Newsmail #54, 2023-03-31

Dear all,

Today I joined the PhD supervisors faculty meeting in the morning. All PhD supervisors at ITM were invited and expected to attend. The theme today was gender equality, diversity and equal treatment. The discussions were very intensive and focused on how to improve the supervision process, to ensure that we do the right thing, that we have a good and sustainable supervision process as well as an appropriate work environment for our PhD students (and others).

Next week we have our annual MMK faculty meetings, our strategic discussion-days. All faculty are invited (not PhD students, I’m sorry). On Monday, we’ll finalize the ongoing process of revising the general study plan for our Machine Design PhD program. Today’s discussions regarding JML therefore timed our process perfectly. The revision of the study plan was initiated last fall and involves, for example, more structured requirements regarding the number of publications required to get a PhD degree, which courses that are required etc.

On Wednesday next week we’ll focus on our MSc programs. The track leaders have for about 1,5 years developed mechanisms for more exchange between the tracks and programs, enabling students to take courses from all our tracks. We often talk about “Major and Minors”, meaning that a student of one MSc program/track can get a profile from another track. It’s now time to converge on these discussions so that we can continue to develop other areas as well, such as an ITRL-related MSc program focused on System Design and system thinking.

Now I wish everyone a nice weekend,

Martin