The midway assessment is organized in two parts: first an approximately 2-hour public seminar, followed by a closed meeting. The seminar is quite informal, with participants from the Department, the PhD-coordinator, the supervisor, colleagues, and other PhD-students, one of whom also will provide feedback on the text. The closed meeting might be very short, but is supposed to give candidate, opponent, supervisor, and PhD-coordinator the possibility to address issues that didn't come up in the public seminar.
The seminar starts with a presentation by the PhD-candidate of the project as a whole (10-15), then commentator is invitated to spend about an hour discussing the text with the candidate. The format can be more or less dialogical, depending on what seems most useful. Questions we would generally like to have discussed are:
- theoretical framework (coherent, clear, useful, appropriate, lacking etc.)
- methodological approach (consistent, systematic, well-fitted to project etc.)
- sources
- use of secondary literature, place in the field
- arguments
- structure
- progress (what is done, what is left)
- writing