School qualifying exams, thesis proposal and thesis defense the trickiest is the thesis proposal. No advisor should ever let her student stand for a defense unless the advisor is convinced the student will pass. Thesis proposals, on the other hand, rarely pass without an objection requiring a modification to the proposal. Students tend to invert the importance of the proposal and the defense: they see the proposal as the formality and the defense as the challenge. When faculty sign off on a proposal, we are giving up some of our rights to object later on. We are agreeing that if a student does x, y and z, as outlined in the proposal, then we shall grant a ph.d.

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All good thesis proposals contain two ingredients: a clearly defined thesis, and a specific plan for demonstrating that thesis. Everything else in the proposal related work, prior work, challenges exists to support the plausibility of the thesis and the plan. Done properly, a good proposal grants immunity against remarks like i thought you said you were going to do x , i'd like you to also do y before i sign off. A thesis proposal is an opportunity for students to obtain protection and assurance.

The thesis proposal document and the proposal presentation should place the thesis statement toward the front, so that while reading and listening, the committee can determine whether the thesis is defensible, and whether the proposed research, if successful, would constitute a valid defense of the thesis. When a student doesn't provide an explicit thesis statement, each committee member will infer a thesis statement that aligns with his or her prejudices, and then, some day, the student will have to defend six theses instead of one. My advice is to make the statement as short as possible: how much fat can you trim from it before it's too general too defend with your work? the thesis statement answers the question, what did humanity learn as a consequence of this dissertation? it's useful to carefully define each term in a thesis statement after it's given, just to make sure the student and the committee are in total agreement about what the thesis means. My thesis statement was, environment analysis of higher order languages is novel, feasible and useful.

This thesis segmented my dissertation into four parts: related work, theory, experimentation and application. my thesis statement doesn't say anything about what technical mechanisms i used to prove environment analysis feasible. I developed abstract frame strings, abstract counting and abstract garbage collection to support my thesis. Of course, even if i took out that claim, my committee would still ask the questions, so what? putting it in my thesis forced me to explicitly defend against that question.

Utility is subjective, which meant i had to find an application of environment analysis for each of my committee members. Ultimately, i detailed 16 distinct applications of environment analysis, so that if a committee member wanted to argue it wasn't useful, they had to argue that all sixteen applications were useless. If a student words the plan right and gets it approved, her defense will go smoothly. If she leaves the plan vague or inspecific, she leaves herself vulnerable to the committee's interpretation of her plan. A good plan contains a fictional schedule a list of remaining milestones and anticipated dates of completion. Relative spacing between dates signals the estimated size of the challenge for each milestone. If the plan contains a claim to be validated, it needs to explain how the student will conduct validation of that claim.

What if a claim ends up being false? what if it turns out to be infeasible in time or in cost to perform the evaluation of one of the claims? a good plan is not a sequence, but a tree. The leaves of the tree form a spectrum from best possible outcome, give me a ph.d. A good plan also provides the criteria for recognizing the completion of a milestone, e.g.