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Help to adopt the new tool

Doctoral education services are arranging two one-hour DPSP support clinics to help learn how to use the new tool. The first clinic is arranged remotely online, the second one on site at campus. Dates and times below:

• Support clinic 1: Friday 4 September at 10-11 (only online)
• Support clinic 2: Wednesday 23 September at 14-15 (only on site at campus)

At the clinics, there will be a comprehensive demo presentation of the new DPSP tool and a possibility to ask questions during or after the demo.

You can also ask anything DPSP related at the monthly Sisu and DPSP clinics and receive support for any practical issues. The next Sisu and DPSP clinic is on Friday 11 September at 9:00.

• Sisu and DPSP clinics for doctoral students

What do you need to know about the new digital DPSP tool?

The new DPSP tool supports doctoral students in managing their doctoral studies and doctoral thesis project. The DPSP tool also helps doctoral students to communicate about their research and plans to their supervising professor and thesis advisor(s). The new tool helps to keep DPSP content up to date with easy editing possibilities. Moreover, the method of approval for supervising professors has been streamlined and made easier in Student Success Hub.

According to the degree regulations on doctoral education, each doctoral student should have a DPSP. The guideline is to discuss it with the supervising professor twice a year. Doctoral students employed at Aalto can do this in connection with their MyDialogues discussions.

Transition from old to new

All doctoral students should start using the new DPSP tool from autumn term 2026 onwards, but as long as a previous version approved in the system stays valid content-wise, an old DPSP is enough to have. If you have started your doctoral studies earlier than March 2026 and have uploaded your DPSP into MyStudies according to the old instructions as a pdf compilation, please note the following:

• A DPSP approved by your supervising professor that is found in the Advisory Notes section of MyStudies with an approval note by your supervising professor (or the doctoral education services) will remain there and stay valid, if there are no changes to it.

If you do not have a DPSP approved in the system and located in the Advisory Notes section, you should make a doctoral personal study plan with the new tool.

Check your advisory information in MyStudies

Especially for students that have started their studies several years ago, there may be shortcomings in advisory information, because the details are registered into the system at the start of the studies and it is possible that the thesis advisors’ contact details have changed since. Before you submit your DPSP for approval, please check that the emails of all your supervision team members are correct. You can see them in MyStudies on the Doctoral thesis page or the DPSP Supervision plan.

This is important, because the DPSP supervision plan is sent to your supervision team members to the email addresses saved in the system. If there was no email saved for a thesis advisor in the past, there now appears a system no-reply address, which needs to be changed to the person's real email address.

If you notice missing or erroneous advisory contact information, please ask your doctoral programme’s Doctoral education services to correct it. Note that if you need to change (add/remove) a whole person from your supervision team, not just their contact details, that happens with an official change request form available here: Doctoral student forms (aalto.fi). We are currently developing a modern digital way to handle these information changes in MyStudies, to be released during autumn 2026.

Instructions and additional information

• DPSP instructions for doctoral students (aalto.fi)
• DPSP information for professors (aalto.fi) and Student Success Hub technical instructions (aalto.fi)