Training and Supervision Plan (TSP)

The Training and Supervision Plan (TSP) is intended to help monitor and discuss the progress of your PhD project during regularly scheduled evaluation meetings. PhD candidates and their supervisory team are responsible for drafting, updating and complying with the TSP. It is best to develop the TSP within the first three months of a PhD project. TSPs tend to differ between departments and disciplines, but generally they include the following:

• An indication of how often the PhD candidate and their supervisors meet. In the first couple of months, meeting your supervisor/s once every two weeks is considered a minimum; once every week is preferable. Meetings should have specified goals (e.g. giving an oral update to discussing a paper) that are clear to everyone involved and they should be oriented at enabling the PhD candidate to make progress.
• An overview with the planning of all intended research deliverables, such as literature reviews, research papers and presentations.
• Plan for regular moments (e.g. twice a year) of reflection and feedback on the supervision.
• Suggestions for which courses / how many ECTS credits the PhD candidate should complete. The minimum ECTS credits varies per faculty and may be subject to change. An overview with faculty-specific requirements regarding ECTS credits and courses (as of 2018) can be found here.
• Teaching responsibilities of the PhD candidates.
• Rules and agreements regarding co-authorship and collaborations in research more generally.
• PhD candidates are in addition advised to keep a portfolio with all realized research and teaching output as an appendix to the TSP document, as a way to indicate how the initially intended activities and planning were changed or expanded in the course of time.