Proposal Writing Notes

Following are some thoughts on what should go into a PhD research proposal in the outline I would expect one to follow. Before you go further, you should have a mental picture of what you’re building. First, you should have seen an instance of the thing you propose to construct:

• I have read a dissertation and attended a dissertation defense.
• I have read a dissertation proposal and attended a proposal defense.

The latter can be a bit tricky as proposal defenses have traditionally been closed exams. More recently they have been made open, but if you can’t attend one then don’t worry too much about it. Second, you should understand the process and outcomes of a dissertation:

• I know what an apprentice is
• I know what an apprentice piece is

The roles of student and advisor are very much the roles of apprentice and master from the days of learning a craft or trade. You will learn to do research by working with your advisor. Your dissertation is an apprentice piece. In the same way that an apprentice piece is a demonstration and not necessarily a practical artifact, your dissertation is a demonstration that you know how to do and present research. The practical artifacts are those papers and research proposals that result.

Introduction:

• Hypothesis or Research Statement
  • Tight, focused definition of what you will do
  • May appear repeatedly in the document, but most always be the same
  • Hypothesis works for experimental dissertations
  • Research statement works for formal or tool oriented disserations
• Motivation
  • Why are you doing this work?
  • What problem are you attempting to solve?
  • Why is the problem important?
  • What real-world issue is motivating your work?
• Contribution
  • What will you do that is unique?
  • What new capabilities or knowledge will result?
  • What is the intellectual contribution to the literature?
• Overview the entire proposal
  • Exactly what it says - overview the entire proposal.
  • The reviewer should learn about the complete proposal at a 10,000 foot level.
  • Many reviewers will make their decision reading the introduction and use the remainder of the document to confirm their decision.

Writing Advice

• The introduction should grab the reader and compel them to continue
• Do not write an introduction that says “In Chapter 1 we…, In Chapter 2 we…,”
• Establish that this is a worthy problem and you know how to solve it
• Do not write a wishy-washy hypothesis or research statement

Related Work:

• Background work
  • Prerequisite knowledge for reading the dissertation
  • Where the research comes from
  • Supporting information
• Related work
  • Work simliar to yours worth comparing with
  • Work that supports your work or puts it in contex

Writing Advice

• Convince the committee you know the literature
• Do not be negative about other people’s work. They are your future colleagues
• If you write this well, you can simply cut-and-paste into your dissertation

Methodology:

• Building the solution
  • Coding up a widget
  • Writing up a mathematical theory
  • Running verification tools
  • Some combination of the two is most likely
• Describing the solution
  • What does it look like intellectually?
  • How is it constructed?
  • Compare with related efforts
• Evaluation of the solution
  • How will you know when you are done? Know precisely what “done” means.
  • How will you know whether “it” worked? Identify what correct means working from your hypothesis or research statement.
  • Analytic evaluation involves mathematical formalism and proof
  • Experimental evaluation involves performing experiments and analyzing results
  • Most dissertations that I advise involve both analytic and experimental evaluation, but most lean towards experimental evaluation

Writing Advice

• Understand how research is performed in your discipline. This is your standard.
• Automate verification activities wherever possible.
• Say “I developed…” or “We developed…” and never hide from your own work
• What kind of evaluation you do depends almost entirely on your hypothesis or research statement. Hypotheses are almost always supported experimentally while mathematical objectives are supported analytically.
• Publishing papers is astonishingly easier when you have solid analytical or experimental results. I will review 30 papers in a given year and 25 of them will have horrible or non-existent evaluation sections. The other 5 get published.

Research Plan:

• Work so far
  • Your work, not related work
  • Preliminary results
  • Show that it is possible to construct the thing, mathematically or experimentally, that you aim to construct
• Work you must do to finish
  • Research and publication, not dissertation writing
  • Provide a schedule for your work
  • Identify where you plan to publish

Writing Advice

• This is your contract with your committee
• Remember that no war is won without a plan, but no war goes according to plan
• Plan on publishing before your defense, not after. It’s easy for your advisor to defend a dissertation with peer-reviewed publications from it

Conclusions and Future Work:

• Summarize the entire proposal in your conclusion
  • Conclusions are almost a shorter introduction
  • State your goal
  • State how you intend to achieve it
  • State how you intend to evaluate it
• Identify again what remains to be done
  • What you have done thus far
  • What you have left to do
• Outline your research plan
  • For the dissertation (again)
  • For the longer term

My Questions:

I can almost assure you that I will ask these questions. You might as well answer (or avoid) them before I do:

• Which of these 5 dissertations do you intend to write? Most students propose too much. Work with your advisor to select an appropriate scope for your work
• What is your contribution? What did you write? What did you do? Most students are unwilling to say what exactly they did. Make sure I know what your contribution is.
• How will you know when you are done? Agree on what constitutes the end of your dissertation. Treat the proposal like a contract.
• Where will you publish this work? Work is not done until published. Don’t make the mistake of not publishing your dissertation work.