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DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS AND DATA SCIENCE

• For Current MS in Stats Students

MS Thesis Track Option

The MS in Statistics and Data Science thesis track is an option for students who desire to enhance their research experience by working with a thesis advisor on cutting-edge topics. Starting the second quarter of the first year of study, students who are interested in the thesis track are encouraged to approach graduate faculty in the department and identify one who is willing to be their thesis advisor. The thesis advisor must be identified by the end of the student’s first year in the program. Once the thesis advisor is identified, a thesis committee will be formed for each student, consisting of the thesis advisor and two other faculty members. In addition to the thesis advisor, at least one other committee member must be a graduate faculty member. The thesis committee must be formed by no later than the end of Fall quarter of the second year. The thesis advisor will guide the student in thesis research and course registration until completion. The student must submit a written thesis, which has been approved by their committee, and give a 30-minute public presentation on the work.

Once you have decided that you would like to pursue the Thesis Track option for the MS in Statistics and Data Science degree, you would follow these steps.

Step 1: Find a Department of Statistics and Data Science tenure line faculty member who is willing to serve as your thesis advisor for your thesis project by the end of spring quarter of your first year.

Step 2: Discuss your thesis project idea with your advisor and then complete the Thesis Project Proposal form and submit it to the MS in Statistics and Data Science Program Director for department approval before August 31 of your first year.

Step 3: Register as needed for Fall quarter once your Thesis Proposal has been approved. IMPORTANT: students pursuing the thesis option for the MS degree must maintain their full-time student status. Registration options will depend on if the student is still completing coursework or has completed all coursework and is no longer taking courses. The MS in Statistics and Data Science Program Director and thesis advisor will advise students on course registration.

Step 4: Set up the committee for your thesis with the help of your thesis advisor by the end of Fall quarter of your second year.

Step 5: Maintain full-time student status by registering as required while you do research and write your thesis under the supervision of your thesis advisor. Students must meet the department expectations, project deliverables, and timeline outlined in the approved Thesis Project Proposal. If a student needs to change their proposed thesis or the timeline, they must submit a revised Thesis Project Proposal form with the new completion quarter and year to the MS in Statistics and Data Science Program Director for approval.

Step 6: Submit the written thesis to your committee and do your 30-minute public presentation on the work in time to meet the TGS requirements for graduation by TGS deadlines specified in the Academic Calendar for the agreed upon quarter that you anticipate completing the thesis project and graduating. More information on the TGS requirements and deadlines can be found here .

If for any reason you feel you will not be able to complete your thesis project by the quarter and year specified above, you must talk with your thesis advisor to discuss the change to your degree completion timeline and submit a revised Thesis Project Proposal form with the new completion quarter and year to the MS in Statistics and Data Science Program Director for approval.

International students are responsible for complying with all Visa policies and terms during their thesis study work.

In order to withdraw from the Thesis option after a student has been approved by the department to pursue it, the student is required to meet with the MS in Statistics and Data Science Program Director to discuss the withdrawal requirements.

Doing a literature review using digital tools (with Notion template)

I’ve recently revamped my literature review workflow since discovering Notion . Notion is an organization application that allows you to make various pages and databases. It’s kind of like your own personal wiki- you can link your pages and embed databases into another page, adding filters and sorting them using user-set properties. The databases are what I use the most. I’ve essentially transferred all of my excel sheets into Notion databases and find it much easier to filter and sort things now. In this post, I’ll go through how I do my literature review and share a Notion template that you can use.

I like to organize my literature review using various literature review tools along with two relational Notion databases: a ‘literature tracker’ and a ‘literature notes’ matrix. You can see a flow chart of my literature review process below (it’s inspired by this post by Jenn’s Studious Life and the three pass method for reading papers which I wrote about last week in this post ):

As you can see, this process involves a couple of decision points which helps me focus on the most important papers. This is an iterative process that keeps me up to date on relevant research in my field as I am getting new paper alerts in my inbox most days. I used this method quite successfully to write the literature review for my confirmation report and regularly add to it for the expanded version that will become part of my PhD thesis. In this post, I’ll break down how this works for me and how I implement my Notion databases to synthesise the literature I read into a coherent argument.

You can click on the links below to navigate to a particular section of this article:

The literature search

The literature tracker, the literature synthesis matrix, writing your literature review, iterating your literature review, my literature review notion template, some useful resources.

This is always the first step in building your literature review. There are plenty of resources online all about how to start with your search- I find a mixture of database search tools works for me.

The first thing to do when starting your literature review is to identify some keywords to use in your initial searches. It might be worth chatting to your supervisor to make a list of these and then add or remove terms to it as you go down different research routes. You can use keyword searches relevant to your research questions as well tools that find ‘similar’ papers and look at citation links. I also find that just looking through the bibliographies of literature in your field and seeing which papers are regularly cited gives you a good idea of the core papers in your area (you’ll start recognising the key ones after a while). Another method for finding literature is the snowballing method which is particularly useful for conducting a systematic review.

Here are some digital tools I use to help me find literature relevant to my research questions:

Library building and suggestions

Mendeley was my research management tool of choice prior to when I started using Notion to organize all of my literature and create my synthesis matrix. I still use Mendeley as a library just in case anything happens to my Notion. It’s easy to add new papers to your library using the browser extension with just one click. I like that Mendeley allows you to share your folders with colleagues and that I can export bib.tex files straight from my library into overleaf documents where I’m writing up papers and my thesis. You do need to make sure that all of the details are correct before you export the bib.tex files though as this is taken straight from the information plane. I also like to use the tag function in Mendeley to add more specific identifiers than my folders.

Mendeley is also useful for finding literature related to those in your library- I’ve found quite a few interesting papers through the email updates they send out each week with ‘suggested papers’. You can also browse these suggestions from within Mendeley and use its interface to do initial keyword searches. The key is to just scan the titles and then decide whether it’s worth your time reading the abstract and then the rest of it. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of papers being published every day so being picky in what you read is important (and something I need to work on more!).

Some similar tools that allow you to build a library and get literature recommendations include Zotero , Researcher , Academia , and ResearchGate . It’s up to you which one you use for your own purposes. One big factor for me when choosing Mendeley was that my supervisor and colleagues use it so it makes it much easier to share libraries with them, so maybe ask your colleagues what they use before settling on one.

Literature databases and keyword alerts

There are a variety of databases out there for finding literature. My go-to is Web of Science as it shows you citation data and has a nice interface. I used this to begin my initial literature search using my keywords.

The other thing you can do with these kinds of tools is set up email alerts to get a list of recent work that has just been published with any keywords you set. These alerts are usually where I find papers to read during journal club with my supervisor. You can customize these emails to what suits you- mine are set to the top 10 most relevant new papers for each keyword weekly and I track around 5 words/phrases. This allows me to stay on top of the most recent literature in my field- I have alerts set up on a variety of services to ensure that I don’t miss anything crucial (and alerts from the ArXiv mean I see preprints too). Again, you need to be picky about what you read from these to ensure that they are very relevant to your research. At this stage, it’s important to spend as little time as possible scanning titles as this can easily become a time suck.

Some of the other tools I have keyword (and author) email alerts set up on are: Scopus , Google Scholar , Dimensions , and ArXiv alerts . I set 10 minutes maximum aside per day to scan through any new email alerts and save anything relevant to me into my literature tracker (which I’ll come to more later).

Literature mapping tools

There are loads of these kinds of tools out there. Literature mapping can be helpful for finding what the seminal papers are in your field and seeing how literature connects. It’s like a huge web and I find these visual interfaces make it much easier to get my head around the relationships between papers. I use two of these tools during the literature search phase of the flowchart: Citation Gecko and Connected Papers .

Citation Gecko builds you a citation tree using ‘seed papers’. You can import these from various reference management software (like Mendeley), bib.tex files or manually search for papers. This is particularly useful if your supervisor has provided you with some core papers to start off with, or you can use the key papers you identified through scanning the bibliographies of literature you read. My project is split into fairly clear ‘subprojects’ so these tools help me see connections between the various things I’m working on (or a lack of them which is good in some ways as it shows I’ve found a clear research gap!).

You can switch between different views and add connecting papers as new seed papers to expand your network. I use this tool from time to time with various different papers associated with my subprojects. It’s helped me make sure I haven’t missed any key papers when doing my literature review and I’ve found it to be fairly accurate, although sometimes more recent papers don’t have any citation data on it so that’s something to bear in mind.

Connected Papers uses a ‘similarity’ algorithm to show paper relationships. This isn’t a citation tree like Citation Gecko but it does also give you prior and derivative works if you want to look at them. All you do is put one of your key papers into the search box and ‘build a graph’. It will then show you related papers, including those which don’t have direct citation links to the key paper. I think this is great for ensuring that you’re not staying inside an insular bubble of the people who all cite each other. It also allows me to see some of the research which is perhaps a bit more tangential to my project and get an overview of where my work sits within the field more broadly.

I like Connected Paper’s key for the generated tree and that it shows where related papers connect between themselves. Again, it’s helpful for ensuring that you haven’t missed a really important work when compiling your literature review and doesn’t just rely on citation links between papers.

This is where I record the details of any paper I come across that I think might be relevant to my PhD. In some ways, it’s very similar to Mendeley but it’s a version that sits within Notion so I have some more customised filtering categories set up, like my ‘status’ field where I track which pass I am on.

Here’s what my literature tracker looks like:

The beauty of Notion is that you can decide which properties you want to record in your database and customize it to your needs. You can sort and filter using these properties including making nested filters and using multiple filters at once. This makes it really easy to find what you’re looking for. For example, say I’m doing my literature review for my ‘FIB etching’ subproject and want to see all of the papers that I marked as relevant to my PhD but haven’t started reading yet. All I need to do is add a couple of filters:

And it filters everything so that I’m just looking at the papers I want to check out. It’s this flexibility that I think really gives Notion the edge when it comes to my literature review process.

The other thing I really like about using Notion rather than excel is that I can add different database views. I especially like using the kanban board view to see where I’m at with my reading workflow:

When I add something to the literature tracker database, I scan the abstract for keywords to add and categorize it in terms of relevant topics. It’s essentially the first pass of the paper, so that involves reading the title, abstract, introduction, section headings, conclusions, and checking the references for anything you recognise. After this is done, I decide whether it’s relevant enough to my PhD to proceed to do a second pass of the paper, at which point I will progress to populating my literature notes database.

Once I’ve decided that I want to do a second pass on a paper, I then add it to the ‘literature notes’ database. This is part of the beauty of Notion: relational databases. I have ‘rollup’ properties set in the literature notes database which shows all of the things I added during my first pass and allows me to filter the matrix using them. You can watch the video below to see exactly how to add a new paper to the ‘notes’ database from the ‘tracker’ database:

During the second pass, I populate the new fields in the ‘notes’ database. These are:

Summary | Objective of study | Key Results | Theory | Materials | Methods | Conclusions | Future work suggested | Critiques | Key connected papers.

I also have various themes/questions/ideas as properties which I add a few notes on for each relevant paper. I then complete my ‘questions for critical engagement’ which are on the entry’s ‘Notes’ page and are stored in the ‘Article Template’. If you want to read more about this process, check out my ‘how to read a scientific paper’ post .

By, doing this I create a synthesis matrix where I can see a breakdown of the key aspects of each paper and can scan down a column to get an overview of all of the papers I have read. For example, if I wanted to see all of the papers about Quantum Point Contacts to get an idea of what previous work has been done so that I can identify my research gap, I can filter using the tag property and can then see the notes I wrote for each entry, broken down by section. I also have tags for my research questions or themes, materials used, experimental techniques, fabrication techniques, and anything else that comes to mind really! The more tags I have for a paper, the easier it is to filter when I want to find a specific thing.

The other property I have included in the literature notes database is ‘Key connected papers’. This is a relation but is within the database itself. So it means that I can link to the page of other papers in the literature matrix. I’ve found this to be useful for connecting to what I call ‘core’ papers. I can also filter using this property, allowing me to see my notes on all of the papers I’ve read that are related to a certain ‘core’ paper. This helps with synthesising all of the information and forming my argument.

For those papers most relevant to my research (the ‘core’ papers) I’ll also do a third pass which involves reimplementing the paper in my own words. This is quite a time-consuming task so not many papers reach this stage, but those which I have done a third pass on are the ones I know really well. My hope is that this will stand me in good stead for my viva. This process also helps me refine my research questions further as I gain a deeper understanding of the field.

I find that writing up a review is extremely intimidating, but having the literature matrix makes this process that bit easier. I won’t go into too many details as there are already loads of resources out there going into the details of writing up a review, but here’s a brief overview of my own process:

Identify your research themes

Using your literature matrix, review each research theme or question and decide which ones you are going to focus on. These will form the different sections of your literature review and help you write your thesis statement(s). You can also think about how your questions link to ensure that you’re telling a coherent story with your review.

Choose and summarize literature related to each theme

For each section, gather up the most important related literature and summarize the key points of each source. A good literature review doesn’t need to cover all the literature out there, just the most significant sources. I try to stick to around 10 or fewer key sources per section.

Critical evaluation of sources

This is where you utilize the ‘questions for critical engagement’. Make sure you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the studies you’re writing about. By doing this, you can establish where our knowledge is lacking which will come in helpful later when establishing a research gap.

Analyse each source in relation to other literature

Try to make sure that you are telling a coherent story by linking between your sources. You can go back to the literature matrix here and use it to group similar studies to compare and contrast them. You should also discuss the relevance of the source’s findings in relation to the broader field and core papers.

Situate your research in a research gap

This is where you justify your own research. Using what you have laid out in the rest of the review, show that there is a research gap that you plan to fill and explain how you are going to do that. This should mean that your thesis flows nicely into the next section where you’ll cover the materials and methods you used in your research project.

In some ways, a literature review never really ends. As you can see in the flowchart at the beginning of this post, I regularly update and revise my literature review as well as refining my research questions. At this point in my PhD, I think that most of my research questions are quite well defined, so I’m mostly just adding any newly published work into my review. I don’t spend much time reading literature at the moment but I’m sure I’ll return to it more regularly when I’m in the write-up phase of my PhD. There is a balance to be had between reading and writing for your literature review and actually getting on with your own research!

Here’s the link to my Notion Literature Review Template . You can duplicate it and adapt it however you want, but this should save you some time setting up the initial databases if you’d like to use my method for organizing your own literature review.

Here are some resources on how to do a literature review that I’ve found useful during my PhD:

• The Literature Review: Step-by-Step Guide for Students
• 3 Steps to Save You From Drowning in Your Literature Review
• How to write a literature review
• How to become a literature searching ninja
• Mind the gap
• 7 Secrets to Write a PhD Literature Review The Right Way

If you like my work, I’d love your support!

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11 thoughts on “Doing a literature review using digital tools (with Notion template)”

Thank you so much for your insight and structured process. This will help me a lot kicking off my Master Thesis.

The perfect method to organize the literature that I have read and will read in the future. I am so glad to have found your website, this will save me from thrashing around in the swamp of literature. I was already feeling the limits of my memory when I was doing my master thesis and this will be so helpful during my PhD.

Thank you so much for this detailed post! Lily 🙂

Thank you very much for this. I’m doing my undergrad atm and reading a lot of papers. This seems like an excellent way of tracking everything.

Thank you, you made my beginning less stressful. I like your system and i helped me a lot. I have one question (more might come later), What do you mean by " journal club with my supervisor."

This piece is really really helpful! I started from this one and went through the rest blog writings. I agree on many points with Daisy. I had an unhappy experience of PhD two years ago and now just started a new one in another country. I will take it as an adventure and enjoy it.

This is an AMAZING template. I've found this so helpful for my own workflow. Thank you so much!

I found this post really helpful. Thank you.

thank you very much!

Hi! Thank you very much for posting this guide and sharing your notion template! I do have a question—do you manually enter the references into Notion, or is there any way to speed up the process? Ta x

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• Manuscript Preparation

Know How to Structure Your PhD Thesis

• 4 minute read
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Table of Contents

In your academic career, few projects are more important than your PhD thesis. Unfortunately, many university professors and advisors assume that their students know how to structure a PhD. Books have literally been written on the subject, but there’s no need to read a book in order to know about PhD thesis paper format and structure. With that said, however, it’s important to understand that your PhD thesis format requirement may not be the same as another student’s. The bottom line is that how to structure a PhD thesis often depends on your university and department guidelines.

But, let’s take a look at a general PhD thesis format. We’ll look at the main sections, and how to connect them to each other. We’ll also examine different hints and tips for each of the sections. As you read through this toolkit, compare it to published PhD theses in your area of study to see how a real-life example looks.

Main Sections of a PhD Thesis

In almost every PhD thesis or dissertation, there are standard sections. Of course, some of these may differ, depending on your university or department requirements, as well as your topic of study, but this will give you a good idea of the basic components of a PhD thesis format.

• Abstract : The abstract is a brief summary that quickly outlines your research, touches on each of the main sections of your thesis, and clearly outlines your contribution to the field by way of your PhD thesis. Even though the abstract is very short, similar to what you’ve seen in published research articles, its impact shouldn’t be underestimated. The abstract is there to answer the most important question to the reviewer. “Why is this important?”
• Introduction : In this section, you help the reviewer understand your entire dissertation, including what your paper is about, why it’s important to the field, a brief description of your methodology, and how your research and the thesis are laid out. Think of your introduction as an expansion of your abstract.
• Literature Review : Within the literature review, you are making a case for your new research by telling the story of the work that’s already been done. You’ll cover a bit about the history of the topic at hand, and how your study fits into the present and future.
• Theory Framework : Here, you explain assumptions related to your study. Here you’re explaining to the review what theoretical concepts you might have used in your research, how it relates to existing knowledge and ideas.
• Methods : This section of a PhD thesis is typically the most detailed and descriptive, depending of course on your research design. Here you’ll discuss the specific techniques you used to get the information you were looking for, in addition to how those methods are relevant and appropriate, as well as how you specifically used each method described.
• Results : Here you present your empirical findings. This section is sometimes also called the “empiracles” chapter. This section is usually pretty straightforward and technical, and full of details. Don’t shortcut this chapter.
• Discussion : This can be a tricky chapter, because it’s where you want to show the reviewer that you know what you’re talking about. You need to speak as a PhD versus a student. The discussion chapter is similar to the empirical/results chapter, but you’re building on those results to push the new information that you learned, prior to making your conclusion.
• Conclusion : Here, you take a step back and reflect on what your original goals and intentions for the research were. You’ll outline them in context of your new findings and expertise.

Tips for your PhD Thesis Format

As you put together your PhD thesis, it’s easy to get a little overwhelmed. Here are some tips that might keep you on track.

• Don’t try to write your PhD as a first-draft. Every great masterwork has typically been edited, and edited, and…edited.
• Work with your thesis supervisor to plan the structure and format of your PhD thesis. Be prepared to rewrite each section, as you work out rough drafts. Don’t get discouraged by this process. It’s typical.
• Make your writing interesting. Academic writing has a reputation of being very dry.
• You don’t have to necessarily work on the chapters and sections outlined above in chronological order. Work on each section as things come up, and while your work on that section is relevant to what you’re doing.
• Don’t rush things. Write a first draft, and leave it for a few days, so you can come back to it with a more critical take. Look at it objectively and carefully grammatical errors, clarity, logic and flow.
• Know what style your references need to be in, and utilize tools out there to organize them in the required format.
• It’s easier to accidentally plagiarize than you think. Make sure you’re referencing appropriately, and check your document for inadvertent plagiarism throughout your writing process.

PhD Thesis Editing Plus

Want some support during your PhD writing process? Our PhD Thesis Editing Plus service includes extensive and detailed editing of your thesis to improve the flow and quality of your writing. Unlimited editing support for guaranteed results. Learn more here , and get started today!

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• Dissertation Templates
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Formatting Guide

The  PhD Dissertation Formatting Guide  (updated Spring 2023) is the source of all formatting requirements and guidelines for PhD Dissertations. Make sure to follow the guide when writing your dissertation.

Double check your formatting with the  PhD Dissertation Formatting Checklist  before submission.

LaTeX Template

The University provides a standard LaTeX template that complies with all formatting requirements.    

University of Pennsylvania PhD Dissertation Template in LaTeX

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The University provides a standard Word template that complies with all formatting requirements.    

Dissertation Template in Word  (updated Spring 2023)

Example PDF of Proper Formatting

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Note: You may need to activate your UPenn Overleaf account to view this PDF.  Penn Overleaf account page. 

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• Jul 29, 2020

How I Made My PhD Completion Plan on Excel (With Template)

Updated: Dec 12, 2023

For the last few weeks, I've been working on my PhD completion plan. It's basically an excel spreadsheet that I'm using to track my progress and plan my time for the remainder of my PhD. My thesis is due August of next year (with a 6 month extension) so the clock is definitely ticking. But what started as a quick and basic gantt chart has quickly turned into a more complicated excel spreadsheet - and I love it so much I thought I'd share it with you all!

If you want to skip to accessing the excel template click the link below. But if you want to see how I made the document and how to use it, then keep on reading!

Basically, to make the Gantt charts I followed this Youtube tutorial:

I really wanted a Gantt chart that showed percentage progress as well as a general timeline, so I thought this tutorial was really useful for showing me how to do this!

If you start playing around with the Gantt charts in the template I've provided and run into any difficulties, particularly with things like changing the dates displayed on each chart, this is a good reference point as to how to fix problems that may arise. But of course, if you reach out to me for assistance with editing the spreadsheet, I'll do my best to help too!

The basic set up is that I have a colour coded table to the left of each Gantt chart within my file, that lists off each task with both my planned dates and my actual dates of start and completion for each task. Therefore, as I go along, if the dates that I actually do things don't correlate with my planned timeline, then I have a space to put the new dates down without losing my originally planned timeline. Basically, this set up allows me to have two options for what my Gantt chart looks like, I have the "Plan" view and the "Actual" view. I also have a column for % completion, so that on the "Actual" Gantt chart, it'll show me how far through I am with each task with a dark bar.

As I said, this all allows me to have two options for what my Gantt chart looks like, with both a planned and an actual dates option, I can control what I'm seeing on the chart using this nifty little drop down box:

By picking either actual or plan from the drop down box, it changes the display of the Gantt chart and what values come up in the second table entitled "Data Prep". You don't need to enter anything in the Data Prep table or do anything to it, it's all set up to get all the information it needs from the colour-coded table.

Then the sheet is set up to automatically create a Gantt chart like this one:

I've colour coded the chart based on three PhD Aims and general thesis writing. You'll notice that the dark bars indicate my percentage progress like I mentioned earlier, so if a bar is half way across, then the task is 50% complete. However, this will only show on the actual view, not the plan view.

If you change the dates for any of the planned or actual dates, it'll automatically update the Data Prep table and the corresponding Gantt chart.

Within the document, I have an overall Gantt chart to chart the whole PhD, but then I've also made tabs for each aim, where you can break each task down into smaller more actionable tasks and have a Gantt chart that displays those in detail. I've personally found this really useful so that I can both get an overall picture of my PhD, but also go into more detail for each aim or project when I need it.

I've also included a "Calendar View" option tab in the document. I don't think there's a way to automatically import dates of all your various tasks into the calendar, so you'll have to do it manually if this is a set up that would be beneficial for you. But personally, I liked being able to plan my day to day out on a calendar in order to know when I could put down tasks as planning to be performed on my Gantt charts. So I filled this calendar view out before I did any date planning on the charts. I obviously colour code these tasks for each aim and then general thesis writing in the same colours I've used to make the overall Gantt chart to make things easier to navigate and know what's going on at first glance.

I haven't included this in the template, but in my personal PhD completion plan document, I also have more tabs with experimental information like my immunohistochemistry antibody panels, so that I can quickly refer back to them while I'm looking at the timelines of completing my lab work for each project.

To access the most up-to-date version of this template, head to my new website at:

7 comentários

This excel sheet looks incredible and I cannot wait to use it: thanks for creating and sharing it with us!

Hello Lily,

My name is Hida and I am thankful for your kind sharing of this template. You have done a good deed and I also hope I can enjoy sharing my knowledge with others too. Thanks 😘

Love from Malaysia,

Hello, thank you so much for sharing this! very beneficial indeed. I need a little help, in extending the timeline beyond December 2021. Can you help me with it? Thanks a lot!

Hi Siti, the date axis are simply the dates on the gantt chart (top of the chart). If you click on those, the date axis will be selected

Hi, thanks for sharing and providing resources. Now that you are using notion how does this planning fit with that software? Or are you still using the gantt chart as your overall planning tool. Many thanks

Thesis Track Degree Requirements - Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering - Purdue University

Thesis Track Degree Requirements

About this track: This track provides students with a classical experience of writing a thesis document that solves a substantial ECE-related problem. This experience, combined with graduate courses that delve into related ECE topics, prepares students for careers in research or pursuing a doctoral degree.

Timeline: Most thesis students complete the MSECE in two academic years.

Research credit requirement: Student in the thesis track will register for ECE 69800, Research MS Thesis.

Additionally:

• Students should consult with their major professor to determine the number of ECE 69800 hours to register for each semester; a maximum of 12 hours can be counted toward the needed 30 credit hours.  
• ECE 69800 hours count toward the 15-credit hour ECE graduate-level credits requirement.
• ECE 69600, Advanced ECE Projects, ECE 69700, Directed Reading EE, and ECE 69200, Introduction to Graduate Research credit hours cannot satisfy degree requirements for the thesis track (i.e., do not count toward the needed 30 credit hours).

Degree requirements:

• Up to 12 credit hours may be ECE 69800, Research MS Thesis
• One core course from the student’s primary area and a second that adds breadth of ECE knowledge.
• Required math courses : 1 (3 credit hours)
• This is a zero-credit-hour course that does not go on your plan of study.
• We recommend that you take course this during your first or second semester.
• Not allowed: ECE 69600 (Advanced EE Projects) or ECE 69700 (Directed Reading EE)

Frequently Asked Questions

How to i find a faculty member to supervise my thesis.

Use the Purdue ECE faculty directory to research faculty members and their areas of interest. Once you identify faculty members with whom you might like to work, contact them by email, explaining your areas of interest.

Networking with current ECE students who are in the thesis track is also a good way to learn more about how to find a thesis advisor.   

What do I do if the semester has begun and I haven’t found a thesis advisor?

You can continue to look for a thesis advisor. You can register for research up until mid-semester if you are able to find an advisor.

What GPA do I need to earn the MSECE?

You must have a plan-of-study GPA of 3.0 to successfully complete the MSECE. Graduate-level transfer courses are not included in your GPA calculation.

• UFR Droit Economie Management
• UFR Médecine
• UFR Pharmacie
• UFR Sciences
• UFR Sciences du Sport
• AgroParisTech
• CentraleSupélec
• ENS Paris-Saclay
• Institut d'Optique
• Polytech Université Paris-Saclay
• Accessibility

The PhD Track: a support programme for doctoral studies

The PhD Track programme at Université Paris-Saclay provides students with a support programme, mentoring from a researcher or lecturer and funding during the two years of Master’s study and the three-year PhD contract carried out in one of the university’s laboratories. Programme laureates are selected following an application and interview. 

Who can apply?

1st year Master’s students (M1) at Université Paris-Saclay , who are interested in research-based education can apply to the University’s PhD Track. The programme is open to all fields of study. 

To apply for the first session in 2023-2024, candidates must develop one or more personal projects around either of the following themes: health sciences and sustainable development.

Programme content

The PhD Track programme includes:

• One-to-one support during Master’s study by a mentor from one of the university’s research units
• A support programme (PhD Master’s programme)
• A 10-month study scholarship which can be renewed once, subject to the decision made by the monitoring committee 
• A PhD contract , subject to the favourable opinion of the doctoral school 
• A commitment from the student to be an ambassador for Université Paris-Saclay in their field of study.

Please note: it is not possible to take a gap year during the PhD track programme, nor is it possible to combine scholarships from the programme with other excellence grants.

The programme is closely linked to the university’s Graduate Schools , which together aim to strengthen education via and for research. The PhD Master’s programme is designed to support Master’s students with the development of their thesis project and their admission to doctoral studies. 

Read the regulation document for the Phd Track:

Calendar 2023 -2024 

Before applying: students can get in touch with their Graduate School contact.

How to apply (Applications closed on 11/12/2023 at 11:00 a.m.)

Before completing this form, please check that you have the following items:

• Your resume (1 page)
• A document presenting your project and your motivations (3 to 5 pages)
• Your school report of last school years (or final years of schooling)
• The opinion of mastre's degree major supervisor or the M1 platform or its representative
• A letter of recommendation (proposed mentor or GS programme referee or referee from previous experience)
• Certificate of admission for the 2023-2024 academic year
• You will also be asked to provide a short description of your project

The application can be completed in either English or French.

Applications closed on 11/12/2023 at 11:00 a.m.