A PhD study is normally between 3 to 4 years. A four year employment includes one year of duty work for the Institute. This work normally consists of teaching and tutoring students, administrative tasks or representation in councils and comities. The duty work should be relevant to your PhD work. Administrative tasks should be as restricted as possible and should not exceed 10% of the duty work. (??)

The Institutes at NTNU set their own guidelines for their students duty work. At the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication the duty work is 1720 hours, and are normally spread over four years. The IET Institute offers the PhD student a 3.25 year contract with an intention of four years. The contract is extended a quarter of a year when the student has finished one fourth of the duty work. This is to assure that the student performs his/her duty work.

At the beginning of the PhD period it’s customary to plan the content of the duty work, when it should be carried out and how many hours should be used on a task. This is decided in a dialog between the student, teaching supervisor and the Institute leader. This is done in the beginning of every semester. How many hours the PhD student spends on the task, is up to the student. It’s the number of hours that counts. This varies from institute to institute.

The student should keep track of how many hours he/she spend on the duty work. You can find a form for this here: http://intern.iet.ntnu.no/pliktarbeid/

It’s the Institutes responsibility to assign enough duty work to the student(??).

If the duty work is relevant it could be carried out in two semesters, but the student has no right to demand this.

Some institutes approve sevaral hours (from 100 to 217) to prepare for studies abroad. There’s no central guide lines for this so it’s up to each institute to decide.

A PhD student normally writes several publications during the PhD period. This could be publications to a journal, a conferance or trough other publication channels. The Institute is financially rewarded for each publication that’s made by people in the Institute and it is also a measurement about the progress of a project. Publications are in other words the way to messure and evalute a researh project. Therefor it’s very important to register all publications in FRIDA.

All publications should be published in the database called FRIDA (ForskningsResultater Informasjon og Dokumentasjon av vitenskaplige Aktiviteter) even though is publised in a journal or on a conferance. FRIDA is a documentation center for research activities. Here you can find what research is done on a spesific topic, by a researher, in a spesific journal, etc. in Norway. In the end of every year NTNU and the Institute gets finalcially rewarded by the number of publications from NTNU or the Institute that’s in the database.