Attendance and Engagement (PhD)

At the University of Edinburgh, we are required to keep EUCLID updated regularly with a record of recent engagement for all students. This allows us to enact our duty of care to you, our students, identifying where you may need additional support. It also incorporates our legal obligation as a sponsor of student visas.

As a PhD student, you can view (but not edit) your engagement record.

Engaging with your studies as a PhD student

The activities you undertake as an independent researcher will necessarily be individual to you. It is our expectation that you are fully engaged with these activities, which may include (but are not restricted to):

Regular supervision meetings
Attending scheduled classes
Attending seminars and workshops
Conducting fieldwork
Data analysis
Participating in research and reading groups
Submitting articles for review
Attending conferences
Presenting papers
Drafting chapters
Tutoring

If you are contacted to highlight that there is no recent engagement logged on EUCLID, this does not usually mean that we are concerned about a lack of engagement on your part. In most cases, it simply means that no engagement has been logged for some time and we wish to update your record.

Logging engagement on EUCLID

Supervision

Supervisors are reminded regularly to log supervision meetings on EUCLID so if they have missed anything, you can simply contact them directly.

Attendance registers (courses)

If you are enrolled on a course, your attendance will be logged for all small-group teaching events (up to 50 students) associated with that course. Missed classes will appear on your engagement record.

This is the case whether you are taking the class for credit or simply auditing.

If you prefer just to have advice on reading materials, please contact pgtaught.sps@ed.ac.uk to be withdrawn from the course so missed classes no longer appear on your engagement record. You should then contact the Course Organiser directly for reading material advice.

Attendance at research seminars, group meetings etc.

PhD students in SPS now have the opportunity to record attendance at such activities via a QR code. The code will take you to a 'My PhD' form to complete. You will find the code displayed in rooms within the Chrystal Macmillan Building. If you would like to record your attendance at an event but can’t access the QR code, please ask those leading the session or contact pgresearch.sps@ed.ac.uk. Attendance recorded via this form will be uploaded weekly to EUCLID.

Activity Update

This is a short form which we have introduced to allow PhD students to tell us easily about recent activities. You will only be asked to complete the form if there is no recent engagement logged on your record. We will contact you directly if this is the case (see below).

How we review your attendance and engagement

We review engagement for PhD and Visiting Postgraduate Research students on a monthly basis. We may therefore contact you from time to time if there is no recent engagement logged on your record. We will ask you to complete the Activity Update. When we receive your form, we will update your record accordingly.

Contacting you with our concerns

If we contact you to ask you to complete the Activity Update and we do not hear from you, we will contact you again with our concerns.

Your feedback

Over the course of 2023-24, we heard from the SPS PhD community via student reps as well as individual feedback and we have been led by this while updating our processes for recording and reviewing engagement.

You told us:

You would like your supervisors to take responsibility for keeping your engagement record updated.: Supervisors are reminded regularly to log your meetings on your EUCLID record. We know, however, that when you meet, their focus is on you and your research and as a result, the updates to your record can sometimes be overlooked. As the activities you undertake as a PhD student extend far beyond supervision meetings, we have developed the 'My PhD' Attendance Record (QR code) and Activity Update as means to collect in details of your most recent activities where no supervision has been recorded.
You would like to be able to edit your own engagement record: We would like that too! Our systems do not currently allow it, but we continue to raise it in the appropriate University fora and recommend that you do the same via your student reps.
Our emails about engagement were confusing: We reviewed our emails over the course of 2023-24 and have updated this web page to (hopefully!) answer your questions and explain why we are contacting you are various points throughout the year.
References to visas and escalation are stressful: As we have explained above, recording and reviewing engagement allows us to enact our duty of care to you, our students, and also incorporates our legal obligation as a sponsor of student visas. We have amended wording in messages to ensure that sponsored students do not feel targeted or unduly concerned.
It is time consuming going back over long periods of time to list all the activities you have undertaken: We have created a more streamlined way to capture a few key activities which we hope will prove less time-consuming: the Activity Update. You will only be asked to complete this form where no other recent engagement is logged on your record.

PhD Students