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Practical Guide for PhD Candidates at EPFL Version: August 12, 2008 Practical G

Practical Guide for PhD Candidates at EPFL Version: August 12, 2008 Practical Guide for PhD Candidates at EPFL, Association du Corps Intermédiaire de l’EPFL. This is not an ofﬁcial guide. For all updates on academic information, please refer to the Doctoral School web site (phd.epﬂ.ch) Background picture on the cover page by Alain Herzog, EPFL c ⃝ACIDE, EPFL 2006, 2008 Last revision: August 12, 2008 Welcome Dear PhD candidates, Embarking on a PhD is a wonderful experience at the crossroads of fundamental sciences and engineering. It could be that you feel like it is sailing on uncharted seas. This guide is meant to be a compass to help you ﬁnd the shore. As the "Association du Corps Intermédiaire de l’EPFL", ACIDE is committed to serve our community of researchers and PhD candidates alike. In that perspective, it has conceived this guide to provide some answers to the most frequent questions and problems that PhD candidates could face. We hope that you will ﬁnd the information you are looking for and never found elsewhere before. Should you still have unanswered questions or unsolved problems, don’t hesitate to contact a member of ACIDE; we will be pleased to assist you. ACIDE wishes you to spend on our campus some very fruitful years, rich in learning and exciting discoveries. by the ACIDE committee. c ⃝Jean Berney. iii Foreword Dear Doctoral students It is with great pleasure, and also a sense of great responsibility, that I welcome you to the EPFL campus. You are our future! Your contribution to the EPFL will have an impact far beyond the conﬁnes of our campus and our research community. Your ingenuity, curiosity, motivation – and yes, hard work – will result in research advances, discoveries and perhaps even innovations that could change our world. The time you spend in the classroom and laboratory with bachelor’s and master’s students is an important part of your preparation for an academic career, and an important part of their student experience as well. You may be surprised at how rich a source of contacts and ideas those hours turn out to be. The PhD is an intense and sometimes exhausting experience, one in which you are taking the ﬁrst steps towards deﬁning the contours of your future professional career. This is your chance to stretch yourself intellectually. Take the plunge. Immerse yourself; don’t hesitate to suggest new ideas, to question current wisdom, to push back frontiers. Take advantage of every possibility to learn, and enjoy the excitement of discovery. Through our newly developed Doctoral School, we will do our best to meet your needs and to offer you a work environment that measures up to the talent you are bringing to our institution. As a member of the Doctoral School, you can take high-level specialized courses in your ﬁeld of study and broaden your knowledge with coursework in complementary areas. The Doctoral School itself forms a community within EPFL, one in which you can meet with other PhD students to share ideas and provide mutual support, inspiration, and intellectual stimulation. I speak on behalf of the entire EPFL community when I extend a warm welcome to our campus. I hope that your years at EPFL will be a richly rewarding experience. by Patrick Aebischer, President of the EPFL. iv PhD lexicon & List of abbreviations The PhD lexicon In order to better understand the EPFL documents concerning the doctorate, which are sometimes exclusively in French, we provide you with a small English-French lexicon for the most important expressions: Dean Doyen Doctoral degree Doctorat Employment speciﬁcations Cahier des charges Enrolment Immatriculation Entrance examination / Qualifying examination Examen d’admission Member of the thesis jury Rapporteur de thèse Microprocessor card CArtes à MIcroPROcesseur (CAMIPRO) Oral thesis defense (closed committee) Examen oral PhD graduate Docteur ès Science PhD candidate Doctorant Public thesis presentation Soutenance publique de thèse Research assistant Assistant Research plan Plan de recherche School Faculté Student Étudiant Thesis supervisor Directeur de thèse Unemployment insurance Assurance chômage Vice-President of academic affairs Vice-président pour les affaires académiques Work certiﬁcate Certiﬁcat de travail List of abbreviations There is a large list of abbreviations and acronyms in use at EPFL to denominate Institutes, Associations etc. To facilitate the newcomer the entrance into this slang, we will shortly give a compilation of the most important ones. v ACIDE Association du corps intermédiaire de l’EPFL SAC Service academique MER Maître d’enseignement et de recherche BSc Bachelor of Science MSc Master of Science EDOC Doctoral School CdH College of Humanities CdM College of Management of Technology ENAC School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering SB School of Basic Sciences STI School of Engineering Sciences and Techniques SV School of Life Sciences IC School of Computer and Communication Sciences vi Contents Welcome iii Foreword iv PhD lexicon & List of abbreviations v Contents vii 1 Introduction 1 2 Structure and organization of EPFL 3 2.1 General organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.2 Schools, Sections and Institutes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.3 Doctoral School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3 PhD, what does it mean? 13 3.1 How to become a researcher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3.2 Motivations and objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 3.3 Motivations and involvements: 15 personal viewpoints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 3.3.1 Eight junior PhD candidates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 3.3.2 Three recent graduates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 3.3.3 Four professors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 4 Admission & Enrolment in Doctoral School 23 4.1 Time ﬂow of a thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 4.2 Why a Doctoral School? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 4.3 Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 4.4 Enrolment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 4.5 Choosing topic and supervisor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 4.5.1 Choosing a topic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 4.5.2 Choosing a supervisor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 4.6 Research plan . . . . . . . . . . . uploads/Science et Technologie/ phd-guide.pdf