Progress Report

[elpf]

So my boss called me in last friday to talk about my thesis proposal. I was really scattered and really didn't have a good idea of how to start so he gave me a little bit of a nudge in the right direction and asked me to come up with something written in about a month (early November). I spent most of this week running around madly so I didn't

Comments

[danger_chick]

I forgot to ask. Is the point of the proposal to prove state-of-the-art and outline your PhD research, or just outline your preliminary research?

[elpf]

The point of the research proposal is to outline what you will prepare for your qualifying exam. In theory this is what you will do our PhD research on but things being as they are, it can change over time. The real point is to prove that you are "ready" to do PhD level research, that you can come up with a research question that is interesting and relevant and can be answered using available techniques (or techniques that you can develop).

[danger_chick]

Wow...that's completely backwards from most of the systems I've been in. My PhD proposal gave an overview of my research, had to prove state-of-the-art, gave a list of my contributions to my field, gave preliminary results, and outlined how I needed to finish. Sure things change, but hopefully not too, too much. I couldn't do the proposal without having done the qualifying exam. The nice thing about the proposal was that by the time I got to my PhD defense I had proved state-of-the-art, so I didn't have to redo that. It was 30 pages of writing in the proposal and probably 10 slides in my proposal, but something like 5 pages and 2 slides in my defense. There's got to be nothing more boring than grinding through related work in a presentation.

[elpf]

I'm assuming its a little different in biology. There is a lot of emphasis on hypothesis driven research so you have to come up with the core question first and propose how you are going to answer it. The thing is that it can change because you don't always get the answer you thought you were going to.

[danger_chick]

The thing is that it can change because you don't always get the answer you thought you were going to.

This part is always true in all research. It's the difficult part about research. As a research engineer, I often ask "Can we design a system that will do X, Y, and Z?" and have to accept that the answer might be "No." In my proposal, I had to be beyond the "I don't know" stage of the research.

[elpf]

That makes sense. I guess what I am saying is that I can ask a yes or no question like, "does this system work like this?" but the answer can be yes or no. It doesn't really matter actually. If the answer is no then I have to come up with a new theory on how it actually works or at least be able to prove it doesn't work that way. I guess the real difference is that it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong because the answer should be interesting either way.

[danger_chick]

it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong because the answer should be interesting either way.

:-D We were joking last night that a favorite curse in our field is "May your radiation engineer be blessed with interesting data."