Hi,

I have been asked to prepare a progress report on the work to date I have done as a first year PhD student. This report will be read by a research committee (made of professors in my discipline). I will also have to give them a presentation. I am 9 months into the first year of my PhD. For the first 5 months I was doing the PhD part-time. For the last 4 months I have been doing it full time. Can anyone suggest what I should include in this report/presentation? Also what would there expectations me regarding the amount of work I have done so far as a first year PhD student?

All suggestions welcome.
Anna.

Hi Anna10.. I dont know what area of research u are, so it may be different for you, and it all depends what ur Uni requirments are, because i believe each uni requires a different format. But generally you would need to include, an introduction to ur work, literature review if u have done some, Methods so far, results so far, discuss what u can of them. Usually the report is not too long, but i found it useful writing my progress reports as if they were part of my final thesis, u will be greatful that u done this when u get to ur writing stage. Oh yeah and dont forget to add what u will do next.

For the presentation, again it depends on how long u have to present, ask ur supervisor, we had 15 - 20 minutes. Again, an introduction about ur work and what it involves, talk to them about what methods u used and the outcomes u have so far. And ur next steps.

ooh a nice gant chart/timeline always goes down well in my department. In fact I once did a presentation with 1 gant chart for each year of my PhD and then an overall one haha, so there were 4 in my presentation! It just shows you are thinking about the future, how to complete in three years (ha!) and shows organisational skills I suppose.

If its a presentation I always like to include a 'research difficulty' i.e. "how do I source participants for xyz" because then it uses up all your question time so they can't ask difficult stuff!

Sneaks, I like the way you think! For very much the same reason I like to put a good few film clips in my presentations ... !

In our dept there are fairly clear guidelines on what is expected in the progress report, for example, if you're a full-time 1st year then you have to write a 10,000 word lit review, a timetable for completion and an outline of the structure of the thesis, oh, and evidence of at least 3 meetings with a supervisor. Part-time students have a 5000 word limit, I think. It might be an idea to have a word with the research administrator in your department - they know EVERYTHING!

And make sure that those assessing your work know that you have only been full-time for the last four months. You know what these academics are like (!). A few years ago a friend of mine started their PhD in February but when she was assessed in April it was evident that they had all forgotten because they had a bit of a go at her because they though that she done stuff all since October. Silly academics!

I'd check your university guidelines if you can.
But otherwise, ours were quite specific in terms of what sections we should include in the report: Background, aims, methods, plan of investigation, results obtained, future work, references. (on the other hand no one seemed to know exactly what should go under each heading so I made it up!)
For the presentation I guess people want to know what you've been doing. If you have no data yet, you could do a talk on what you are planning on doing, along with the background to the study.

I don't think there are hard and fast rules on what should be done in the first year. It depends so much on the field, but also the individual project. At the end of my first year I had no real data to speak of, but I had a clear plan, which seemed to work fine. Another had spent a year in a lab and had a load of data. we both passed fine (up)