What is a PhD?
What does a PhD degree involve? Put simply, it is a three-year programme during which you are expected to produce an original PhD thesis of 80,000 words in length. In the UK, the PhD degree does not involve preliminary years of generic training, as in the US system. Rather, the required research training is integrated into the three-year programme and you will start work on your dissertation immediately.
At Manchester we have a norm of joint supervision, and when your application is accepted you will be informed of the names of your supervisors. Normally, you will have a lead supervisor and a second supervisor, who will jointly provide you with supervision and guidance through the three years of the PhD programme. You may be interested to look at our student-supervisor agreement, which will give you a good sense of what is expected of you by your supervisors and, in turn, what you can expect of them.
In addition to the regular meetings that you will have with your supervisors, we also require that you to attend other meetings over the course of the year that are designed to assess your progress. You will be allocated a Supervisory Board, which consists of your supervisors and one or two other members of academic staff. Meetings of the Supervisory Board are held once a semester, and they constitute both our mechanism for formally assessing your progress and your opportunity to receive reactions to your work from other members of academic staff. You will also be required to meet once a year with the Graduate Director and the PhD Director in order to discuss your work and progress, identify any problems and in general talk about how we can help you to complete your PhD successfully and on time.
Aside from your work on your thesis, you are required to complete compulsory research training modules in your first year and to attend a compulsory PhD seminar in all years of your PhD course. In the first semester of the first year, all students are required to attend a weekly seminar on dissertation research design, which addresses a range of issues involved in designing your research project and writing your PhD. In the second semester, the weekly PhD seminar is compulsory for all students, and aims both to provide students with an opportunity to make presentations of their research projects and to provide sessions offering advice on preparing for your future career.
So those are the formal requirements of the PhD programme. But we hope that your activities for the three years of your PhD study will extend much more widely than these formal ‘hoops’ that you have to jump through. We hope that you will take full advantage of the vibrant research environment in Politics and beyond as an important complement to your individual research activities. We anticipate that at the appropriate time you will be thinking about using your research as the basis for participation in conferences and early publications. Many of our students also fruitfully combine their research with teaching work in the Discipline Area. In short, it is hoped that your experience as a PhD student in Politics will be varied, stimulating and very rewarding.