School of Civil Engineering Progress Review Guidelines

Your confirmation of candidature review will include the submission of your candidature and project documents, as well as a meeting of total duration approximately 60 minutes.

Your confirmation report should comprise a critical literature review of the relevant background, a field report (if applicable) and summary of work completed to date. The report must contain a declaration of the intended scope of the thesis work, and a plan for the work, which needs to be done to complete the thesis. The confirmation report is expected to demonstrate a comprehensive grasp of the state of the art related to the project. Equally, the planned contribution to the research field internationally and/or professional practice must be clearly conveyed.

The report should be no more than 8000 words in length, plus references and appendices. The inclusion of illustrations, diagrams and tables is strongly recommended. There is no word limitation of additional information in the form of appendices.

The document should be of professional quality, with the expectation of not having technical or grammatical errors. Writing quality and report presentation is expected to be similar to final dissertation or publication.

The meeting with the review panel will include:

• an oral presentation with additional time for open Q&A and discussions. An invitation is to be emailed to the entire School at least one week before the confirmation session. The presentation is usually 25 minutes with open questions following the presentation.
• individual interviews with the supervisory team and the candidate.

*To request a seminar advertisement, the ‘HDR confirmation seminar request form’ should be submitted to enquiries@civil.uq.edu.au two weeks before the confirmation session. The HDR confirmation seminar request form is available under the ‘Current Researchers > Candidature’ section on the School of Civil Engineering's ‘Current Students > Higher Degree by Research’ webpage.

The principal quality expectation for the oral presentation and subsequent discussion is that candidates convey the objectives and study methodology for their research clearly and concisely and show how it relates to existing knowledge. The presentation format should be similar to a conference presentation but pitched to the School-wide audience.

Written feedback will be provided by your reviewer(s) after the review meeting. Your chair will also prepare a written report detailing the recommendations of the Progress Review Panel to the Dean, UQ Graduate School.