Writing Your Proposal Document

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When to Write Your Proposal Document

I suggest starting as early as possible! As soon as you know you are planning to propose soon, start the document. It will take a couple of weeks to finish, maybe more, and your committee should ideally have ample time to read and review it before your proposal. As indicated above, I gave my committee one month to review my document before my proposal. They do not need to officially tell you they approve or anything like that before you do the proposal presentation, but when they approve your thesis proposal and admission to candidacy, they are approving your document. So they need to have time to read it.

How to Write Your Proposal Document

Warning to other departments: Robotics has a different written format requirement! I don’t know about ML, but in this section I will again be speaking only to CS.

Again, the CS Handbook states that:

The PhD. proposal consists of:

1. A proposal document written by the student in which he/she will propose the research work to be undertaken as part of his/her doctoral work and a schedule for completion.

2. An oral defense of the proposal document

Helpful. So there’s no information there on format, length requirements, background to the proposed work, etc. In practice, you are free to interpret this how you will, so long as you clearly write down what you propose to do, why you are proposing to do it, what you expect to see, and you provide a timeline for completion.

For my proposal document, I went ahead and wrote version 0 of my entire thesis (click here for a .zip with stripped down source files to get the template that I used, as well as a completed intro chapter just as an example for your reference). This included all of my relevant prior work, introduction and related works chapters, everything that would be part of my final thesis. The final document was over 200 pages, so it was a herculean undertaking for my thesis committee to read, but I actually do recommend doing it this way, for a couple of reasons.

  1. Your committee sees the entire trajectory of your PhD and gets a better sense for your expertise and what to ask you questions about.

  2. You get free feedback on your thesis before your final defense (one day).

  3. I had at least 1 committee member tell me that they really liked seeing the full document, and that they wished more students did it this way.

For more information on the thesis proposal timeline and other aspects of the thesis proposal process, see my other posts on the subject!