Unofficial PhD Advice — PhD advice curated by PhD students

University Resources

The RSC

The RSC — Research Students Committee — is charged with looking after both PhD and research masters students in the department of computing science at the Department of Computing Science at Glasgow. You can find out more about it here, with details such as:

  • Who’s on the committee
  • Support services and counselling
  • FAQs
  • General PhD things
  • Absence from the university
  • Annual progression / Vivas
  • Travel / expenses
  • Thesis

Here’s the RSC research student guide. This document is intended to act as a manual, for both students and supervisors, on the process and regulations relating to those degrees.

PhD Representatives

Frances Cooper is our PhD representative (You can email her at f.cooper.1@research.gla.ac.uk). If you have any questions or complaints or comments, you should absolutely feel free to talk to her. She’s there to help and will do her best to treat any of your issues confidentially. She’s the perfect person to be a PhD representative. She’s very kind, welcoming, supportive, and helpful. She will raise any of your issues at the monthly RSC meetings and see to its completion.

Gözel Shakeri (email: g.shakeri.1@research.gla.ac.uk) and Alberto Gonzalez Olmos (email: Alberto.GonzalezOlmos@glasgow.ac.uk) are Athena Swan representatives. The Athena Swan committee is committed to equality and diversity. If you have any questions, comments, or issues please feel free to contact either of them. They will treat your issue confidentially and try to help you where they can.

Department of Computing Science support

If you have any issues with any equipment, please feel free to contact support at support@dcs.gla.ac.uk. Robert Nugent and Derek “Del” Hamilton are happy to help whenever they can.

IT Support

In case you need software (e.g. Matlab), you should email the IT guys (Steward Macneill at Stewart.Macneill@glasgow.ac.uk) They will try and help you our. They also deal with your DCS profiles for the machines in our building and the labs.

T4 Webpages

The basic idea behind these pages (an example here) is to provide a very brief overview of who you are and what you do along with contact details and a link to your own personal webpage, where you can do/say whatever you like. You can modify your webpage via T4.

Some information is provided here, but you should be given more concrete instructions (and a signup form for T4!) as part of your induction materials.

Room Bookings

In case you need to book a room for a meeting, email bookings@dcs.gla.ac.uk the room number, date, and time. Helen Border will sort things out for you.

Teaching and Tutoring

If you want to do any tutoring, there will be plenty of opportunity! Level 1 & 2 teaching are seen to by Helen Border (email Helen.Border@glasgow.ac.uk), and levels 3 to 5 are allocated by Gail Reat (email Gail.Reat@Glasgow.ac.uk). Usually, an email will be sent out around May for the next academic year’s classes, but it’s still worth emailing as there may be some still unallocated.

Finance

Whenever you want to buy something with the school’s money, you need to make sure that the budget holder is aware of your spendings. Ask the budget holder (e.g. the RSC, or your supervisor) before you make the purchase. Once you have the permission, email a filled out purchase order or your money claim to Ian O’Rourke at Compsci Finance (email compsci-fintrans@glasgow.ac.uk). The expenses form you need is available on the RSC website (here!).

If you want to order things via Amazon, email Robert Nugent at Robert.Nugent@glasgow.ac.uk. He’s got an Amazon Prime account and can get you your things within a day.

If you need to send money claims to the finance hub, do it via internal mail. This means you should put your money in an envelope, write the finance hub address on it, and put it without a stamp in the mail room behind the janitor. The address of the finance hub is:

College of Science and Engineering
1st Floor (Level 3)
Boyd Orr Building
University Avenue
University of Glasgow

This isn’t actually too far away, so you may prefer to just take it over the road.

Letters and Parcels:

Letters for your will be put into your pigeon hole. You can find it in front of office G161. For bigger parcels, you might want to check the mail room behind the janitor in the SAWB foyer, or the mail room in the Boyd Orr building. PhD students are not allowed a key to the mail room in SAWB, so you’ll have to make sure the janitor is there to let you in.

Printing

We use PullPrinting to do our printing. Here’s a website which will walk you through setting it up. However, here’s also a link to print online without having to install a driver. Oddly, printing via the link is often more reliable and prompt than via the drivers…

Graduate School

The Graduate School offers many useful courses for PhD students — but they also offer many amazing opportunities to make new friends, and to network with your peers, such as their retreats and annual ceilidh.

Funding

(for internships, summer schools, travel and so on)

There are a couple of funding schemes for all sorts of things. If you need travel money then you can request it from RSC (see above), and the Graduate School (Who have a £40,000 mobility fund). SICSA has money for summer schools and internships.

Mentoring

Our school’s Athena Swan committee launched a PhD mentoring scheme. Through that scheme , you can be allocated an RA who will mentor you in any way you want (such as securing funding, climbing up the ladder, teaching, and so on). If you’re interested, email Alice Miller (email: Alice.Miller@Glasgow.ac.uk) or Oana Andrei (email: Oana.Andrei@glasgow.ac.uk).

Accommodation:

If you’re in need of University of Glasgow Accommodation, then you can find lots here. This page offers information on council tax, how to recycle in Glasgow, and so on. If you’re looking for private accommodation (generally cheaper than University of Glasgow housing!), then you can have a look at Gumtree, or at Spareroom.

Childcare

If you’re in need of childcare, you should consider joining the Parent Buddy network. This group facilitates peer-support and advice around managing childcare issues and workloads.

Lunch & Pubs & Fun

Every day, as 12:30, we have lunch together in the common room — please feel free to join us as often as you want. We usually do a jigsaw puzzle or a crossword puzzle to entertain ourselves. There are a lot of laughs to be laughed and great friendships to be made. So! Please join us! :D

We try to have weekly coffee mornings on Fridays at 11am in the common room. You’ll receive an email near the time. The PhD representative usually provides coffee and biscuits, courtesy of the RSC.

Quite frequently, we organise movie nights in the School. We have a brilliant HD projector, amazing surround sound, bean bags, and loads of snacks and drinks! (Bring your own food, though) We will let you know about these things as well.

Finally, we do pub nights every now and then, just to relax together on a Friday after work.

Information about all of this is available via a Google Group — email Gözel Shakeri at g.shakeri.1@research.gla.ac.uk and she’ll gladly add you to the group!