PhD students at their Third Year are required to present their PhD research at the Spring Ph.D. Forum.

*  Present chapter 2 or the preliminary version of chapter 3.
In the first two years, admission to the following year was based, to a large extent, on your performance in the exams. This time instead, the assessment will be based exclusively on the quality and advancement of your research projects. By the end of the third year, you should have a complete draft of the first chapter, a second chapter at an advanced stage of development, and a well-structured idea for the third chapter. This means that at the forum in May, we expect you to present the second chapter with some preliminary results. 
 
Alternatively, you could present the research idea for the third chapter if it is refined enough. If you are working on field data, you must have some preliminary results, access to all the data you need (or a sure timing on when they will be available), and a clear research plan and timeline. If you have not completed the analysis yet, please explain your empirical strategy in detail, spelling out the testable hypotheses and the precise approach you plan to adopt for each of them. 
 
If you are working on a theoretical model, you must be able to illustrate the framework, motivate the assumptions (how restrictive and reasonable) they are and explain why you need them, provide preliminary results from the simplest cases, and give an idea of the feasible extensions you plan to work on. 
 
If you are working on an experiment/RCT, the design should be finalized (including the instructions and software, if needed), and you will need to have at least the analysis of the data from a pilot. If you have not completed the analysis yet, please explain your empirical strategy in detail, spelling out the testable hypotheses and the precise approach you plan to adopt for each of them. 

We would like to introduce the figure of the "discussant." This is not meant to be a second advisor or a mentor, but someone from our faculty who is into the literature and can give specific feedback and ask questions during the forum. 

Each presentation will last 40 minutes, plus 10 minutes of Q&A.