Get Early Feedback On Your Thesis!

This is an optional extra in your thesis proposal and defense process, but I cannot recommend it enough!

Why Get Early Feedback?

Once you’ve written your document and nearly finished preparing your presentation, I strongly recommend bringing it to each of your committee members individually and getting their feedback. This has several benefits, it gives you nice one-on-one facetime with your committee members and gives you a chance to get to know them a bit better, it helps them to see your story early and therefore sets their expectations for your proposal, and it gives them a chance to give you honest feedback in private. Rather than airing their grievances in public before an onlooking crowd, you can have a back-and-forth discussion in private.

How Should You Prepare?

I suggest taking your proposal presentation and slashing it down to the barest of bones. My proposal presentation was 90 slides, and my “condensed” presentation was about 20. I included a high-level motivation (2 slides), a thesis statement (1 slide), and then for each project that I was going to present (step 5 above), I included a “methods” and “results” slide (2 x 6 papers = 12 slides). Then I included 3-4 slides on my proposed work, and my timeline. I stepped through each of these with my committee members in one-on-one meetings, giving them a speedy-version of what I was going to say in my proper, full presentation.

How Early Should You Do This?

I recommend doing this at least few weeks before your public presentation. One or two of my committee members originally misinterpreted what I was going to do with my proposed work, so this extra time gave me a chance to re-calibrate their expectations in a one-on-one, rather than in front of everybody. I got to rework my thesis statement with the help of other professors, I got early feedback on my proposed study design that I took back and integrated before even presenting the proposal publicly. I also got useful feedback that some results were missing or didn’t make sense, so I knew which completed projects I had to provide more or less information on in order to clarify my story. In the closed-door session of my proposal, I had more than one committee member say that they didn’t have any questions for me because we had already been over everything in a one-on-one. Seriously, I cannot recommend this enough.

For more information on the thesis proposal process, see my other posts on the subject!