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Home > Graduate > Goals for Dissertation Year Graduate Students

Goals for Dissertation Year Graduate Students

1. Final Oral Examination
2. Thesis Submission
3. Placement

Final Oral Examination

When the student's dissertation is complete, he or she must pass a final oral examination on the dissertation and related topics. The student requests the appointment of a committee of examiners, at least four weeks in advance of the examination date. This "Final Exam Application" form is submitted to the Graduate School on-line using CAESAR.

The committee must include no fewer than three full-time members of the Northwestern University faculty, three of whom, including the chair, must be members of the Graduate Faculty. The chair of the committee is expected to hold a tenure-line appointment in the Economics department. Ordinarily, the examiners will be the members of the student's thesis committee.

The Graduate School normally requires that all requirements for the doctoral degree must be met within nine years of initial registration in a doctoral program. After nine years, students can maintain their affiliation with Northwestern by registering each quarter (except summer) for TGS 513, Advanced Continuous Registration. Tuition is at a higher rate than TGS 512. This registration is considered less than half-time and therefore does not provide students with the ability to defer loans or extend visas.

Full information on completion procedures are posted on The Graduate School's website.

Thesis Submission

Following successful completion of the final examination, an electronic version of the dissertation must be submitted to The Graduate School. Click here for more information from The Graduate School.

Placement

The Department assists its students in obtaining jobs. The Placement Director coordinates the activity. Each year a timetable is issued that indicates the key dates for preparing job market materials:

phd-jobmarket.pdf (2-page PDF file).

The vitae of job market candidates are disseminated by the department on its web site. Candidates can also prepare a personal web page.

Students on the job market should inform the Placement Director of their preferred positions, any constraints they face, the state of their negotiations, and their acceptance of job offers.

Students who are on the job market in their fifth year are eligible, resources permitting, for departmental funding. To be eligible for funding, students who are entering their fifth year will have to ask their dissertation committee chair to submit a form to the Graduate Program Coordinator's office by July 31. This form certifies that a draft of a job-market paper has been submitted and that the student is going to be on the job-market in the fall. The form can be obtained from the Graduate Program Coordinator's office, or downloaded in PDF format.

Instructions for Preparing your Vita

• Click on the MS Word file vita.doc and open it in MS Word or download it to your computer.
• Edit as appropriate and fill in between the **s.
• Delete any sections that are not appropriate.
• You can elect to omit any or all of the items under "Personal Information."
• Double click on the header on page 2 and insert your first and last name.
• Carefully proof read
• Save the file for yourself.

Web Vita

• Convert the Word document you just created into PDF format.
• Save it with the title "cv.pdf" (note lower case)
• Post on your personal job market web site.

Web Interactive Capabilities

We also need some interactive capabilities on the job market homepage to allow hot links to your e-mail address, vita, web page, and the addresses of your references. To do this:

• Right click on the file jobmkt-template.txt (for Economics students)
• jobmkt-template-KSM.txt (for Kellogg students)
• Download it onto your computer using the "File-Save As" command.
• Open it using a text editor (do NOT use Microsoft Word) and fill as appropriate. You can delete any items that do not apply to you.
• Rename the file "yourlastname.txt" and save as an ASCII (or txt) file.
• Submit it as an e-mail attachment to Ian Savage along with the PDF version of your vita. It is best to send as an attached text file, rather than pasted into the body of your e-mail as some e-mail programs will remove the html tags.

Preparing your Web Personal Home Page

Job market candidates will have accounts established on Northwestern's Depot server.

To maintain a uniform appearance for our job market candidates, you must use our standard template for your homepage. Instructions for setting this up are:

• Go to: www.econ.northwestern.edu/phd/indexjm.html.
• Click on File > Save As to save the html file to your local computer.
• Edit the file, preferably using WordPad. There are tags in the file telling you where to insert information. Note that you can replace the image on the left with a photograph of yourself, but this a matter for personal preference. In addition to linking to your main job market paper, feel free to add links to other papers or supporting information.
• Transfer it to your Depot site, keeping the file name indexjm.html.