Guidance
One of the main aims of the Integrated Research Training Group (IRTG) is to provide structured guidance to its members.
- Within the first 3 months of a student's project, a student's doctoral committee (DC) is formed according to certain guidelines and they jointly sign an Agreement of Supervision.
- A student can also choose a student peer. This is a more senior PhD student who can help the new student during his or her first year in the project.
- Students write a report or paper draft every term (semester) and upload it in the TR32 Database themselves. The exact due dates are laid down in their Agreement of Supervision.
- Students are responsible for arranging a meeting with their DC to discuss their report and their progress each term. They should send their report or paper draft to their DC members at least 14 days before this meeting.
- More information, guidelines and the feedback form for doctoral committee meetings can be found below.
Doctoral Committee (DC) composition
The guidelines for the formation of a Doctoral Committee are as follows:
- Each student's Doctoral Committee should consist of:
- The student's own professor (or "Privatdozent");
- a professor (or "Privatdozent") from another cluster or from outside TR32;
- a postdoc, preferably from the student's own working group or cluster.
- The composition of the DC needs to be approved by the TR32 directorate. Therefore, new members should discuss their DC with their advisors within the first few weeks of their project and send the proposed three names to the IRTG coordinator by email.
- After approval by the TR32 directorate, the student and the DC members will be notified.
Doctoral Committee meetings
This information based on the TR32 IRTG statutes; these items are compulsory for doctoral students and their doctoral committee (DC) members.
General information
Doctoral students and DC members meet once a term (semester).
Other people can be invited by any of the DC members to attend (part of) one or more meetings of student and doctoral committee. Decisions on whom to invite should be taken by mutual consent.
Before the meeting
The meeting is organized by the doctoral student.
The student makes his/her semi-annual report available to the DC members at least 14 days before the meeting.
During the meeting – fill out the feedback form
What is discussed during the meeting is in principle a matter between the student and the DC members. However, the TR32 directorate needs to have a general idea of the students’ progress. Further, to help plan IRTG resources and activities, the IRTG coordinator needs some information. Therefore, jointly fill out the feedback form. It is the advisor’s responsibility to return the feedback form to the IRTG coordinator.
To help structure the meeting, some guidelines are provided here.
The doctoral student should take notes during the meeting …
After the meeting
… and send minutes of the meeting to all committee members within two weeks. The doctoral committee should make clear to the student how detailed they expect these minutes to be and what kind of information should be included.
First-year evaluation
The doctoral committee meeting for a student’s first-year evaluation is a special meeting: the student presents his/her work to the entire TR32 community prior to the meeting.
Apart from that, the evaluation allows estimating the state of comprehension and the mathematical and computational skills of the student in relation to the thesis subject and his/her ability to communicate in writing and orally. The results will be evaluated by the doctoral committee and reported to the IRTG coordinator (through the same feedback form).
The goal of the first-year evaluation is to identify potential weaknesses of the student and to develop mitigation strategies early in the project. The evaluation can serve as a basis to assess if pursuing a PhD degree in the next two years is realistic.
Meetings - Past Events
Annual General Assemblies | First-year evaluation meetings
First-year evaluation meetings
About one year after the start of their project, all doctoral students in the IRTG are expected to present their work to the wider TR32 community in a 20-25 minute presentation, followed by a 10-15 minute discussion.
Past first-year evaluation meetings
Past meetings are listed here:
| Date: |
Venue: |
Time: |
Speakers & Subjects |
| First-year evaluation meeting | |||
|
Mo 07.10.2013
|
University of Cologne,
Geographical Institute,
Südbau (Building No. 303),
Training room 3 (1st floor),
Otto-Fischer-Str. 4, 50674 Köln
|
09:15
|
Announcements and welcome
|
| 09:20 | Theresa Bick "Interdisciplinary Summer School: Data assimilation in geosciences" | ||
| 10:05 | Sayah Hasan "Remote Sensing with Polarimetric Radar" | ||
| 10:50 | Break | ||
|
11:15
|
Gordon Diefenthal (intro): "Objective error quanti cation for polarimetric based precipitation estimates using X-band radar"
|
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|
11:20
|
Sabrina Esch (intro): "Derivation of soil moisture patterns from active SAR-data - Short Project Introduction"
|
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|
11:25
|
Inken Rabbel (intro): "Analyzing feedbacks in a forest soil-vegetation-atmosphere system"
|
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|
11:30
|
Shaoning Chen (intro): "High resolution parallel simulation of variably saturated flow with adaptive mesh refinement"
|
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|
11:35
|
Theresa Bick (1st-year): "Processing radar observations for data assimilation with a Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter"
|
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|
12:10 - 12:45
|
Christopher Nordlund (1st-year)"Jointly simulating NMR and flow properties of partially saturated rocks by means of a triangular pore model" (cancelled)
|
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|
|
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| First-year evaluation meeting | |||
|
Th 05.09.2013 |
Jülich Research Centre IBG 3 - Building No. 16.6u |
09:45 - 12:35 |
09:45 – 09:50 Welcome & Announcements |
Annual General Assemblies
Below are the minutes of all General Assemblies of the IRTG held to date:
- Minutes of the General Assembly on 17 June 2013 (accepted) (login required)
- Minutes of the General Assembly on 29 June 2012 (accepted) (login required)
- Minutes of the General Assembly on12 July 2011 (accepted) (login required)
DC members
Links to
- Members
- Guidance
- Doctoral Committee Meetings
- DC rules and guidelines (including link to feedback form)
- Application process for aspiring members
- General IRTG rules
- Fellowship application form (for doctoral students from outside TR32 to work here for up to 6 months)
Training - Past Events
Direct links to:
Transferable Skills Training | Research Training Days | Lecture Series
Transferable Skills Training
This page lists past courses that counted toward IRTG credits.
Past events
| Date: |
Venue: |
Time: |
Speakers & Subjects |
| Compulsory IRTG Workshop | |||
| Good Scientific Practice | |||
| We 20.11.13 |
University Bonn Hörsaal Meteorological Institute, Auf dem Hügel 20, 53121 Bonn. |
09:30 09:40 - 10:15
10:15 - 11:00 11:00 11:20 - 11:50 11:50 12:00 - 13:30 13:30 14:45 - 15:00 |
Welcome and announcements (Karin Boessenkool) Christopher Nordlund "Jointly simulating NMR and flow properties of partially saturated rocks by means of a triangular pore model" (first-year evaluation presentation, incl. discussion)
Karin Boessenkool - Good Scientific Practice See TR32DB for presentation Break Clemens Simmer - Experience from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft See TR32DB for presentation Introduction to group exercises Lunch and group exercises
Group presentations and discussion (Students, Simmer, Boessenkool) wrap-up and end of meeting |
| Introduction into TR32 Database | |||
| Mo 07.10.2013 |
University of Cologne, Geographical Institute, Südbau (Building No. 303), Large Computer Room, Otto-Fischer-Str. 4, 50674 Köln |
14:00 - 17:00 |
Constanze Curdt (Section Z1) The new version of the TR32 Database, including practical exercises.
Please respond to the doodle poll to reserve yourself a space! |
| Date: |
Venue: |
Time: |
Trainer & further information |
Credits | Organiser & contact |
| Transferable skills course | |||||
|
PhD Coaching - the path to a successful doctorate degree |
|||||
|
Mo 20.01.14
and Tu 21.01.14 |
University of Cologne Seminarzentrum,
Kerpener Str. 15,
50937 Köln
Seminarraum 2
|
10:00 - 18:00
09:00 - 17:00 |
Trainer: Dr Prause-Stamm (Impulsplus) Only few spaces available for IRTG members |
1 |
Personnel Development (University of Cologne) (contact Karin Boessenkool for an application form) Deadline 10.01.2014
|
| Transferable skills course |
|||||
|
Time and Self management (in German) |
|||||
|
Th 21.11.13 |
University of Cologne Seminarzentrum,
Kerpener Str. 15,
50937 Köln
Seminarraum 2
|
09:30 - 17:30 |
Trainer: Ms Weyand Max. number of participants: 14 |
0.5 |
IRTG (contact through Karin Boessenkool) Fully booked out. |
Research Training Days
TR32 Research Training Days are primarily organised for the doctoral students who are members of the TR32 Integrated Research Training Group (IRTG), but they are open to all (subject to available space).
The Research Training Days substitute the compulsory TR32 Lecture Series, which many people thought was too large an investment in terms of traveling time in relation to the amount of information provided.
Also, we wanted to move away from a compulsory lecture series and towards more choice. What remains is the total amount of 3 credits that need to be accrued through Lecture Series and Research Training Days combined.
Per full Research Training Day, 0.5 credits are awarded. It is the students' responsibility to make sure that their attendance at a research training day is recorded.
Past events
| Date: |
Venue: |
Time: |
Speaker & Subject: |
||
| RTD01 | |||||
|
School on methods to detect/describe patterns in geosciences Organized by Sabine Lennartz-Sassinek and Karin Boessenkool |
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| Th 11.07.2013 |
University of Cologne |
09:30 - 10:30 |
Alexander Graf See TR32DB for presentation |
||
| 11:00 - 12:00 |
Katharina Krebsbach Gaussian Fields and Gaussian Markov Random Fields See TR32DB for presentation
|
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| 12:00 - 13:00 |
Petra Friederichs An introduction to spatially extrended extreme value theory and Bayesian hierarchical modelling of extremes See TR32DB for presentation
|
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|
14:00 - 15:00 |
Marijke Huysmans Multiple point geostatistics and the use of training images for pattern characterization See TR32DB for presentation, paper and additional info (all in one document) |
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| 15:00 - 16:00 |
Mort Canty Statistical Change Detection Methods for Multispectral and SAR Remote Sensing Imagery See TR32DB for presentation |
||||
| Fr 12.07.2013 |
University of Cologne |
10:00 - 11:00 |
Michael Hintz The Information Entropy Spectrum: A tool for Quantification of Surface Heterogeneities See TR32DB for presentation |
||
| 11:00 - 12:00 |
Sabine Lennartz-Sassinek Quantification of land-surface heterogeneity via connectivity analysis See TR32DB for presentation |
||||
| 13:00 - 14:00 |
Victor Venema Variability on all scales, analysed with spectral analysis and structure functions See TR32DB for presentation |
||||
| 14:00 - 15:00 |
Sabine Lennartz-Sassinek Multi-fractal detrended fluctuation analysis: Detection of linear and nonlinear long-term memory in records including polynomial trends See TR32DB for presentation |
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New members
If you have recently become a member of the IRTG, please read the following information carefully.
Responsibilities
This document describes everyone's responsibilities at the start of a new membership: SOP_new_membership.
Rules and Guidelines
The aim of the IRTG is twofold: certificated training alongside your research project and structured supervision. Through the following information, you can get an idea of what is expected of IRTG members, and what opportunities they get.
In the Rules and Guidelines section you can find some documents that explain the prerequisites and tasks of
IRTG membership: the Agreement of supervision is a document that you and your supervisory team (the so-called doctoral committee) will have to discuss and sign within the first 3 months of your membership. Most tasks and rights are lain down in this document. It sometimes refers to more detailed information in the IRTG statutes (thus far only available in German: IRTG Ordnung).
For further information about meetings with your doctoral committee, check this link.
The document doctoral student annotated task list sums up the members' tasks and explains a bit more about compulsory training.
First steps
One of the first steps for you to take at this point is to discuss the composition of your doctoral committee (DC) with your advisor. Send the three names in an email to irtg@tr32.de in the next few weeks. They need to be approved by the TR32 directorate. You will be informed of the directorate's decision a.s.a.p.
