Aaargh!
An email from the people to whom I applied:A typical research proposal will comment at some length on your thesis research and publications, explain your main results and their significance, and then have a short section towards the end outlining ideas for future research. The future research may or may not be related to your thesis research, but it is better if there is some relation, as it helps to establish the viability of the proposed research. If your proposed research is in an unrelated area, you should have some preliminary results to substantiate the proposal.
The weakness of your current statement is that it ignores your past accomplishments, and the proposed research is fairly speculative.
[snip]
If it helps, think of the new proposal as a "statement of research interests", rather than a "proposal" in the strict sense. The main point is to help convince some committee that you are an accomplished researcher with a budding research program and the ability to work independently, and whose interests are sufficently close to ours that there will be some likely benefit if you come here. It is not important to go into enormous detail when talking about future research, but it would be good if you could point to, say, two or three areas that you would like to work on in the next year or two.
I wouldn't mind so much if they'd asked for a "Personal Statement" or something - to me, the term "Research Proposal" suggests that it should mainly be about the research that you propose to undertake. But apparently not. I've got until, er, tomorrow to submit another one :-(
In other news, hearken ye programmers unto Steve Yegge's latest drunken blog rant. I've been having similar thoughts myself, related to Bad Things that have happened to me with big codebases: it's a large part of why I'm so interested in the APL family*. But I'd like to stick my neck out and say that the way Steve feels about Java is the way I feel about Haskell.
* I note in passing that that page comes up first in a Google search for "APL lesson" - epic win!
The weakness of your current statement is that it ignores your past accomplishments, and the proposed research is fairly speculative.
[snip]
If it helps, think of the new proposal as a "statement of research interests", rather than a "proposal" in the strict sense. The main point is to help convince some committee that you are an accomplished researcher with a budding research program and the ability to work independently, and whose interests are sufficently close to ours that there will be some likely benefit if you come here. It is not important to go into enormous detail when talking about future research, but it would be good if you could point to, say, two or three areas that you would like to work on in the next year or two.
I wouldn't mind so much if they'd asked for a "Personal Statement" or something - to me, the term "Research Proposal" suggests that it should mainly be about the research that you propose to undertake. But apparently not. I've got until, er, tomorrow to submit another one :-(
In other news, hearken ye programmers unto Steve Yegge's latest drunken blog rant. I've been having similar thoughts myself, related to Bad Things that have happened to me with big codebases: it's a large part of why I'm so interested in the APL family*. But I'd like to stick my neck out and say that the way Steve feels about Java is the way I feel about Haskell.
* I note in passing that that page comes up first in a Google search for "APL lesson" - epic win!