Within 3 months after you start as a PhD student, you must write a PhD plan that needs to be approved by the PhD school. The PhD plan will be revised every 6 months during your studies.

Please see the general guidelines for PhD plans at GSNS.

At Department of Computer Science (and Bioinformatics), the PhD plan should be based on the template below. The two parts of the template must be uploaded as one single PDF under "PhD Project" in the PhD-Planner online system. When you revise the plan, please replace the existing PDF instead of adding a new one.

Brief information about publications, courses, dissemination, and research environment must be updated separately as other ”plan elements”.

The online web form for the PhD plan and biannual evaluations also contains fields for "assessment text" and "essential changes". These fields are used by other PhD programmes, and you do not need to complete these, since that information should be included in the uploaded PDF as described below.

In case of questions, please contact the chair of the CS PhD committee.

The PhD plan PDF file must have the following structure:   Research Plan Describe your plan for the research project. Try to give an overview of the research challenges and your ideas for how to approach them. Make sure to include relevant references. Describe the objectives, and outline a work plan, preferably with a tentative schedule and milestones. The plan should be relatively concrete for at least the first 6 months, but it should also cover the remaining period (possibly in less detail). Expected: 3 - 5 pages. Note that it is perfectly acceptable to revise the plan during the project period after discussion with your supervisor, in connection to the biannual updates (see below).   Biannual Reports At each biannual evaluation (excluding the initial version), add one time-stamped section that explains: status and results in relation to the plans described last time, including progress about research papers that are in preparation or completed, if the plan hasn't been followed, a brief explanation of why, and what has been done instead, your plans for the next 6 months, and if the long-term plans for the project have changed, explain how and why. Expected: ½ - 2 pages at each update.