Supervision by the Mentoring Committee

The Doctoral Regulations of BayNAT describe the details of the mentoring committee in § 6 and the PEER Regulations (BayNAT regulations) under item 5 (2) on page 28.

The mentors for the thesis project are already proposed at the time of registration for the doctoral programme. Applicants, therefore, should as a first step contact potential mentors to discuss their professional qualification and their willingness to participate in the thesis project. Officially the director of BayNAT appoints the mentoring committee after the application has been accepted.

Committee members

As a rule, the mentoring committee consists of three scientists who are able to professionally supervise the research project from different view points.

• The supervisor of the planned thesis project ("thesis reviewer") has to be a professor of the graduate school according to  Art. 2 para 1 number 1 BayHSchPG, i.e. an instructor authorised to administer examinations  (professor, junior professor, habilitated person or in the process of habilitation). He or she chairs the mentoring committee.
  
  
• Additional mentors may be authorised examiners or no more than one) non-authorised examiner who is member of BayNAT with a doctoral degree (assistants, postdocs).
  
  
• At least two members of the mentoring committee should be involved in the doctoral programme PEER at the University of Bayreuth. Upon request to the director, who has to agree on admission, it is possible to have an external mentor. Members of BayNAT from other research fields (mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer sciences, geography, etc.) are not considered as "external".

If a mentor can no longer be part of the mentoring committee, the director will nominate a substitute member (by request of the doctoral student in accordance with the mentorate). The Regulations do not  require him or her to disclose the reasons for the withdrawal from the mentoring committee.

Tasks

Doctoral students must draft a Supervisory Agreement with their supervisor. This is also a precondition to get funding from the UBT Graduate School.

One task of the mentoring committee is to give advice to the doctoral student with respect to research. This is formally realized by discussing the research plan and the annual reports required for the doctoral programme. In the mentor´s daily research routine - in particular the supervisor - he or she should be available for discussing questions and problems.

The mentoring committee gives advice with regard to selecting the required assessment components like courses, possible stays abroad and conferences. It ensures that a balanced selection is chosen from the course catalogue within the graduate school in order to promote the candidate's professional and transferable skills.
The components are formally proposed by the mentoring committee (or the supervisor) upon admission to the doctoral examination and are confirmed by the steering committee.

The mentoring committee also supervises the doctoral student during the writing process of the thesis. The target date to submit the thesis should be settled in agreement with the mentoring committee.

The doctoral student and the mentoring committee will meet regularly - prferably at least once a semester.