Goal

The purpose of the Annual Review is to offer students structured feedback between their candidacy exam and their dissertation defense. This will allow the committee to become more familiar with the student’s work over time and will allow the student to receive constructive feedback while their research is in progress.

Process

Students will meet with their committee in the fall no sooner than 1 year after passing candidacy, usually in the Fall semester. The graduate office will communicate the deadline for submitting the paperwork for the Annual Review process. 

Process Summary

The student will complete the Annual Review Update Form. The Graduate Office encourages students to share a draft of these materials with their advisor prior to completing the form in DocuSign. The advisor will approve the form, and then it will automatically route to the rest of the committee. The committee will review the document, and each committee member will have the option to sign the form (without an individual meeting with the student), to request an individual meeting with the student or to request a meeting of the committee. While it is not required if not requested by the committee members, we encourage students to schedule meetings with their committee members as needed/interested. The fully signed document will then route to the Graduate Program Administrator, who will file the annual review in the student’s file. Students are encouraged to communicate the Annual Review process to their committee. 

Individual Items (Forms)

Annual Review Update Form through DocuSign

The Annual Review Update Form can be accessed here 

A few helpful tips for filling out the form in DocuSign: 

• When filling out information about courses, insert the word "transfer" in the year and semester field if you took a course or its equivalent at a different institution. If you took more than 10 courses, only list the three required courses (Thermo, Transport, Kinetics) and 7 others that are relevant to your research.. 

Action Plan to Improve Performance

If the committee finds that a student’s work has serious deficiencies, the student should design an Action Plan with the help of their advisor. The Action Plan should have concrete and measurable tasks within a manageable timeline and clear deadlines. It should also address all deficiencies recognized by the committee. The graduate office has provided numerous resources for creating Action Plans.

The Action Plan should be concisely presented to the committee in 10-15 minutes. It should contain a clear timeline and metrics for measuring improvement. There are no formatting requirements. While it might be most beneficial to the student to meet with the committee in a group (virtual attendance is acceptable), this may not be possible given the diversity of committee members. For serious deficiencies, group meetings are suggested, but not required.

View additional resources here