: Make sure to go through “Mutual ethical guidelines for the relationship between supervisors and doctoral students at LTH” together, and when both the student and her/his supervisors agree, say “yes”.
• Risk assessment: this is to be filled in when you feel the need to carry out a risk assessment. This could be quite relevant when, e.g. the implementation of the research project may not work out as planned, due to the Covid crises.
• Midway reviews: this is a new requirement for students who started the PhD programme after 1 January 2019. As found here , the PhD student’s progress in terms of development of PhD thesis as well as achievement of learning outcomes are to be reviewed by an examiner, and the the examiner is to provide a formal assessment.

Activity

• “Teaching/admin/other” and “Activity” – These should be aligned to the ratio between the departmental duties and Postgrad studies during the upcoming half a year (e.g. for the winter 2020 ISP, you should fill in the figure for spring 2021).
• Departmental duties: Here you list the breakdown of departmental duties you carry out, organised by semester (e.g. autumn 2020, spring 2021, etc.). One confusing issue is that the percentage regarding education is provided on annual basis, while the percentage you need to provide in the ISP is on semester basis (i.e. half a year). In order to be crystal clear to everyone involved, please make sure to translate the percentage related to education from annual basis to semester basis, and make sure to state that the percentage is provided on semester basis (e.g “MESPOM PSBP course: 4% (2% on annual basis)”. This means that, if the educational activity in question (e.g. teaching in a course, supervision of a thesis) takes place during one semester and not across the semester, you double the percentage given on annual basis.

For Each departmental duties you need to provide the following information:

- Activity – if it is teaching, also include the name of the course

- Number of percentage allocated, and clarification that it is counted per semester

Keeping a good record of the engagement in departmental duties is very important, not least as it is used as a basis of the potential extension of the PhD employment.

• Alignment with the amount of time you spend on departmental duties and the percentage in the beginning –Once the semester is over, reflect upon the concrete timing you spend on the respective activities and state the “actual”. If the “actual” is different from “planned”, make sure to revise the description of the concrete departmental duties towards the end of the document.

Courses

Attention for those of you who were moving to a new ISP now: in transferring the information, some experienced that the information available in the previous ISP template disappeared: please copy all the course information you have in another document before you save the document for the update!

• Course requirements: as it stands now, the IIIEE PhD programme requires minimum of 90 credits.
• Completed courses – provide the full name of the course together with its provider, total number of credits you receive, and the timing of completion (i.e. the date of the issuance of course certificate or equivalent). In principle only those you have finished and registered in LADOK should be included here .
• Planned courses – list the courses you intend to take, including all the five mandatory courses and move them as you finish the respective courses. For selection of courses, please see “courses” . In addition to the courses you intend to take, please also include 1) courses you are in the process of taking, as well as 2) courses you already took but its registration in LADOK has not been completed. In this case you can provide its status in parenthesis (e.g. completed in 2019, waiting for course certificate).

Thesis work 

Thesis constitutes 150 credits. Here you describe the concrete PhD research activities that contribute to the development of your PhD thesis.

• Overview of the planned thesis work: Here you provide a concise description of your PhD research including e.g. its overall aim and some overall steps to fulfil the overall aim. This could include, e.g. how you plan to translate the outcomes in the form of articles.

• “Sub-project/manuscript”:Here you could describe the progress of activities that contribute to the final PhD work. In the case of article-based PhD thesis, it is typically academic articles that are to be appended to the PhD thesis. Under the part “planning”, in addition to the progress, please provide concrete number of credits allocated to the respective activities (not all the activities have to be credited), so that others (e.g. Director, Director of PhD studies) could immediately understand what constitute how much percentage of the thesis work, and if necessary, suggest changes.. When, for example, you have a conference paper, which you intend to develop into an article that constitutes part of your final thesis, you could allocate a number of credit that you could acquire from the conference paper. The calculation of such is primarily in the hands of supervisors, but if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. Overall approach as to how to allocate credit is found here. Here, also make sure to include mid-term and final seminar, including the preliminary timing (once you know it).

Progression and Learning Outcomes

The general study plan of the IIIEE PhD education specifies the learning outcomes that need to be fulfilled in order to receive the PhD degree. 

These learning outcomes are in line with the Higher Education Ordinance (1993:100) of Sweden.

In this part of ISP you fill in concrete activities you carry out during your PhD studies (e.g. attending courses, conferences, seminars and the like, taking part in educational activities…) and demonstrate how you are fulfilling these learning outcomes. Please also include what you intend to do to achieve the respective learning outcomes under “planned” activities.

As of autumn 2020, we are in the process of developing the IIIIEE’s interpretation of each learning outcomes, as well as examples of activities that could contribute to their achievement.