Preparing Your Thesis Proposal Presentation

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!

Responding When You Don't Know Something!

Acknowledge When You Don’t Know Something

A big part of being a good researcher is recognizing when you don’t know the answer to something, and a likewise a big part of your PhD milestones (quals, proposal, and defense) will involve testing this. I’ve spoken with several professors and other students about this, and it is considered a universally important subject to these PhD milestones— your committee will test whether or not you know what you don’t know, and have the strength to admit that.

Areas You May Be Pressed

Your committee will likely try to back you into a corner where you don’t know the answer to something, usually in an area that you should be the right person to answer the question. Whether it is some obscure model or technique you haven’t heard of, some hypothetical about how your work would apply to new datasets or domains, or questions about fundamentals in math that you haven’t brushed up on, your committee will likely search for (and find) things that you don’t know. And they will know that you don’t know. If there is one thing professors are good at, it’s sniffing out bull-shitting students.

Responding If You Don’t Know Something

It is okay to not know everything and the right thing to do is to admit and acknowledge it. You can (and maybe should) speculate about what might happen if your model were applied to a new dataset, but you should make it clear that this is speculation and you would need to do the actual research to know for sure. If you really haven’t heard of something you feel like they expect you to know, you can respectfully apologize for not having heard of it, and ask for more information on where you can learn about it. If you are being asked to compare your work to something else you haven’t heard of or read, offer to brush up on the other papers and then follow-up offline. Or again, speculate on how the related work might compare, based on what you know about how it works vs. how your technique works. But if you haven’t run the experiments, do not make claims that you cannot support with evidence.

Summary

Most committees try to get students to admit that they don’t know something. Failure to do so will reflect poorly on you. You shouldn’t proactively try to not know something, or fail to prepare adequately because you can just be honest and say you don’t know. But at the same time, don’t back down or be afraid if you don’t know the answer immediately. Your committee expects this, and they want to make sure that you know it and can handle it professionally. Be confident, be factual and correct, and you’ll do great!

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!

Delivering Your Proposal Presentation

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!