Defense of Research



You must hold your defense three months prior to graduating. Graduation is the time when you submit your final dissertation hard copy. At the defense time, all of your research should be complete, and you should have at least some written documents describing the work, but the final dissertation need not be complete yet. The Dissertation Research Defense Form should be submitted to the Ph.D. program coordinator immediately after your defense.

Committee

Your committee should be formed of at least five people. At least one must not be a CoC faculty member (can be other unit at Tech or outsider, but should have a Ph.D.), but the majority must have some CoC faculty appointment. Note: You only need to have three people on your committee at the time of your proposal, but it is recommended that you have all five members at that time.

All members of your committee should be present for the defense; however, in hardship cases, measures such as conference calls can be used as well.

Advertising the defense

The Graduate Studies office asks that you post an announcement of the defense to the git.cc.general and git.announce newsgroups. This should be done at least fifteen (15) working days prior to the defense. The announcement should consist of the day/time/place of the defense, title, abstract, and a list of the committtee members. Please provide an electronic copy of this announcement to Barbara Binder so that she may forward it to the GT Graduate Studies department.




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