Delivering Your Proposal Presentation

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This post assumes you have already prepared your presentation, written your thesis proposal, and ideally gotten feedback on your proposal!

Once you’ve gotten this far, you’re nearly done! By now, you have written your complete document and your committee has had a chance to read it, you’ve prepared your presentation and script (hopefully with feedback from your committee members), and you have scheduled this date when all of your committee members can be present at once! The process of the proposal is determined by your chair (your advisor), but in general you will be introduced, you’ll present your work, you’ll answer public questions from the committee and from the audience, and then the audience will be kicked out and you’ll answer private committee questions. Then you will be kicked out, the committee will deliberate, and you’ll be invited back in to hear the results. Congratulations (hopefully)!

The only major piece of advice I have to offer during your proposal presentation (apart from the usual: practice, be confident, know your stuff, and relax!) is to recognize and respond appropriate if you don’t know something. I’ve written a separate post on this (linked), but it is something you should expect your committee to search for, and you should be prepared to respond professionally (and to generally remain calm, it’s okay to not know something).

After you finish delivering your presentation, all that’s left is to get everything documented!

Getting Your Forms Signed!

Don’t forget to get everything signed so that you officially enter candidacy! Look on the Georgia Tech website for the Request for Admission to Ph.D. Candidacy form, and send it to the right people on DocuSign. You may need to talk to the grad coordinator to figure out who the right people are for the admin signatures, because unfortunately those people are constantly shifting in the CoC.

Thesis Proposal Summary

The thesis proposal is a relatively long process! If you do it the way that I did, you come out with a nearly completed thesis, plenty of useful feedback to carry over into your proposal project, and an admission to candidacy! I think the most stressful part of all of this is (1) the scheduling and (2) finding the right story for your work. Most of us don’t have a clear thesis road planned out when we start, and we have to sort of reverse-engineer a story around the projects that we’ve completed. To recap, the loose timeline I suggest includes:

  1. Pick your committee. Ideally make it your final defense committee, and make it people who will support you and who will provide you with good advice and guidance.

  2. Write your document and your presentation. Give yourself plenty of time for this.

  3. At the same time, schedule with your committee to find a date & time for your proposal.

  4. Send your document to your committee and set up 1-1 meetings for a whirlwind preview of your thesis proposal presentation.

  5. Send out your 1 week notice

  6. Propose and get your forms signed!

Good luck!