We welcome students who would like Klaus Wehrle to act as the (second) examiner of their Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis. To create an efficient and effective procedure for deciding whether we can assess your thesis, please carefully read the following information and follow the instructions on documents to provide and whom to contact. You will receive an answer within due time if you follow the procedure, but please note that we reserve the right to not answer or to decline your request if you do not provide the necessary information during the process. The decision if Klaus Wehrle can take over the duty as second examiner mainly depends on our available resources and most importantly on our ability to assess your topic. Please note that we may require up to four weeks for grading your thesis after we have received the necessary documents from your first examiner (who may need a similar amount of time after you have handed in your thesis). Please consider this for your time schedule, especially if you require that your grading is finished by a certain deadline for enrollment into a subsequent study programme or the like.

Please direct all your inquiries regarding first/second examination if you are not directly advised by COMSYS staff to our functional mail address thesis@comsys.rwth-aachen.de. Please note that mails directed to other staff members (including Klaus Wehrle and our office staff) will be ignored. Normally, you should receive a reply from us within a few work days. In exceptional cases we might need up to two weeks. If you wait longer than two weeks for a reply or receive an e-mail error, please contact René Glebke as the coordinator of Klaus Wehrle’s examiner duties directly.

Please note that we have different procedures based on the type of examiner duty you wish Klaus Wehrle to perform.

If you already have a first examiner from computer science and are seeking for Klaus Wehrle to second-examine your thesis simply reach out to us via an e-mail to thesis@comsys.rwth-aachen.de and include the following information:

• Your full name, e-mail address and matriculation number
• Your study programme
• The name of your first examiner (professor / private docent)
• The name and contact details (at least e-mail) of the person(s) advising you
• The proposed title of your thesis
• An abstract of your thesis topic of 0.5 - 1 pages in length excluding references, written in German or English. Please be specific enough to allow us to verify that we are able to assess the proposed topic. As COMSYS values thorough evaluations in theses, be sure to also include some initial ideas on how to assess the outcome of your thesis against e.g., state-of-the-art approaches.
• Your planned date for submitting your thesis (a rough estimation suffices)

If you are enrolled at RWTH and are interested in writing a thesis advertised by industry or a non-computer science institute, please follow these steps:

• Prepare an abstract of your work as outlined under the “second examiner” procedure above, but do not send it to us yet. Instead…
• Ask your advisor(s) to contact us via thesis@comsys.rwth-aachen.de to schedule a first (likely virtual) meeting to discuss the topic based on your abstract, as well as organizational details. Having a thesis such as yours first-examined by us means certain responsibilities from both sides we would like to discuss first, and you will likely not be involved in that process. For example, since you will be graded along the regulations of RWTH computer science, we would like to discuss our views and expectations regarding the thesis (and the process) with your advisors first, to see if our views can be aligned and everything will run smoothly for you.
• After these initial parameters have been set, there will be one or two additional meetings (again likely virtual) with you, your advisors and us, in which we will finalize the details of the examination duty.
• Note: For all theses, including those from industry, you need to hold your initial and final talks (see Thesis Process) in front of a public audience within our regular Thesis Talk slots. Please tell your advisors that we also require you to provide the entirety of your work artifacts (thesis document and any code/… generated during the thesis process) to us. We usually do not accept theses that are not to be publicly announced and presented, or from which we do not receive these artifacts, unless the respective company has made a special arrangement with us.

If your case does not fit into any of the above categories, please prepare an abstract of your work as outlined under the “second examiner” procedure above, and contact us via thesis@comsys.rwth-aachen.de. We will try to determine if Klaus Wehrle can still serve as your examiner.

Note: If you are enrolled in a study programme that is not one of the study fields directly offered by the Department of Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University (Bachelor, Master), please contact your examination board (Prüfungsausschuss) first to make sure a computer science professor from RWTH is allowed to grade your thesis.