Overview

Your research should produce an original contribution in your chosen field of study. You work closely with your supervisor, a member of academic staff, who is your principal source of support. If you choose a research area that has interdisciplinary aspects, you may have more than one supervisor. In addition to regular supervision, you will be supported by a supervisory panel of three academic staff who provide further structured input and guidance.

We offer an extensive support framework to all our research students. We support you in becoming an effective researcher through a series of weekly workshops taken in the first year. These cover research-specific subjects including how to access journals and review research publications, how to write and publish academic articles and how to present your work at seminars and conferences. You may also attend workshops on key transferable skills including communication, time management and teamwork.

You join one or more of our well-integrated, active research groups where you will be able to test and discuss your ideas and place your research in a broader context.

We host a seminar series for visiting speakers as well as holding regular seminars within our research groups where research students are encouraged to participate. We also host an annual postgraduate conference where you have the opportunity to both present your work and to gain experience as a conference organiser.

Many of our research students earn money by teaching on our undergraduate programmes. We provide teaching development courses in your first year to give you the skills to teach effectively.

Our world-leading researchers, in key areas such as systems security, programming languages, communications, computational intelligence and memory management, and in interdisciplinary work with biosciences and psychology, earned us an outstanding result in the most recent national research assessment.

Our programmes are taught and supervised by leading researchers who are experts in their fields. The School of Computing at Kent is home to several authors of leading computer science textbooks.

We have strong links with industry including IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.