My Annual PhD Student Assessment - Meeting My Research Studies Panel (RSP)

Ciara Feely’s end-of-year PhD assessment centers on a Research Studies Panel (RSP) that formally checks whether a doctoral student is on track—research-wise and career-wise—while also pushing for concrete next steps. In her setup, the panel totals five people: two supervisors, two additional professors from her Dublin-based research center, and one professor from another university brought in because of specialized involvement in the project’s running-science and computer science/machine learning components. The panel’s job is to track progress against a research plan, ensure publication and thesis planning stay aligned, and confirm professional development milestones are being built toward a viable end-of-PhD career.

The RSP meeting is tied to a structured annual review document: the Research and Professional Development (RPDP) form. Feely fills in sections covering ongoing research updates, a future work plan, and academic/professional activity records. The chair of the RSP—typically a professor who is not her supervisor—then completes the panel’s progress-to-date recommendations and any additional comments. Feely also prepares slides (optional but encouraged) to summarize her program status, internship outcomes, career goals, and the current state of the research—especially the new data pipeline that has opened up multiple potential project directions.

Her research focus is injury prediction using training data, with new data from Strava and additional summarization work tied to training breaks. She reports that after completing an earlier “stage transfer” assessment at about 18 months—an evaluation that determines whether she continues toward a PhD or exits with a master’s—this annual review becomes the routine checkpoint. For the RPDP future plan, she prioritizes narrowing down useful projects that can feed back into predictive modeling, then translating findings into concrete training plan recommendations. She also lists coursework, prior learning, research integrity training, publications, presentations, outreach activities, and an internship, including participation in “I’m Scientists Get Me Out of Here” and service on an equality, diversity, and inclusion committee.

The meeting itself runs as a short presentation followed by a longer Q&A and feedback session. Feely’s supervisors mostly stay quiet, letting the other panel members drive questions. The feedback concentrates on validation and realism: whether user studies are feasible, how recommendations might be tested with real runners, and how injury prediction should be validated given that training breaks are used as a proxy for injury. A major discussion point is the choice of a 14-day break window versus other lengths, plus whether performance differences can be attributed to injury specifically or to broader training behavior (for example, runners with slower marathon times taking more breaks). Panel members also press on publication strategy—targeting sports analytics journals—and on career planning, including whether lecturing-focused training should happen now or later (with the expectation that a postdoc will be the more likely path).

Overall, Feely frames the assessment as productive rather than punitive: the panel’s questions push her toward tighter validation plans and clearer publication and career targets, while she remains motivated to finish the training-break summarization work so she can move on to the next set of analyses.