Congratulations!
As a PhD student, you have spent spend significant time at the University of Rochester taking courses, completing research in your field, completing milestones and are now ready to complete your degree.
The final requirement in earning a PhD degree is the completion and defense of the doctoral dissertation. Understanding the steps and associated deadlines in the dissertation submission and degree conferral process is necessary to establish a successful plan. For complete descriptions of the process, please review the Regulations and University Policies Concerning Graduate Students.
The page below is organized by before, during and post-oral defense. Please read the page in it’s entirety and email questions you have to UnivGradEducation@UR.Rochester.edu
All PhD programs must administer a qualifying examination as part of the PhD program requirements. The qualifying examination may be either written or oral or both, at the discretion of the department/program, and must be passed at least six months before the final examination may be taken.
The associate dean of a school certifies that a student has passed the qualifying examinations and is recommended for candidacy.
For more details, please review page 12 of the Regulations and University Policies Concerning Graduate Students.
At least six months before you plan to defend your dissertation, you should contact the graduate coordinator of your program for details regarding the submitting the defense. During the months leading up to the anticipated defense, your graduate coordinator will walk you through the process and explain any department specific nuances.
Pay careful attention to the five PhD degree cycle deadlines. In each degree cycle, there is a deadline for the last day to complete your degree requirements. There are no exceptions to the deadlines. If a deadline is missed, your name cannot be approved by the Council on Graduate Education and presented to the Board of Trustees until the following degree date.
The oral exam/defense/dissertation is approved at multiple levels of the University. Starting with the program, oral exam/defense/dissertation committee, school graduate deans and the University Dean of Graduate Education. You will receive emails a few days before your defense confirming that the approvals for the defense have all been received.
The dissertation process webpage offers several writing resources to help you get started, meet your goals, and complete your thesis/dissertation on time.
You also will want to take full advantage of internal reviews of the dissertation before uploading the thesis for defense registration, in order to minimize the number of errors in the registration version.
Page 11 of the Regulations and University Policies Concerning Graduate Students (“Redbook”) goes into detail about the make-up of the committee.
Approval must be obtained in writing, based on a petition that includes a rationale for the request and a CV of the proposed nonstandard member.
Contact your Graduate Coordinator to start the petition process.
Page 12 of the Regulations and University Policies Concerning Graduate Students (“Redbook”) goes into detail.
Contact the graduate coordinator of your program for details regarding the scheduling the defense.
Click here to Download a checklist of information needed to schedule defense
Click here to download the Oral Defense Rubric.
Approximately, 24 hours after oral exam, an email is sent that details out the next steps. Including uploading the final abstract and dissertation to ProQuest®, submitting a UR Research authorization form, and completing two required surveys.
The libraries at University of Rochester, electronically store and publish the dissertations based on a students embargo restrictions.
You can access our database of dissertations on the UR Research page hosted by the library.
There are two required survey’s for completion of the PhD Process. The University of Rochester PhD Survey and the national Survey of Earned Doctorates. The links to completing these surveys will be included in the completion memo sent post-defense.
We use a service called ProQuest to administer the electronic final thesis/dissertation (ETD) submission. ProQuest provides services that enable strategic acquisition, management and discovery of information collections. Once you have made any necessary revisions and the thesis/dissertation is final, you are ready to begin the submission process.
Once you have completed the steps above, you will receive an email the confirms that all of the requirements have been completed and will include a PhD Completion memo.
Application for Graduation (AFG)
The application for graduation notifies the Office of the University Registrar of when you plan to complete your degree requirements. The application kicks off the process of reviewing and updating the student record and ensures you receive important updates about degree progress and commencement. The application for graduation also serves as an opportunity to provide your name as you’d like it to appear on the diploma and in the commencement book as well as the address where you would like your diploma to be mailed.
Please visit the Registrar’s Office site for details.
If you are eligible, you can use the Application for Graduation form.
We offer both an electronic diploma and a paper copy diploma to students after their graduation date. Information on ordering replacement diplomas is located on the registrar’s webpage.
The University holds one doctoral commencement ceremony each year in May. Eligibility to walk in the May ceremony includes students that graduated between August of the previous year through August of the current year. As an example, the May 2025 ceremony is for students who graduated August 2024, October 2024, December 2024, February 2025, May 2025 and August 2025. Doctoral students are only eligible to walk once.
You will receive information about the ceremony that your are eligible to walk in during the Spring semester.
The academic hooding of doctoral students is a long-standing academic tradition that symbolizes the transition from student to scholar. At the University of Rochester, this significant recognition takes place annually during the doctoral degrees graduation ceremony.
During the ceremony, each doctoral graduate crosses the stage and is hooded, marking their academic achievement. Doctoral graduates typically invite their primary faculty advisor to perform the hooding. If the primary advisor is unavailable, a doctoral graduate may request another faculty member participate in the hooding ceremony. If no faculty member is designated, a distinguished faculty member or administrator will be appointed to perform the hooding.