The Thesis Proposal Process at Georgia Tech
I recently completed my thesis proposal at Georgia Tech, and the process included several questions that I did not feel were adequately documented anywhere. With this post, I’m hoping to provide a straightforward timeline/guide for the thesis proposal process at Tech for future students. Admittedly, this post ended up much longer than I expected it to be, so maybe treat it more as a reference material and come back to each section as you get to that stage.
Who is this for?
Ideally this would be useful for any PhD student at Georgia Tech, but I am in the Computer Science PhD in the school of Interactive Computing. I believe the process is slightly different for different departments/PhDs, and I will make a note where I know things are different. I don’t know the full process for Machine Learning or Robotics PhDs, but the overall guidelines here should apply.
The Core Timeline
Below is a rough timeline of what your proposal process will look like. Some steps (like 2-5) can be jumbled in order, and more details on all of these steps are below. I would suggest allowing for ~4-5 months for this process. Scheduling professors can be very difficult and slow.
Identify your committee and reach out to ask them to join you in this lengthy process.
Schedule your proposal (see below)
Write your proposal document and send it to your committee for approval
Announce your proposal to the school (must be 1 week before the actual proposal, see below)
I’ve written separate posts for each step of the process, all linked above. For more information about each step and for a LaTeX template with some of my thesis proposal, refer to those posts to learn more. Below, I’ll briefly cover scheduling, because it isn’t interesting enough for its own post.
Scheduling Your Proposal
I’ll be honest, this is just very difficult and I don’t have a lot of great advice for you here. I used whenisgood to find good times, first sending it to my advisor and getting his availability, then removing times that he couldn’t be there and sending the modified version to my committee members. I would recommend confining your times to 9-6 PM, and provide weeks of available days. Literally weeks. Professors have negative time, and finding a slot where 5 of them are free for 2 hours can be maddening. More than anything else, this is why you need to start so early. So do not put it off.
Don’t forget, once you have your date, you must send out an announcement to the school one week before you propose. This is as simple as finding one of the dozens of existing announcements in your inbox, copying the format, swapping in your information, and sending it onto the PhD Program Coordinator. Include a title, date, time, room number or virtual room link, and an abstract for your talk.