Ready to finish your PhD

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December 06, 2024

5. Submitting your thesis

When it is time to submit, please contact the IMPRS coordination office in good time, meaning 8 - 10 weeks before you want to submit. As stipulated in the Regulations of the IMPRS-QBEE and in the Doctoral Supervisions Agreement for IMPRS-QBEE, all IMPRS doctoral students have to complete the IMPRS curriculum before submitting their thesis.

Dates: Pre-check and submission

For submission, two appointments are scheduled with the examination office: the so called pre-check date and the submission date. These appointments need to be funneled through the IMPRS coordination office, please do not schedule with the examination office directly!

On the pre-check date, the examination office will pre-check all the documents which will accompany your thesis on submission day. A check list of said documents can be found here. Please prepare these latest 1 week before the actual pre-check date and send them to the IMPRS coordination office. We are also happy to help you preparing these documents.

Two work days prior to your submission date you need to submit your thesis electronically, either as a PDF attachement via mail to promotion-zpa@uni-konstanz.de, and CC IMPRS@uni-konstanz.de. Alternatively, you can upload your thesis on a cloud and share the link in the e-mail instead of the PDF attachement. The U KN offers their own cloud solution, but you are free to use any. Either way, please include the statement “I agree to an online display” in this e-mail.

On your thesis submission day, you will need to bring

  • your thesis: four DIN A4 printed versions of your thesis, bound (no spiral binding), and you have to include an EMPTY page after your title page (in case you go for double-sided printing, this means that your print document needs to include three empty pages after the title page) and
  • the pre-check documents (minus the title page and the table of contents), printed one-sided as the documents will be passed on to different people

to the POSTBOX (not the office itself!) of the examination office before noon, using the following address:

PO box (70)
Universität Konstanz, Abteilung Studium und Lehre Zentrales Prüfungsamt, z. Hd. Frau Matzner,
Fach 70, Universitätstrasse 10, 78464 Konstanz

Your thesis: formal requirements

A doctoral thesis at U KN has to fulfill certain formal standards. It is usually written as a publication-based cumulative thesis, but can also be a monograph with prior the agreement of the supervisor. A monograph is NOT simply cumulative thesis with (yet) unpublished chapters!

To get a first overview about this specific standard, we would recommend that you browse the published theses of the last couple of years at the U KN library online’s repository (KOPS). You will find a huge number of published theses from the Biology Department including some from Konstanz and Radolfzell (http://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/: Fachbereich (=Department) – Biologie; Dokumenttyp (=type of document) – Dissertation (= doctoral thesis). You may notice that many of the latest thesis are not accessible yet. This is due to publication / copyright issues: if a chapter of your thesis isn't published yet in a journal, you may do not want to have it published as part of your thesis either. If this is the case, you can ask for an embargo.

Here you find a checklist for the components of your thesis.

Printing your thesis: Payment of the thesis printing is entirely at the personal cost of the doctoral student, unless otherwise stated by your supervisor!

University printing facilities at U KN are available to MPI-AB fellows and U KN, however should be discussed prior with Dago (dolalere@ab.mpg.de) to see if an arrangement can be made in terms of invoicing, as the U KN doesn’t accepted external payment methods. Another external option that many have used: http://copy-service-konstanz.de/.

What happens between submission and defense: The doctoral examination process is based on the Doctoral Regulations of the U KN. After you submitted your thesis, your thesis will be sent out to your referees. Your referees will write a report and submit it to the examination office. The referees have three months to evaluate your thesis. However, please keep in mind that the examination office cannot help it if the reviewers take more than the allocated time period. You should clearly check in advance whether your reviewers have time to evaluate your thesis. Tell them in advance that they may expect this reviewing work and to reserve some time for it. The faster your reviewers are, the faster the whole process can be. It pretty much depends on your “reviewers management”.
In some cases, a third review is needed, namely if the average grade of your thesis is 0,5 or higher, or if the two grades given differ by more than a full grade. If this is the case, you then have to provide the third referee with another hard-copy of your thesis. This referee is again given 3 month time to write their report.

Between the submission of both written evaluations, you need to calculate at least 5 weeks until
the possible date for your oral defense, but the bottleneck is receiving the reports.

Once all reports are in, you will be notified and the two week inspection period begins. During these two weeks, your thesis will be openly displayed for inspection at U KN. Professors, Junior-Professors, university lecturers or lecturers (Privatdozent) as well as the doctoral candidate, may submit a detailed opinion in writing to the examination office with any concerns.

When these two weeks have passed, you will be notified by the examination office of your earliest possible defense date. Your oral thesis defense can take place within a period of two weeks and to eight weeks after the inspection period. Please schedule a suitable date with your examination committee. Once you have a date, you need to organise a room for your defence - the IMPRS coordination office is happy to help! Please inform the IMPRS coordination office and the examination office as soon as possible about date, time, and place of your defense. Please keep in mind that this information needs to be officially published at least two weeks prior to your defense.

If you wish to have your doctoral examination process completed by the end of the winter semester (mid-February), we recommend that you hand in your application at the start of the winter semester (beginning of October) at the latest. If you wish to have your doctoral examination process completed by the end of the summer semester (middle/end of July), we recommend that you hand in your application at the start of the summer semester (beginning of April) at the latest.

6. Defense

You are expected to present your thesis in a talk of about 30min. The committee will question you thereafter about your thesis and about general issues of your subject (+/- 1h). The defense and the following discussion are public to fellow doctoral students and scientists from U KN (hence the announcement of the exam, two weeks prior to the defense). Of course you are free to invite colleagues, friends, and family members if you please.

After the defense (your presentation and the discussion), you and all guests leave the room and the three committee members will discuss your performance and will decide about the grade of the defense. Your final grade is calculated by averaging the mean of the defense grade and two times the mean of the thesis grades (the thesis counts double). After they have decided about the grade, they will call you in and explain their decision.

You do not have to be matriculated to attend your defense, especially if this falls at the start of the new semester. Note that to upload your thesis on KOPS (see below for details) you do need a @uni-kosntanz e-mail account. These expire after 6-months after the last registered semester.

7. Publishing your thesis

To receive your certificate, you have to published your thesis within two years after your defense:

“As set out in § 17 of the doctoral regulations,you must publish the thesis in the version ap-
proved by the referees within two years following the oral examination. If the thesis is not published within this period, you forfeit all rights attained through the examination”

 ~ Source: “Provisions for the publication of the thesis”, found here.

The final thesis may only be slightly modified after the reviewers’ requests e.g., typos and English languages errors, no modifications to the analysis or results may be added. You cannot update the manuscripts with an accepted version of a previously submitted manuscript!

For publishing, you will need

  • to provide a copy of your (modified) final thesis to each reviewer (this may be a PDF);
  • to collect the signatures of your reviewers and the Head of the Biology Department, stating that they agree with the publication, using the form “Publication of the Thesis”. Submit the signed form to the examination office;
  • to upload a PDF of your final thesis version to the online repository KOPS. If you don't want your thesis to be directly available online (embargo), you have to send an informal request (by email) to your first supervisor asking for permission to block your thesis in order to protect your data until publication in a scientific journal (max. 24 months) and forward a copy of their answer to KOPS;
  • to hand in (another) four hard copies of your final thesis to KOPS. This time, please use the “Sample title page for publishing the dissertation” and include the date of the defense and the names of your reviewers on the page after the title page (the previously empty page).

The library will then inform the examination office that they have received your final thesis version and the examination office will send your doctoral certificate to the address you provided during submission. In case you moved, please notify the examination office of your new address!

IMPRS Doctoral Certificate Supplement
The IMPRS office will issue a doctoral certificate supplement, which lists up to thirty credits you gained through your IMPRS curriculum. The only requirement for this is that you needed to have sent in all proof of your attended courses, visited conferences, published papers, supervised students, organized symposia, etc., to the IMPRS coordination office.

International certification of your degree (Apostille)
Most foreign countries require an official certification of your degree: state parties of the Hague Convention of 5 October 1961 require a certification called Apostille, all other countries a legalization.

To receive this international certification, you need to:

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