Finding a date for a thesis defence

A team meeting needs four people and an hour. A thesis defence needs four to six, at least one of them external and often in another country, for a window of two to three hours rather than a day. Add a room that holds an audience, and a graduate school whose forms must be filed weeks in advance.

That is why the usual approach fails. Asking “which afternoons are you free in June?” by email produces five answers in five formats, half of them conditional, and none of them comparable. The constraint is too narrow for prose. It needs a closed set of slots that each examiner can tick in under a minute, and one table where the overlap is visible.

The window comes first. Send a poll before you know the outer bounds and you will collect yeses for dates the graduate school cannot accept, which is worse than collecting nothing.

1. 1

   Find the two hard dates

   The submission deadline, and the earliest date the regulations allow a defence after submission: often a notice period of four to eight weeks. Everything you propose sits between them.

2. 2

   Count the reading time backwards

   An external examiner needs the manuscript well before the defence. If they received it on 2 March, nothing earlier than mid-April is a serious proposal, whatever the rules allow.

3. 3

   Decide the length of the session

   Presentation, questions, deliberation and the announcement: two and a half to three hours, not ninety minutes. Propose the full block, or examiners will accept a slot they then have to leave early.

4. 4

   Shortlist six to eight slots

   Spread across two or three weeks, at most two per day. Fewer than five and nothing overlaps; more than eight and the jury answers at random.

Not every member of the jury constrains the date equally. Asking all of them at once treats a professor flying in from abroad like a colleague two corridors away, and the poll ends up optimizing for the wrong person.

So the shortlist is already filtered by the time anyone votes. The poll then runs once, with every member of the jury on it, including the two who shaped the window, because an informal “June works for me” is not an answer on a specific Thursday afternoon.

Hours. A defence is not held on a day, it is held from 14:00 to 17:00, and an examiner free on Thursday morning is not free on Thursday afternoon. Create the poll with the “Time slot” type, which asks for precise hours and lets you put two blocks on the same day. The “Date” type, which proposes whole days, only moves the ambiguity one step further down.

Give each slot its real duration. Two slots a day at most, and label them with the full block you intend to occupy so nobody accepts half of it.

Each examiner answers “I am available”, “I might be available” or “I’m not available”: the green tick, the amber question mark and the red cross in the table. Green marks a row every single voter said yes to; amber marks the next best one after it. Slots stay in calendar order, so you keep your bearings while the answers arrive.

This is where hand-rolled scheduling usually breaks. You write “14:00” meaning your own clock, the examiner in Montreal reads it as theirs, and the mistake surfaces a week before the defence.

• Everyone votes on their own clock. Every reader sees the slots converted into their own time zone (the browser’s by default, or another one picked in the settings menu), with the time zone displayed next to the table. Change the setting and the table redraws immediately.
• Nobody does arithmetic. Hours appear in 12h or 24h format according to each reader’s locale, so an examiner is never asked to subtract six hours in their head before ticking a box.
• No account, nothing to install. A jury member opens the link, ticks, and is done. Creating the poll needs no account either; signing in with Google is optional and only lets you find your polls again from another device.

One courtesy still belongs to you rather than to the software: do not propose a block that lands at 07:00 or 22:00 for the external examiner, even if they could technically attend. The rules for scheduling across time zones apply to a defence like they apply to any other meeting, with less room to be wrong.

The room is a resource, not a participant, and it is the part most candidates leave until last. Two ways round it, and the choice depends on who controls the booking.

If rooms are scarce, ask the person who manages them first, and add them to the poll like any other voter: they tick the slots a suitable room is free. A single extra column, and the shortlist shrinks before the jury sees it. If booking is straightforward, run the jury poll on its own and reserve against the winning slot the same day the table settles: within hours, not next week, because the row that suited everyone on Monday is a row someone else books on Tuesday.

With five or six examiners this is the normal outcome, not the exception. No row is green, and one row is amber: the leading one, ranked by the most yeses, then by the fewest nos. Amber here means “this is the best we have, someone is still missing”.

That row names your problem for you. Look at who is blocking it: one red cross, or an amber question mark from someone who has not checked yet. Then ask that one person directly: a single message about a single slot, which is a far easier thing to answer than an open question about June. A “might be available” often becomes a yes once a date is nearly settled and the alternative is a month’s delay.

If the answer is a firm no, add two or three more slots to the same poll rather than starting again. The link stays the same, the existing votes stay where they are, and the jury only has to answer for the new rows.

• Nothing is highlighted at all? With a single voter, or on a table where no row has a yes, there is nothing to point at yet. Chase the votes before reading the result.
• A member has been replaced? The organizer can remove a participant from the table, so a withdrawn examiner does not keep blocking a row they will not attend.
• Slot agreed? Add to calendar sits on the highlighted rows and offers iCalendar (.ics), Google Calendar and Outlook Web. If you asked the jury for their email when creating the poll, the calendar event can invite the people who said yes.