Milestones for PhD Students
Milestones mark specific out-of-classroom requirements PhD students must meet to make appropriate progress towards successful completion of their dissertation. Currently there are six milestones tracked in the School of Information Sciences, and these milestones are entered and tracked via PeopleSoft.
1) Once a PhD student takes her/his first exam, the appropriate program representative (currently Marcy or Mary) creates that student's milestone list in PeopleSoft and marks the first milestone.
2) In PeopleSoft itself, the person marking milestones for a new student checks to see if that student already is in the system (from a prior degree perhaps imported into Peoplesoft during the transition from ISIS to PeopleSoft). Either a new record is created (if the student was not already in the system) or an existing record is added to (if the student was in the system).
3) To set up the first milestone list in either case, the "milestone copy" option in PeopleSoft should be selected. This will add a template for that student. The template was last updated when Wes Lipschultz emailed Patti Mathay in the Registrar's Office to request the following 6 milestones (each is preceded by a sequence number in increments of 10. These increments allow for later additions in the sequence to existing records if needed):
10 Doctoral Prelim Evaluation
20 Doctoral Comp Examination
30 Admission Proposal Defense
40 Doctoral Dissertation Defense
50 Doctoral Dissertation Approval
60 Statue of Limitations
Two masters milestones were removed (Master's Comp and Master's Thesis Defense) because they are not tracked by the School, but Patti Mathay could be contacted again to have these added back later.
4) As each of the 6 doctoral milestones are attempted, the appropriate program representative marks the attempt on PeopleSoft and whether or not the attempt was successful.