Supervision, Personal Tutoring and Grievance Procedures

Here you will find details of how you will be supervised during your PhD and details about the grievance procedures.

At the start of your PhD journey in SoMaS you will be assigned a Supervisor and an Independent Advisor. 

Supervisory meetings

It is the University’s policy that formal supervision meetings (between research students and their supervisors) take place at least once a month and their date/content need to be recorded on the PATS system. These meetings are formal. In these meetings, you will discuss and record progress made and set objectives for future work. Informal meetings with your supervisor will also happen and these will be much more frequent (typically once per week or more often). Indeed, advice and help is available from your supervisor at all times throughout your studies, if not in person, then via telephone, video call or e-mail. 

The School needs to be able to have a record of formal supervisory meetings in order to monitor the PGR attendance and engagement and in order to meet the UKVI service requirements for visas.  


From the start of January 2024 it is the responsibility of PGR students to record when a supervisory meeting has taken place. This could be done within the meeting itself or shortly afterward. Once a record has been created on PATS by a student, the supervisor/advisor will get a notification and will then confirm on PATS that the meeting has taken place. Responsibilities of the student and supervisory team are laid out in the the Code of Practice for Research Degree Programmes, which you should read carefully.

Here is a link to a document with further guidance on using PATS as a PGR Student. If you have any questions or problems, please contact maths-phd@sheffield.ac.uk

Meetings with an independent advisor

You will be assigned a member of staff as an independent advisor, whom you are encouraged to meet on a regular basis, at least twice per year as a minimum. Your independent advisor will ensure that you are progressing as expected and that you have a clear idea of where your research is going. At the meetings with your independent advisor you should reflect on the general strategy of your PhD project, discuss scientific obstacles and plan towards successful completion of your PhD thesis. Reports from independent advisor sessions will provide documentary evidence of your progress, identify any problems, and highlight areas where action needs to be taken. Meetings with your Advisor should also be recorded on PATS. Your Advisor will then need to log into PATS and confirm the meeting record. 

Grievance procedures

We hope that you will find your experience as a PGR student in Sheffield an enjoyable, satisfying and stimulating experience. However, it is possible that circumstances occur that are not satisfactory, for example, problems with your research environment (e.g. office or working space), problems with equipment or your supervision, etc. In the first instance, if appropriate, you should raise these issues with your supervisor. If this is not appropriate, or if the issue is not resolved, you should then raise it with your independent advisor or directly with the Postgraduate Research Director (Istvan Ballai). If the issue is still not resolved within the department then following this it is appropriate to contact Research, Partnerships and Innovation (RPI) directly. The contacts for RPI can be found here. 

The university complaints and appeals process can be accessed here. 

A brief overview of the complaints procedure can be found in the Code of Practice. 

This link explains how to report bullying and harassment within the University.

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