During Your Doctoral Studies

The doctoral programme lasts 3 years and is rich in content. As a doctoral candidate, you'll face many challenges and must attain increasingly complex skills, such as autonomy, curiosity, perseverance, etc

You will alternate between administrative tasks related to your studies and those linked to your research project and doctoral training, such as research work, including publications and communications, and writing your thesis
All the following steps will lead you to the final stage, the thesis defence

• At the start of each academic year, you will need to renew your registration by completing your pre-registration at the ED SMRE and then your annual registration at your institution
• The individual examining committee (CSI) will assess your progress at the end of the first and second years and make recommendations
• You will validate this progress during the annual interview with your Doctoral Study Faculty (DED)
• You will complete a part of your studies and research abroad as part of international mobility programme

For this, you will need to know who is who when it comes to doctoral studies (in French, PDF, 178 kB)

In terms of your thesis work, it will be your responsibility to

• Draw up a bibliography and maintain your scientific surveillance. Your original research requires state-of-the-art, in-depth knowledge, so a large part of your work will involve keeping abreast of scientific advances in your field
• Collect data. This can be done through bibliographical research, measurements, experiment set-up, surveys, etc
• Analysing/interpreting data. The collected data must be summarised, processed, analysed and finally interpreted in order to draw conclusions
• Presenting results. Communication is essential in research. This includes articles, reports, reviews, publications (written), as well as seminars, conferences, and presentations (oral)
• Writing/defending the thesis. Upon completion of the research work and results, a thesis is presented as a high-quality scientific document, then read by a group of experts and publicly defended orally

The final stage of your studies will involve writing a thesis that sets out the research work and its results in a high-quality scientific document. A thesis is presented before a jury and defended publicly, with some exceptions. The jury then awards the title and grade of doctor