Choosing Your Thesis Committee
Your committee ultimately decides whether or not you pass your proposal and your defense, so you want to choose them carefully!
The rules from the CS Handbook state that:
“Your advisor is the chair… Your committee should be formed of at least five people. At least one faculty member must be from outside CoC (from another unit at Tech or an outsider, and should have a Ph.D.), but the majority must have some CoC faculty appointment.”
Note: You only need to have three people on your committee at the time of your proposal, but it is recommended that you have all five members at that time.
So you only need 3 members, and at least 2 must be from the College of Computing (CoC) and 1 outside of the CoC for your proposal. However, it is strongly recommended to have your entire committee together (so that is 5 members with at least 3 from the CoC).
I recommend working with your advisor and other students in your lab to identify good CoC faculty for your committee— they will know which professors align best with your research direction, which are the most helpful on committees, and what those professors look for in thesis proposals or defenses. All of this is stuff you should know about your committee before you propose!
Choosing an External Committee Member
Fortunately, choosing an external committee member is quite straightforward. When I talked to the graduate coordinator for my proposal, I was told that the only requirement was that my advisor agree to my external committee member!
The external committee member can be a great networking opportunity, and many people suggest reaching out to other big-name or rising-star professors in your field from other universities or institutions. I personally went with an advisor from another research org that I knew I worked very well with, and who I wanted on my committee for his useful feedback and direction.
Reaching Out to Your Committee
This can be slightly scary and intimidating, but it is part of a professor’s job to be on thesis committees, and I am given to believe that many of them do enjoy it to some extent. Be respectful and concise and provide as much useful information as possible, and send weekly reminders if you don’t hear back! My thesis request emails looked something like:
Subject: Thesis Committee Invitation/Request
Dear Professor <Name>,
I am in the process of writing and preparing my thesis proposal on interactivity and explainability in human-centric machine learning, and I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to have you on my thesis committee.
My thesis will encompass a selection of works that have already been published on interactivity and explainability for machine learning (including X, Y, and Z), works that are currently under review for personalization and human perceptions of explainability, and a proposed final project on personalization and explainability in the context of a user study.
I plan to get a written thesis proposal to my committee in early March, and to do the formal proposal presentation in mid-April.
Please let me know if you are willing to serve as a committee member for my thesis proposal!
Thank you,
And these were sent sometime in mid-January. So, about 2 months before I planned to finish my written proposal document and about 3 months before I planned to do my proposal. For more info on the overall timeline and other details of the proposal, check out my other posts on the subject!