Erin Thesis Proposal

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1. What is the problem you intend to address? If you can’t explain your research problem, clearly and concisely, you probably don’t understand it.
2. Why is the problem interesting and challenging? Remember, much of your audience will be from outside your domain. They need to understand not just what your problem is, but why it’s an appropriate research topic at the masters or doctoral level.
3. In what sense are previous solutions to the problem inadequate? In rare cases, you’re attacking a completely new problem that no one has ever attempted to address. However, it’s much more common to be making an incremental improvement on previously-existing work. You need to understand what this work is, and to be able to explain it. If you don’t understand how your work fits in with previous work, you’re likely to waste time reinventing the wheel. Remember, a week in the laboratory can often save an afternoon in the library.
4. What is your proposed approach to addressing the problem? At the proposal stage, it’s not enough to have an understanding of the problem; you also need to know how you intend to solve it. This doesn’t mean you need to know the solution yet (that’s what your research is for), but you do need to have some idea of what you’re actually going to do. You do not need a project management chart with time lines and milestones in your presentation. Rather, you need to explain the key steps that will get you from your current level of knowledge to the conclusion of your research.
5. How will you evaluate your work? This is related to question 3, above. The criteria by which you judged previous solutions unsatisfactory are exactly the criteria you should be using to evaluate the success of your own work.

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