The deliverable at P4 is “complete draft thesis”, and many of you asked their supervisor: “what does that mean?”. The answer to this is very subjective, and thus varies from supervisors to supervisors, so discuss this with your supervisors. The main point is that the committee needs to assess whether what has been done so far (and submitted) is at least a 6.0, if this is so then a GO is given. You then have 1 month to improve your work/thesis for the P5, where a mark is given.

Some guidelines:

• the draft thesis should contain all the main results, ie there shouldn’t be essential work left
• there should be conclusions drawn based on the work done
• if not all the sentences are perfect it’s fine, but if your text is filled with typos and reading it is difficult then it’ll be more complex for the committee too assess whether the work done deserves a 6
• a tip: figures/tables/workflows can be drawn by hand on paper, and simply scanned. Between P4 and P5 you’ll have time to make nice figures.
• acknowledgements, abstract, title page, future work, tables of figures, etc. can be left for after P4

Good luck, Hugo