When to submit
Your PhD thesis cannot normally be submitted until you have been registered for eight complete terms and must be submitted by the end of your fourth year. In deciding when to submit your thesis you should be guided by your supervisor and by your annual reviews.
Students who have not submitted within the four-year period will be withdrawn from study and recorded as a late submission. If you are an overseas student your visa may become invalid at this point. Students intending to submit a PhD thesis after being withdrawn from study should apply to the Student Registry to be reinstated.
Applying for appointment of examiners
You should apply for the appointment of examiners at least two months in advance of submitting your dissertation. Please use this form:
The form must be accompanied by a short summary of your dissertation. The summary should take the form of an abstract of the thesis and be about 300 words in length. It should be presented on one side of A4 paper with your name and the exact title of the thesis at the top.
The Degree Committee, in consultation with your supervisor, will then consider the summary and the thesis title so as to appoint two examiners, neither of whom may be your supervisor.
How to submit
You should submit your thesis by uploading it to Moodle as a PDF file. Please email the Department to request access to the Moodle site for PhD thesis submission.
After the examination, you will be required to provide one copy of your thesis to be deposited in the University Library and one copy to be deposited in the Whipple Library. These should be clean copies, permanently stitched and bound in stiff covers, with your name and the title clearly inscribed on the cover and incorporating any corrections required by the examiners. At the same time, you should submit a further loose copy of your summary to be filed in the University Library and the Whipple Library. You will also be asked to sign a declaration regarding your right to be identified as the author.
You will not be able to collect your degree until you have submitted the two hard-bound copies of your thesis. You are strongly recommended to retain one or more copies for your own use.
Your PhD thesis must also be deposited on Apollo, the University's online repository for digital content.