SUPERVISION
Chair involved in the BIT programme
Most examiners appointed for the Reseach Topics and Final Project come from the following three chairs within the EEMCS and BMS faculty:
- Industrial Engineering and Business Information Systems (BMS)
- Services and Cybersecurity (EEMCS)
- Data Management & Biometrics (EEMCS)
What (not) to expect from a supervisor
You are expected to carry out your final project independently, and the supervisor should stimulate you in your work. However, with ‘carry out your final project independently’ we certainly do not mean that you should avoid approaching your supervisors for advice. It is, after all, a learning process in which you have the right to be guided. What matters is that you do not become dependent on your supervisors, and that the supervisors do not hand you ready-made solutions. You should view your supervisors more or less as colleagues with whom you can discuss your work as a way of ordering your own ideas. In the end, you are personally responsible for monitoring your own progress, while your supervisors only make sure that you do watch your own progress.
FINDING a SUPERVISOR
Just like with the assingment, there are multiple ways in finding a supervisor for your assignment. When browsing the website of our research chairs, your assignment will mostly come with one or two supervisor attached to the project. But if you found an assignment at a company or without an obvious supervisor you can:
- Browse the member pages of the chairs involved in the BIT programme and look for staff members with expertise in the area of your assignment
- Look at the lecturers of courses related to the topic of your assignment
- Look at the list of staff members of the course description in Osiris for some suggestions of possible supervisors to approach
While the daily supervision of your project or research topics will often be in the hands of a PhD student, your main supervisor and the one responsible for supervision of the project should always be a lecturer appointed as examiner for Research Topics and Final Project. Examiners are appointed by the Examination Board (see the list of lecturers appointed). These examiners have all completed their PhD and obtained an University Teaching Qualification (UTQ, Dutch: BKO) or equivalent. If your supervisor is not on the list, this can mean three things:
- Your supervisor has not yet completed his PhD or has not started his UTQ, and is therefore not (yet) appointed by the Examination Board. They can still act as daily supervisor, but someone else (preferably a colleague from the same chair, needs to take over the responsiblities as examiner).
- Your supervisor is (fairly) new to our Faculty and therefore has not been appointed (yet) as examiner. If your supervisor thinks they are sufficiently qualified, please let them contact the MSc coordinator so we can ask the Examination Board to appoint them.
- Your supervisor is from a chair outside of the chairs normally involved in the BIT programme, or is a guest lecturer/lecturer from another university. In some cases these lecurers can be appointed as examiner for a specific assignment only. In this case please contract the MSc coordinator in order for the Examination Board to appointed the lecturer for this specific instance only. Obviously these examiners need an (completed) UTQ and PhD as well.