PKU’s Ph.D. candidates take new measures to complete thesis pre-defenses during COVID-19 outbreak
Apr 15, 2020
Peking University, April 15, 2020: During the novel coronavirus outbreak, Ph.D. candidates and supervisors of Peking University adopted telecommuting technologies to overcome the difficulties caused by isolation and finished the thesis pre-defenses.
Virtual thesis pre-defenses
Isolated at home, the students and their supervisors took various measures to solve the challenges of telecommuting. For the lack of research resources, Ph.D. candidates use VPN to access internal data. And they set up remote desktop connections to PKU servers for data-intensive computation, which cannot be done on personal computers. Also, the supervisors frequently held online discussions to help the students with their dissertations.
While students adopted news measures to carry out research remotely, faculty members at university and department levels worked together to prepare and ensure a smooth running of virtual thesis pre-defenses. In March, PKU issued a guidance note to all departments regarding the arrangement of this semester’s review of doctoral candidates’ thesis. To ensure the smooth running of online pre-defenses, several schools of PKU set up working groups to design workflows and emergency plans in advance. In addition to rounds of rehearsals, the Graduate School of Education also offered training and wrote instruction manuals for faculty members and Ph.D. candidates to solve their technical problems.
With all these solutions and support, four colleges and departments with over 60 Ph.D. candidates have completed virtual pre-defenses. Wang Feifan, one of the Ph.D. candidates of Institution of Modern Optics, just returned home from abroad after her academic exchanges in the U.S. While still adjusting to the novel situation since face-to-face instruction from her supervisor is not possible, she did not know how to start her thesis at home. Knowing her problems, her supervisors discussed with her through the Internet every week and her classmates communicated with her through PKU’s public curriculum platform, which helped her determine the overall structure of her thesis.
“(Though completed online,) the thesis pre-defenses strictly follow the academic requirements, standards, and procedure of traditional ones”, said Han Chenyu, a Ph.D. candidate from the School of Economics.
Written by: Liu Huihui
Edited by: Huang Yadan
Source: PKU News (Chinese)
