Structured PhD (Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences) (English)

Course Overview

As part of the doctoral training available on the Structured PhD program, students avail themselves of a range of interdisciplinary taught modules. The wide menu of available options include modules that:

• are discipline-specific in that they augment the student’s existing knowledge in their specialist area
• are dissertation-specific in that they supply core skills which are essential to completion of the research project, e.g., additional language skills
• acknowledge a student’s professional development, e.g., presentation of a paper at an international conference
• enhance a student’s employability through generic training, e.g., career workshops, computer literacy.

Each student is assigned a primary Supervisor(s) and a Graduate Research Committee made up of experienced researchers to plan their program of study and to provide on-going support to their research.

A Ph.D. dissertation should make a substantial and original contribution to its field of knowledge. The Ph.D. degree is awarded for work that is 'worthy of publication, in whole or in part, as a work of serious scholarship' ( NUI Galway Calendar). The length of the dissertation in English is normally 60,000 to 80,000 words. The duration of research is usually four years.