Preparing Your Thesis Proposal Presentation

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Your oral defense (your thesis proposal presentation) is where you get to convince your committee (and a wider, public audience) that you deserve a PhD. You need to show that you’ve done cool work, you’re a smart and capable researcher, and you have thought of an interesting final project that will bring home a strong body of work. No pressure!

In general, a thesis proposal presentation will look something like this:

  1. Introduction

  2. Problem setup/motivation

  3. Related work (for the entire thesis)

  4. Thesis Statement

  5. Completed Projects (tie back to thesis statement regularly)

  6. Interesting open question (setup for proposed work)

  7. Proposed work (final project design and expected findings)

  8. Timeline

Introduction & Motivation

As stated above, your introduction should set the stage for your problem. You don’t need to dive right into the technical details of your work— start by getting your audience to pay attention. You should open with a brief introduction of yourself, and then get into the motivation for why your work is important or interesting. What problem out in the world are you interested in? What gap in the literature needs to be addressed? What unique combination of fields or ideas have you happened upon? Find your interesting hook and motivation, and use that to drive your presentation. Ideally this will somehow tie into everything you have done, so you can hark back to it throughout your presentation.

Related Work

The related work section is tricky, because many times your thesis projects can draw from different areas and have drastically different bodies of related work. My advice is to pick the few papers or projects that will be directly referenced in this talk, and possibly some work from your committee members as well (assuming they work in your area, which they probably should). I put ~30 papers up on screen for my related-works slide, broken up into 4 sections (1 for each “section” of my talk). This included my papers, in bold, so that my committee/audience knew that I had made contributions to each section. Of these 30 papers, I only went into detail on the 3 or 4 that were most directly related to my talk, then moved on.

Thesis Statement

Committees will vary on how seriously they take your thesis statement, but you should take the time to get it right either way! Your thesis statement does not need to be a single sentence, so don’t stress finding the silver-bullet sentence that perfectly summarizes your work. But do make an effort to present a testable hypothesis (or a couple) as your thesis statement, and have it be something that you do test in your research. If you were to show your thesis statement slide in a vacuum to an audience in your area, they should have a good sense for what to expect (and hopefully, be interested in it!). I’ve written a whole separate post on finding my thesis statement and advice for finding yours, if you’re interested!

The Work You’ve Done

This bit is the easiest! You’ve already completed several projects and, ideally, given talks at conferences or seminars on your work. Take the talks that you have already done, and staple them together! Now, as mentioned previously, you may need to view your projects in a new light in order to get them to fit into one cohesive thesis, so take care to actually rehearse the presentation and ensure that it makes sense. But overall, this part of the talk is largely pre-made, all you need to do is make tweaks and fixes to get everything to flow nicely.

The Work You Will Do

The last couple of sections of your talk should set up and then describe your actual proposed work. What gap has been left in the papers that you just talked about? What interesting project would unify the various strands of work you’ve presented or completed? How are you going to complete that project, or answer that question? You should present this as one of your completed projects, but in future tense. So talk about the methods that you will employ, the data analysis you will do, the results you expect to find, and the implications of those results for the field at large.

Timeline

The timeline is a required part of your thesis proposal at Georgia Tech, so don’t forget it! In my proposal and in most that I’ve seen, it’s one simple slide with a Gantt chart or spreadsheet on it, where you will essentially say how long you expect everything to take. You might say something like “January-February: Design model, March: Run study, April: Analyze results, May: Write & Defend.” It honestly doesn’t need to be much more in-depth than that.

Parting Words

Once you have your presentation, I cannot emphasize enough how much I believe you should run it by your committee early. Please do this, it is so helpful. Once everything is set to go, all that you have left to do is propose!