What is Dc in Ph.D (Doctoral Committee)

Instructions to Students:

1.Complete the Student Data Form.

Identify each member of your prospective committee and provide their name and academic affiliation after consulting with your advisor/major lecturer. It's a good idea to have at least one member of your committee come from your minor's discipline. Please use the Revise PhD Committee form to add new members to your committee if it is larger than 4.

 Mark the box next to the committee member's name if they are to serve as chair or co-chair.

Any new members of your committee will need to sign a document authorizing their inclusion. The signatures may be obtained in either electronic or physical form. If you want to utilize electronic signatures, you'll need to give the form to each committee member individually (not all at once) so that they may sign it using Adobe Acrobat and submit it back to you. You might also print the form and have each committee member sign it by hand to get original signatures.

Give the paperwork to your supervisor. Send an email to everyone who signed the electronic form. If you need to submit a form with original signatures, you may either scan it and send it via email or drop it off at the department head's desk. If your university lacks departments, you should speak with the Graduate Studies Director.

 

Instructions from the Department:

The department head must first approve all proposed committee members by checking the necessary boxes.

Mark the box for "Tenure-Track" or "UT Joint Faculty" if the prospective committee member will serve as chair or co-chair. If none of these conditions is met, then the member is ineligible to serve as chair.

Remember that a curriculum vitae is needed for any suggested committee members. The form designates certain sections with an asterisk *.

According to the Guidelines for PhD Committee Service, section 4, the department chair must ensure that the committee is properly organized.

To verify that the committee is properly created, the department head should sign where specified on the form if they agree with the proposed assignments. The Graduate School might receive the signed form in one of two ways:

If a student emails you a completed form, you may sign it digitally in the spaces provided. Once complete, please attach a resume to the email and send it to gradspec@utk.edu.

If the student handed you a printed form, you'll need to physically sign it and send it, together with any resumes, to the Graduate School for processing.

Send a scanned copy of the completed form to gradspec@utk.edu.

Please send this form to the Graduate School.

Send the form back to the student so they may hand-carry it to the Graduate School's main office.

 

You will spend the majority of your time as a Ph.D. student in a single lab, reporting to a single PI. Your committee is comprised of independent principal investigators (PIs) with varied but complementary backgrounds. Your progress is evaluated and a graduation date is set during this meeting. They aid you in your studies, provide wisdom and insight, and keep you grounded in reality. The committee meeting is where you get to show off your hard work and get feedback on how to go forward with the project. Different institutions and departments use different structures.

There is often an element where you leave the room and they discuss you while you wait outside in addition to the presentation and conversation. In certain cases, the PI will take a step back as you discuss your issues with them. 

It's important to note that your committee will ultimately decide whether and when you get to defend your thesis. So, although you and your PI may feel like you have all the power, it is ultimately your committee that decides when you have completed enough of the required work to defend your dissertation. In certain cases, the committee just agrees with the PI on when the student is ready to go on. Sometimes disagreements arise when members of a committee reach different conclusions on a certain circumstance. 

 

Committee meeting's purpose

To begin, let's be quite clear: Participate at the committee meetings. All those meetings with your dissertation committee during the course of your Ph.D. are for one reason: to make sure the work you're doing is excellent and will lead to a thesis and paper. The members of your committee are there to provide you with objective feedback and guidance. In general, they desire what's best for you and discourage you from wasting time. 

It might be the only time you get to meet face-to-face with so many knowledgeable people who are all interested in you and your project. The gatherings might provide excellent chances for development and learning. 

A committee may help you in various ways: They may help you avoid wasting time or overlooking crucial details by suggesting experiments, offering novel interpretations of your data, drawing unexpected connections, and asking perceptive questions.

If you and your PI are too immersed in your research to see the forest for the trees, an advisory board composed of outside specialists might serve as a useful reality check.

They may be a calming influence if your PI has unreasonable expectations for your Ph.D. project and a compass for direction if they are excessively engaged or detached. Your committee may be an invaluable resource in times of need. 

You can always count on your committee members to be there for you, in good times and bad. 

In addition, members of your committee will be familiar with your scientific work and will be in a good position to recommend you for future positions or funding opportunities. 

 

Do committee meetings count as tests:

Although a committee meeting is not an extension of the qualifying test, it does need a high level of preparation and knowledge. Since this is a conversation, there will undoubtedly be questions. It might be embarrassing if you are ill-prepared to respond to such inquiries. But generally speaking, if you remember these two things: To begin, you are the best person to assess the progress of your project since you are actively working on it. The second is that it's preferable to discover what you don't know and need to know early on so that you may have a solid groundwork upon which to construct your study, rather than discovering too late that you overlooked something fundamental. 

Do they rate my development? Committees may assess your progress and choose what they want from you in order to present at the next meeting. They may sometimes inform you that your efforts are insufficient. Despite the pressure, remember that your teachers just want you to succeed and go on to the next level. 

You may discuss the reasons why you aren't productive enough with them. Perhaps you are having difficulty because of a sophisticated technique that requires further training, because troubleshooting is taking too long, or because you are unable to get the necessary mice or strains. Perhaps you've been experiencing some difficulties with your mental or physical health, or you could use some assistance with time management or prioritization. Perhaps you feel the expectations are too high, despite your good job, because of how long experiments take. Better progress may be made as a result of these discussions. 

 

The quick solution is to choose persons with relevant experience and abilities. Make sure you know the requirements of your program and that you have the right people on your committee. 

Finding the ideal committee is difficult, but here are some criteria to bear in mind:

Keep an eye out for contrasting features: It's good to choose co-workers that don't mimic your PI exactly but rather play to their strengths. You may consider adding a more seasoned member to the committee if your PI is quite young. If your PI isn't really hands-on, you may want to find someone else on the committee who is willing to pitch in and assist you figure out the details. Find someone with a broad perspective to complement your detail-oriented PI. If your PI is always dreaming up fantastical experiments, it may be time to find a new one. Clearly, you understand. 

Find someone who is truly interested in helping you succeed. It can be tempting to surround yourself with people who seem like they won't pose much of a challenge, but this is your opportunity to grow professionally and personally. 

Seek it out: To get an idea of what it's like to work with someone you're considering inviting to join your committee, seek out someone who already has that individual on their team. 

If things go south, consider who will come to your aid: If things go swimmingly in graduate school, it's possible that whomever you pick for your committee won't make a huge difference. You should consider the potential importance of your committee in the event of a crisis. 

Several graduate students I interviewed for this piece emphasized the following. As discussed here, here, and here, PI-student interactions may become abusive due to the inherent power dynamic. It's important to have individuals on your committee who can be impartial and assist you navigate, or perhaps help get you out, of a bad situation with your PI. 

Your PI shouldn't have any close personal buddies on your committee. At first glance, it could seem great; after all, they are familiar with your PI's work and are rooting for their student's success since they are friends with your PI. If things continue to go well, there shouldn't be any issues. However, having someone who isn't necessarily going to see things exclusively from your PI's point of view might be helpful if things start to go poorly in the PI-student relationship. Including an impartial third party on your committee might be useful in this situation. Someone who isn't emotionally engaged in the relationship with your PI but can yet provide an objective perspective on the dynamics may be able to help everyone involved move ahead. When things become tough, having a committee made up of just your PI's old buddies might make you feel imprisoned and useless.