Carrying Out Your Research Programme

 

BACKGROUND

Undertaking an MPhil or PhD research programme requires a considerable degree of personal commitment and self discipline and although you will have regular contact with your supervisors, it is really up to you to ensure that you do what is required to advance your research. You will need to take full responsibility for managing your time and become pro-active in seeking out the information and advice that you require.

In the early phases of your research, particularly when preparing the Registration Document, there will have been be a major focus on the gathering of information about the subject area and finding out what others have been doing in the field, but it's now time to put this into practice and do your research!

 

Meetings with your supervisory team

In the early phases of your research you will probably find it helpful to have fairly frequent meetings with your supervisors, perhaps weekly for full-time students and at least monthly and preferably fortnightly for part-time students. As your research develops and you become more able and confident, you may be able to reduce the frequency of contact, meeting with the Supervisory Team when you have a particular outcome to discuss.

 

Record of Meeting

It is strongly recommended that you and your Supervisors complete the Research Student Meeting Record form at the end of each meeting, indicating the progress made since the last meeting; what has been agreed as a deliverable for the next meeting and the time / date / location of the next meeting. This will form part of the information used for the Annual Monitoring process.

 

annual monitoring

The tic is required to monitor the progress of each Research Degrees Student on an annual basis, providing a report to URDC which becomes a part of the URDC Annual Report to Birmingham City University Senate.

The Annual Monitoring process is carried out using a combination of paper based forms and interviews. During the part of each Academic year, Research Students and their Supervisors will be asked to complete the Annual Monitoring forms and return these to the tic Research Degrees Coordinator. Each student, , will also, where possible, be interviewed by a sub-panel of tic-RDC to discuss both the progress being made and any other issues appertaining to life as a Research Student of the tic.

The Annual Report forms can be obtained by following the links below:

Supervisors' Annual Monitoring Form

If the research is not progressing as planned, it is important to ascertain the cause and identify how progress can be improved. Clearly technical issues can be best discussed with your Supervisors, but if there are other, perhaps personal, factors that are impeding progress you can request a confidential meeting with the tic Research Degrees Coordinator at any time.

 

Back to RDC Process Map