Propose your PhD

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In the past, PhD proposals in our department have come rather late in the PhD process; often they were balanced more toward reporting extensive thesis work so far than toward actually proposing work to be done. It may be useful to model PhD proposals that truly propose work after grant proposals. This page collects references, guidelines, and examples for crafting a PhD proposal document early on in the thesis work. David's vision for the proposal process is for the student's committee to be involved in three evaluations of the research:

  1. Review the proposal document before most of the work it proposes has begun; due by the end of third academic year
  2. Review the student's progress at a formal CS department-style "proposal" presentation; due by the end of fourth academic year
  3. Sign off on the student's research at the public thesis defense presentation; due by the end of fifth academic year

The goal for timing of these events would be one year between each pair.

NIH-Style PhD Proposals

There are five sections in the NIH grant proposal format relevant to PhD propsals:

  1. Vision / Introduction / Summary
    • A (strictly) one-page summary of the context of your work, the "hole in the web of knowledge" that you perceive in this area, and what you plan to do to fill it. The page limit seems short but you only need enough background to give a general picture; arguments to establish novelty and significance go in the Significance section, accompanied with any more specific background required to make those arguments.
  2. Contributions
    • An approximately one-page summary of the specific contributions you intend to make; in other words, deliverables. Each one needs only a short blurb to describe it, but it should include a sketch of how you intend to "prove" your contribution.
  3. Significance
    • A longer section explaining the significance and novelty of your proposed work, along with any further background you need to provide in order to argue these points. You need not refer to individual contributions, though that might be useful. This section should be chock-full of references to back up your arguments. The level of detail in the descriptions of your proposed work in this section should be between the Contributions section (where everything's high-level and you only have a page to fit it all in) and the Research Design section (where you get into the specifics of each proposed experiment); the emphasis is on impact and context rather than mechanics.
  4. Preliminary Work
    • For a PhD proposal, this may include published work, informal feasibility studies for your various contributions, established relationships with collaborators, or unpublished (and perhaps even unpublishable) work demonstrating your familiarity with the field. You should try to cover everything that's relevant at all to your ability to complete the proposed research.
  5. Research Design
    • Talk about the specific experiments you will perform and arrange them into a timeline. This will likely be a quite long section.
  6. References

The Contributions section should be about one page long, and in total the Contributions, Significance, Preliminary Work, and Research Plan sections should total no more than ten pages---the NIH is strict about this, and David intends to be, too. You may take as much space as you need for references.

NIH-Style Proposal Revisions

Unless you get your proposal perfect the first time around, feedback from your committee is likely to require changes at a number of levels. You are expected to produce a revised proposal based on this feedback. It should differ from your initial proposal as follows:

  1. It will have an additional one-page introduction outlining the major criticisms together with how and where you addressed them in the revised proposal. Typically, this introduction should not argue against a critique, but rather state how it is addressed in the revision. Sometimes that may mean that a description in the revision is clarified. Sometimes it means that a piece of the proposal is removed. Sometimes it means that significant new work must be added to the proposal. Some interaction with your committee is likely to help in crafting this introduction.
  2. The other proposal sections will be revised as outlined in the introduction.
  3. Some mechanism for distinguishing changes (text color, change bars, etc.) must be used to show where any substantive changes were made.

Note that the revised proposal is still subject to the 10-page limit (plus the single introduction page).

NIH has a very similar revision process. Their guides to writing proposals describe this, if you would like further reading. This revision process is also very similar to the revision process at many journals. Example of journal-paper response letters from your colleagues may be enlightening.

Evaluation Rubric

David's rubric for this proposal format follows:

  1. Vision
    • concise
    • convincing
  2. Contributions
    • contributions clear
    • evaluations of contributions clear
  3. Significance
    • well established
    • assertions cited
    • related well to the literature
  4. Research Plan
    • clear
    • concise
    • appropriate scale
    • no wasted effort
    • risks identified and sized
    • contingencies

LaTeX Templates

You can copy the files nih.cls and prop.tex in /pro/graphics/proposals/nih/bisti to serve as templates for your proposal, but please don't modify the originals.

Examples

Grant Proposals

Since this brave new world of authentic PhD research proposals is supposed to be modeled after the grant proposal and review process, check out Write a grant proposal for more information and examples of how real grant proposals are constructed.

Older PhD Proposal Examples

Most of these example PhD "proposals" from previous years are proposals in the CS department sense: they report on a large body of completed work and propose the completion of the dissertation research. Some are from biomed, where the format is more similar to David's.

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