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Manual

Your PhD Thesis Journey

Most of the following information is from the Promotionsordnung.

  1. Get accepted as a PhD student at FB3 (form "Annahme als Doktorand"). This requires an Exposé, ideally done early in your PhD.
  2. Write your thesis
  3. Find a date for your PhD Colloquium. Book a room.
  4. Find a second reviewer (see Promotionsordnung for criteria for reviewers). The first reviewer is your advisor (this might change with the new Promotionsordnung).
  5. Put together a Prüfungsausschuss: two professors/post-docs and two unversity staff/students (at least one student is required). The reviewers are also part of the Prüfungsausschuss.
  6. Print three copies of your thesis. I recommend one-sided and soft-cover (cost me around 140€ for ~180 pages).
  7. Hand in the three copies to the "Geschäftsstelle für Promotionen" (currently Silke Völkers).
  8. Send the digital version of your thesis to the reviewers.
  9. The reviewers now have 6 weeks to send their reviews to the Geschäftsstelle für Promotionen.
  10. When the reviews arrive, they are published for 14 days at FB3.
  11. Plan a buffer of three weeks after you receive the reviews until the acceptance for colloquium ("Zulassung zum Kolloquium") through the Promotionsausschuss.
  12. Rock your colloquium.

The Template

Feel free to use my LaTeX code. I used the Cambridge Engineering PhD Template from Overleaf. However, I made some changes:

  • included biblatex instead of bibtex. biblatex has better formatting of urls in references and works better with zotero. it is more modern too. it takes longer to compile though (you will notice with a few hundred references).
  • added the quotchap and epigraph packages for nicer formatting of the first page of a chapter and to include a quote at the beginning.
  • formatting of the title page
    • removed unnecessary parts (e.g., "This dissertation is submitted for the degree of...")
    • supervisor and second reviewer names are vertically aligned
  • removed the chapter .tex files and put all the contents in one thesis.tex file (it's easier to navigate with the sections view in Overleaf than switching between files)

I suggest you use the Overleaf Pro account, since compiling can take more than a minute and will not work with the free account.

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