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A best practices guide to PhD programs at EPFL

• French 2021 2020 2019 2018
• German 2021 2020 2019 2018
• English 2021 2020 2019 2018

EPFL has published a guide that sets out the rules of its PhD programs, as well as the rights and responsibilities of PhD students and their thesis supervisors.

A large part of a PhD program is the relationship between students and their thesis supervisors. The quality of this relationship has a significant influence on the quality of the work produced and the well-being of everyone involved. Starting a PhD program can be daunting. In addition to their classes and research, students may also be adjusting to different habits and customs, adapting to a new culture, and learning certain unspoken rules. As for supervisors, they have to juggle many different responsibilities at once, are under pressure to deliver results, and must always be familiar with the best practices for overseeing PhD thesis projects.

Since 2017, PhD students have been asked to complete a survey each year. This gives them a chance to express their opinions and share their experience completing a PhD at EPFL. In 2019, three-quarters of respondents said they were satisfied with their experience, but many students also said they were under extreme pressure and were experiencing symptoms of stress and depression. Some students said they felt they had not received enough guidance on managing their thesis projects. This prompted EPFL’s doctoral school to create a best practices guide for both PhD students and supervisors.

© 2021 Adrien Miqueu

“The 2019 survey and comments we received from supervisors highlighted the need for a guide that summarizes the rules, systems and procedures for PhD programs at EPFL.”

– Luisa Lambertini, Associate Vice President for Postgraduate Education

Clarifying the relationship between PhD students and their supervisors

“We took all this feedback into account,” says Marius Burgat, a scientific advisor and lead writer of the guide. “We raised these issues with the Doctoral Commission (Cdoct), an advisory body that includes program heads as well as PhD student representatives.” Luisa Lambertini, Associate Vice President for Postgraduate Education, adds: “The 2019 survey and comments we received from supervisors highlighted the need for a guide that summarizes the rules, systems and procedures for PhD programs at EPFL. This information was previously out there, but was split up in many separate documents or had not yet been formalized in writing.”

“The aim of our guide is to give everyone involved in PhD programs a useful resource for information and contacts,” says Burgat. “It’s intended to be helpful both at the start of and during PhD studies, and can always be referred back to if someone experiences a problem.” The guide also offers advice to students and supervisors about settling into a PhD program, achieving a healthy work-life balance and preventing harassment. The paragraphs are color-coded, so it’s easy to see which parts are intended for students and which parts are for supervisors. “Students therefore understand what they can expect from their supervisors, and vice-versa,” says Burgat.

Understanding the aims of a PhD program

The guide also clearly outlines EPFL’s position on what a PhD program should lead to and how it should be conducted. Students must of course write a thesis, but there is more to it than that. “PhD students also need develop soft skills, such as project management and networking, which will be useful to them throughout in their careers, whether they decide to stay in academia or not,” says Burgat. “It’s important that supervisors encourage students in these skills as well.”

A work in progress

“Developing the PhD guide was a real team effort,” explains Burgat. Four PhD students and several supervisors volunteered their time to help put it together. “I would like to thank the many people and departments that contributed to this initiative,” says Burgat. “Special thanks go to PhD student Alice J. Gillen, to Jeroen van Hunen, who was then the Deputy Vice President for Postgraduate Education, and to Juliane Kuntschen and Anikó Borbély, who added the finishing touches and made sure the guide was ready for publication.” Lambertini points out that “the contents of this guide are destined to continually change and evolve. We therefore welcome any contributions from members of the PhD community.”

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Unofficial template for the PhD thesis at EPFL maintained by PolyDoc

glederrey/EPFL_thesis_template

Folders and files, repository files navigation, template for the epfl phd thesis.

Welcome to the unofficial template for the EPFL PhD thesis. Before starting to write your thesis, have a look at this page: https://www.epfl.ch/education/phd/regulations/internal-regulations/edoc-faq-end-of-thesis/ . It will give you all mandatory information concerning your thesis. It is also not required for you to use this template. It's only here to help you and remove the struggle to create your own template.

Other versions of the template:

• Mathias Payer: https://github.com/HexHive/thesis_template .

If you are using this template and improved it, if you have suggestions to improve it or if you have questions, feel free to contact me: [email protected] . You can also contact PolyDoc , the PhD students association from EPFL, or visit their website if you have more general questions.

If you created another template and want to share it with other PhD students from EPFL, feel free to contact PolyDoc and we'll see what we can do.

The compilation fails: it says "LaTeX Error: Unknown option explicit for package titlesec

The package titlesec has been modified in 2007 to include an option which allows more customization of the chapter titles. This template relies heavily on this option. In order to resolve this, you need to update to a more recent version (either your full Latex-Distribution or at least the titlesec package).

I have a problem with special characters, the compilation fails as soon as there is a special character in my file

For best cross-platform compatibility, the template is configured for "UTF-8" input encoding instead of platform specific encodings (such as "Western-Latin for Mac"). In your Latex-Editor, be sure that the files are saved with this encoding. (In TeX-Shop for Mac: Preferences -> Source-Code -> Encoding -> "UTF-8". You'll need to re-open and save the files in order to make the change happen).

I'm using "mhchem" for typesetting chemical formula and there is a bug in the compilation

This package is under active development: it has been updated on 2011/06/03 to version 3.11 correcting for an incompatibilty with some font-related packages. Please update your Latex-distribution to this latest version of mhchem by downloading the newest version from CTAN and replacing your existing mhchem.sty file by the newer version.

I want to use Tex+dvi for compiling my files, because I have a lot of .eps graphics and I don't want to convert all of them and use pdftex for compiling my files

Never mind for the .eps files: the pdftex compiler is able to convert them automatically to .pdf files. In some configurations you will not even need to do anything besides specifying the full graphic-file-names (ex: "mybeautifuleps.eps"). If this fails, you can still include the epstopdf package manually. The template chapter header styles are unfortunately not (yet) compatible with tex+dvi compilation, so there is really no way around the pdftex compiler at the very moment if you want to use this template.

The compilation fails with the error message "! pdfTeX error (font expansion): auto expansion is only possible with scalable fonts

This error stems from an incompatibility of your system with the font used for the titlepage. We might change this for the whole template design soon, but in the mean time, just open "head/titlepage.tex" -> go to line 4 and put the line in comment by adding a "%" in front of the line such that it reads "%\sffamily". After this the compilation should work. Another solution to this problem (tested on Windows 10) is the following: Start "MiKTeX Settings (Admin)" Press "Refresh FNDB" Press "Update Formats" Press "OK" (to close the app) Clean auxiliary files (.aux and .out) Recompile and everything should work.

Contributors

• ??? (Original creator)
• Diogo Rodrigues (Fixed latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf version + other minor problems)
• Mahdi Khoramshahhi (Added a fix for the bug on the font expansion)
• Léo Belzile (Changed the logo, tidy up the code, fixed some bugs) [ current version ]

Contributors 3

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Postdoc Lucas Frérot wins EPFL thesis award

Frérot received the award for his thesis was on “Bridging Scales in Wear Modeling with Volume Integral Methods for Elastic-Plastic Contact.”

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Lucas Frérot was awarded the “2020 EPFL PhD Thesis Distinction in Civil and Environmental Engineering” for his recent PhD thesis. EPFL is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland that specializes in natural sciences and engineering.

The PhD distinction is awarded to only the best 8% PhD theses of each EPFL Doctoral Program. Frérot received the award for his thesis was on “Bridging Scales in Wear Modeling with Volume Integral Methods for Elastic-Plastic Contact.”

Frérot is currently a postdoctoral fellow co-advised by Jafaar El-Awady and Thao (Vicky) Nguyen. He studies the micro-scale friction mechanisms of self-assembled monolayers and the wear of polymer systems.

More about the award and Frérot’s thesis can be found here.

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