In the second half of March, public reporting presentations by postgraduate students are being held at South Ural State University.
Within three weeks the total of 5 days are planned for presentations, where around 100 postgraduates graduating in 2025 will be heard. Their works are being discussed by an expert committee chaired by the SUSU Rector Alexander Wagner. The committee members also include the SUSU President Aleksandr Shestakov, First Vice-Rector, Vice-Rector for Research Anton Korzhov, Head of the Research and Innovation Services Leonid Shipulin, Head of the Centre for Doctoral Studies Natalia Shaburova, as well as directors of majors-specific institutes.
Each postgraduate will have 5 minutes to present his/her work and report about the main results obtained. Next, comments will be offered by his/her academic adviser. After that, the expert committee will assess the work's completeness and its compliance with the scientific field, clarify data on publications, sophistication of the theoretical part of the thesis, implementation of results in production, and will provide each postgraduate with recommendations on how to polish his/her thesis before its submission to the council.
The topics of the dissertations by students graduating this year are very diverse: application of AI in metallurgy and pipe rolling industry, effects of electromagnetic radiation on biological membranes, fuzzy sets theory and its application in the creation of confectionery technologies, annotation of big data in the form of time series, impacts of solar flares on electromagnetic waves, issues of construction, of economics, of applied mathematics, of modern dramatic art, Old-Russian icon painting, and more.
SUSU is a participant of the Priority 2030 program and is implementing a strategy on providing training for engineering specialists. In this context the university has set a high bar for itself in terms of the indicators of timely defences by postgraduates and of the number of young candidates of sciences among the teaching staff.
"Such presentations allow to assess the status of readiness of dissertations: that is how many publications a student has available, how complete the thesis text is, whether all the chapters are in place...The final certification, which will be held in July, is not that far off, so some of the postgraduates need to mobilize the efforts, some need to hurry up, and others on the contrary need to relax and understand that they are doing everything right," explains Head of the Centre for Doctoral Studies Natalia Shaburova.
Right before the presentations not only the postgraduates themselves feel nervous, but their academic advisers do as well.
"Such new format is a motivation for our postgraduates to get their heads straight and prepare even better," believes Abduvali Toshev, Head of the Department of Production Technology and Catering Organization of the Institute of Sport, Tourism and Service. "Our students have already achieved the main results, but some are awaiting patents, or publication of articles in journals recommended by the State Commission for Academic Degrees and Titles. Summer is ahead, and it is high time to finalize the texts of dissertations."
Summer is the high time to finalize dissertations. Many of the postgraduates, whose research is mostly complete, have received recommendations from the experts to focus on their work in the nearest months, so that they could present their dissertations to the council in autumn and defend them before the end of 2025.