Progress Report

Oct 13, 2006 13:21

So my boss called me in last friday to talk about my thesis proposal. I was really scattered and really didn't have a good idea of how to start so he gave me a little bit of a nudge in the right direction and asked me to come up with something written in about a month (early November). I spent most of this week running around madly so I didn't ( Read more... )

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danger_chick October 13 2006, 23:18:06 UTC
I forgot to ask. Is the point of the proposal to prove state-of-the-art and outline your PhD research, or just outline your preliminary research?

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elpf October 17 2006, 21:06:21 UTC
The point of the research proposal is to outline what you will prepare for your qualifying exam. In theory this is what you will do our PhD research on but things being as they are, it can change over time. The real point is to prove that you are "ready" to do PhD level research, that you can come up with a research question that is interesting and relevant and can be answered using available techniques (or techniques that you can develop).

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danger_chick October 19 2006, 09:44:35 UTC
Wow...that's completely backwards from most of the systems I've been in. My PhD proposal gave an overview of my research, had to prove state-of-the-art, gave a list of my contributions to my field, gave preliminary results, and outlined how I needed to finish. Sure things change, but hopefully not too, too much. I couldn't do the proposal without having done the qualifying exam. The nice thing about the proposal was that by the time I got to my PhD defense I had proved state-of-the-art, so I didn't have to redo that. It was 30 pages of writing in the proposal and probably 10 slides in my proposal, but something like 5 pages and 2 slides in my defense. There's got to be nothing more boring than grinding through related work in a presentation.

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elpf October 19 2006, 15:27:38 UTC
I'm assuming its a little different in biology. There is a lot of emphasis on hypothesis driven research so you have to come up with the core question first and propose how you are going to answer it. The thing is that it can change because you don't always get the answer you thought you were going to.

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heatmhub October 14 2006, 16:34:23 UTC
Hooray! : )

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