Detailed guidance on the SOR projects including meeting and receiving feedback from your supervisor. HTML Available projects List of available projects will be displayed here when they are to announced. Doing the project If you are doing a project suggested by an academic you will have that person your sole supervisor. If you are doing a non-academic external project then you will have a supervisor in the external organisation and secondary supervisor within the University. If at any time during your project you feel there are problems with the supervision you are getting, let the project coordinators know immediately by sending an email to: or-projects@maths.ed.ac.uk or talk to: Akshay Gupte Alper Yildirim Vanda Inacio de Carvalho. You should have been told what project you will be doing and who your supervisors are by the end of the exams. You should contact your main supervisor and arrange an initial meeting with one or both of them. Your first meeting should happen before 4 June (ideally, in Week 0). Supervisor meetings It is important to manage your interactions with your supervisor to get the most out of the time they can give you. At an early stage discuss the supervision process with the supervisor and agree on how often you will see them. You should aim to be in contact with your supervisor either in a meeting or by email or phone on average about once per week, but the pattern may vary as the project progresses. You may need to have more meetings than this initially until the project is well defined, and there may be occasions where you need more regular contact because otherwise you will not be able to make progress. It is a good discipline to write a short report each week listing what you have done that week, and send this by email to your supervisor. Keep these reports. It is good to draw up a timetable early on of what you plan to do and agree on this with your supervisor. It can be modified later in discussion with your supervisor. Find out when your supervisor will be away and if they will be away for any period of more than 2 weeks ask them to suggest somebody you can contact if difficulties occur while they are away. At the end of the first full week in June send an email message to the project coordinators confirming that you have had a meeting with one of your supervisors and that your project is underway. or-projects@maths.ed.ac.uk By the end of June, you should have a good understanding of what the projects will achieve, and you should start preparing an outline of what will be in the dissertation. By the end of July, you should have a clear outline of the different sections of your dissertation and you should have written at least 20% of it. This should be given to your supervisor so that they can comment on its content and style. Read carefully the University regulations on plagiarism. Ask your supervisor specifically to verify that you are citing other people's material in a way that is acceptable to Edinburgh University. We will ask you to sign a declaration when you hand in your dissertation to confirm that it is free of plagiarism. As part of the project, you have to show that you can work independently on the given topic for a period of between two and three weeks, not having meetings with your School supervisor during that time. Feedback from your supervisor Your supervisor should read and give you detailed comments on one or two chapters of your dissertation. Agree with them when you will give them this material and when you will get it back. You will probably need over a week to react to the supervisor's comments. Give the material to be read to your supervisor by the end of the first week of August at the latest. However, if you give work to the supervisor to read when it is at a very preliminary stage, where the structure is not clear or the English is bad, then the supervisor may find it difficult to read and not be able to give useful comments on its content. Do not expect your supervisor to correct your grammar, get help elsewhere for that and use the time your supervisor has to guide you about the content. This article was published on 2025-02-26
HTML Available projects List of available projects will be displayed here when they are to announced. Doing the project If you are doing a project suggested by an academic you will have that person your sole supervisor. If you are doing a non-academic external project then you will have a supervisor in the external organisation and secondary supervisor within the University. If at any time during your project you feel there are problems with the supervision you are getting, let the project coordinators know immediately by sending an email to: or-projects@maths.ed.ac.uk or talk to: Akshay Gupte Alper Yildirim Vanda Inacio de Carvalho. You should have been told what project you will be doing and who your supervisors are by the end of the exams. You should contact your main supervisor and arrange an initial meeting with one or both of them. Your first meeting should happen before 4 June (ideally, in Week 0). Supervisor meetings It is important to manage your interactions with your supervisor to get the most out of the time they can give you. At an early stage discuss the supervision process with the supervisor and agree on how often you will see them. You should aim to be in contact with your supervisor either in a meeting or by email or phone on average about once per week, but the pattern may vary as the project progresses. You may need to have more meetings than this initially until the project is well defined, and there may be occasions where you need more regular contact because otherwise you will not be able to make progress. It is a good discipline to write a short report each week listing what you have done that week, and send this by email to your supervisor. Keep these reports. It is good to draw up a timetable early on of what you plan to do and agree on this with your supervisor. It can be modified later in discussion with your supervisor. Find out when your supervisor will be away and if they will be away for any period of more than 2 weeks ask them to suggest somebody you can contact if difficulties occur while they are away. At the end of the first full week in June send an email message to the project coordinators confirming that you have had a meeting with one of your supervisors and that your project is underway. or-projects@maths.ed.ac.uk By the end of June, you should have a good understanding of what the projects will achieve, and you should start preparing an outline of what will be in the dissertation. By the end of July, you should have a clear outline of the different sections of your dissertation and you should have written at least 20% of it. This should be given to your supervisor so that they can comment on its content and style. Read carefully the University regulations on plagiarism. Ask your supervisor specifically to verify that you are citing other people's material in a way that is acceptable to Edinburgh University. We will ask you to sign a declaration when you hand in your dissertation to confirm that it is free of plagiarism. As part of the project, you have to show that you can work independently on the given topic for a period of between two and three weeks, not having meetings with your School supervisor during that time. Feedback from your supervisor Your supervisor should read and give you detailed comments on one or two chapters of your dissertation. Agree with them when you will give them this material and when you will get it back. You will probably need over a week to react to the supervisor's comments. Give the material to be read to your supervisor by the end of the first week of August at the latest. However, if you give work to the supervisor to read when it is at a very preliminary stage, where the structure is not clear or the English is bad, then the supervisor may find it difficult to read and not be able to give useful comments on its content. Do not expect your supervisor to correct your grammar, get help elsewhere for that and use the time your supervisor has to guide you about the content.
