Completing a PhD involves fulfilling several academic/bureaucratic requirements along with conducting research. A lot of information and advice seems to be passed around by word of mouth, so I figured that I would try to write them down. When I can, I will provide links to official guidelines. Be sure to confirm with the PhD program coordinator! Right now, the coordinator is Britton Carnevali and she is awesome.

Course Registration

As a PhD student, you will need to register for credits every semester through Path@Penn. This is the same portal that undergrads and master’s students use to register for classes. Note: Path@Penn somewhat recently replaced an older system called PATH, which may be mentioned in some places.

You will probably take several classes in the first few years, but you will eventually register for just “CIS 9999 Independent Study Research” (before thesis proposal) or “CIS 9950 Dissertation” (after thesis proposal) (see course catalog). PhD students need to maintain “full-time enrollment,” which is 3 to 4 CUs (course units). For reference, most classes are 1 CU. CIS 9999 is actually adjustable, so you can register for 1 to 3 CUs to make sure you hit the full-time minimum.

TA Duties

You will also need to TA for two semesters, which is called the “Teaching Practicum” (see Teaching Practium section). You would register for CIS 8950 Teaching Practicum during the semester(s) you work as a TA. Becoming a TA is pretty informal. You will probably end up TAing for your advisor or someone else in the department who is teaching something familiar. A few tips:

  • The summer before you TA for the first time, you will need to complete training through CETLI (Penn Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Innovation, previously called “CTL”). It usually takes place in late summer, so look out for an email in August. The makeup session is usually shorter than the regular session (1 day vs. 3 days).
  • You can discuss setting up a “Head TA” position if you want. In my case, I wrote homework assignments instead of grading them, which I thought was interesting from a curriculum building perspective.
  • You can suggest offering office hours by appointment instead of weekly.
  • If you want teaching experience, you can volunteer to teach a lecture or run a review session. For even more experience, you can consider the CETLI Teaching Certificate, teaching a CIS 19XX minicourse, or co-teaching a class (ask your advisor).
  • After you fulfill the two semesters of Teaching Practicum, you can be paid to TA additional classes.

Breadth and Depth Courses

The course requirements actually changed right after I completed mine, so I am less familiar with this area (see Course Requirements section). In general, you will need to complete 2 breadth courses (waived if you have a master’s) and 6 depth classes. This requirement is usually pretty flexible as long as your advisor is okay with your choices.

Research Qualifier

This is another requirement that changed shortly after I completed the older version (then called the WPE-II). This requirement is supposed to completed at the end of your second year or beginning of your third year (see Research Qualifier section).

The goal of the research qualifier is to assess early research progress. That sounds scary, but it is really just a milestone to keep you moving. Otherwise, your first major written report and oral presentation might be the thesis proposal in your fourth (ish) year. Along with showing your committee that you have been making progress in your first couple of years, this is a good chance to experience how academic bureaucracy works.

What counts as progress? It is pretty broad, especially at such an early stage. It might look like literature review, formative studies, data collection of some kind (questionnaires, LLM outputs, pilot studies), or the beginning of a prototype. It might be more advanced, like a paper submission or publication. It might be a study that did not work out as you had hoped. Do not think too hard about whether your progress is impressive or “real” or beats some state of the art. In general, if your advisor is satisfied so far, you are probably good. Be sure to meet regularly and ask frequently for feedback.

What is “academic bureaucracy”? That is just my way of talking about the rules and structures that are instituted by a system: committees, deadlines, deliverables, other aspects of a system that codify a process. For the research qualifier, you will need to assemble a committee (three faculty members who will judge your research qualifier, one of whom you will designate as the chair), write a report, and give a presentation. You will need to coordinate schedules, book rooms, send email announcements, and learn how to integrate feedback from multiple people. It might sound like a lot, but you can do it!

A few more tips:

  • Some people use a recently finished project for their research qualifier. You can discuss this option with your advisor. Asking labmates for examples may also be helpful.
  • Dedicate the last section of your written report and presentation to discussing next steps. This can be more specific/immediate (such as finishing a project within the next semester or submitting to a conference by a certain date) or broad/distant (such as future project ideas).
  • Take this opportunity to try to develop your research direction. You do not need to have a specific thesis topic in mind yet. A general idea will help your committee understand what kind of researcher you want to be (and it will prevent you from spreading yourself too thin).

Thesis Proposal

You will propose your thesis around the end of your fourth year, when you and your advisor estimate that you have about one more year of work to do until you graduate. Timelines in research can be difficult to define, so the thesis proposal has historically had a lot of wiggle room. For example, I proposed my thesis in August 2025 (end of fifth year) and graduated the following December (midway through sixth year). You, your advisor, and maybe your committee chair will help you with the timing.

The most important part of the thesis proposal is the thesis statement. By the time you present your proposal, you need to have a clear, defensible research claim. Remember that research is about generating knowledge, not just building, observing, designing, whatever-ing something. I think about 50% of my effort on the proposal went toward figuring out my thesis statement (and I still had to work on it afterward). The effort is worth it (especially during job apps…).

Similar to the research qualifier, you will need to assemble a committee, write a report, and give a presentation. This time, the committee needs to include an “external,” or someone from outside the department. You can try cold emailing the most interesting researcher in your field and asking them to serve on your committee. Your advisor might have some advice on good people to ask, especially depending on your career goals.

Expectations for the report seem to vary by committee. In general, the goal of the thesis proposal is to convince your committee that the work you are proposing would satisfy the requirements for a dissertation. Therefore, a substantial portion of your proposal will be discussing planned work. Before you talk about planned work, you should also explain your previous/current work to provide background information. You are allowed (and encouraged, to be honest) to reuse past written documents/slides to help you do this.

My thesis proposal was structured like this:

  1. Abstract (1–3 paragraphs)
  2. Introduction chapter (several paragraphs)
  3. Related work (a few pages, reused from previous papers)
  4. First prior work (reused publication)
  5. Second prior/ongoing work (reused recent submission)
  6. Planned work (bullet point tasks and timeline)

Note that this structure made extending my proposal into my dissertation super easy. I highly recommend following a structure like this.

Other tips:

  • The you can choose a new committee for your thesis proposal after your research qualifier. After the proposal, you should keep the same committee.
  • To my knowledge, your advisor can be on the research qualifier committee (without being the chair) but not on the thesis committee, so be sure to plan around that.
  • Meeting individually with committee members can be helpful (it was for me). You can get a sense of the scope and amount of planned work that makes sense for a successful proposal.
  • Your committee will likely give you feedback after the presentation. If you prepare well, the feedback will mostly be about specific details to include or interesting areas to focus on. A less ideal situation would involve committee members not understanding your goals, which is why meeting with them beforehand even for just 30 minutes can be so valuable.
  • Making it this far represents a lot of endurance and hard work on your part. Congratulations 😊

Dissertation Defense

The dissertation defense is funny because it is officially the most important milestone of your PhD but also the most straightforward one, at least in my view. You already have your committee members. Your proposal will probably serve as a solid foundation, so you will not need to start from scratch. For me, it was actually a joyous occasion because it was such a rare opportunity to brag about my life’s work while wrapping up the highest academic degree, an accomplishment apparently less than 2% of the world’s population shares.

Okay, story time over. The process of completing the dissertation defense is basically the same as the process for the thesis proposal, just with slightly different content. Now that you are actually graduating, though, the academic bureaucracy becomes an even bigger deal.

Your dissertation will eventually be an actual published document, which comes with specific formatting requirements. Graduation itself also involves a bunch of paperwork and deadlines, so pay close attention to your email. Additional information is available from the Provost website.

Make sure you watch out for these steps:

  1. Beginning of semester: fill out a form (emailed to you) indicating your intention to graduate that semester. This should get you on the important mailing lists.
  2. ~Month before the end of the semester: deadline to defend. You need to defend (give the presentation) by a certain date to be eligible to graduate that semester.
  3. ~Two weeks before the end of the semester: required formatting meeting. If, like many others, you plan on depositing your dissertation (uploading the final copy online) at the end of the semester, you need to attend a meeting to make sure your formatting is correct. This is actually very helpful for peace of mind. My meeting was online. I shared my screen and scrolled through my dissertation while the host checked for errors. Your dissertation should be mostly complete by this point, but you can keep making changes as long as you are confident that your formatting is still correct.
  4. ~One week before the end of the semester: upload the final dissertation online (link is emailed to you). You will need to sign up for the “deposit appointment” before doing this. This is not an actual meeting. It is a placeholder for administrative purposes.
  5. ~One day after depositing dissertation: receive confirmation that your dissertation was accepted. You are done!
  6. ~One week (or several weeks) after deposit deadline: receive PhD designation your transcript. Congrats! You are officially a doctor!

PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR EMAIL DURING YOUR FINAL SEMESTER SO YOU DO NOT MISS ANY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS, DEADLINES, SIGN-UP FORMS, OR OTHER INFORMATION!!!