PhD Milestones

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....

This is an optional extra in your thesis proposal and defense process, but I cannot recommend it enough! Why Get Early Feedback? Once you’ve written your document and nearly finished preparing your presentation, I strongly recommend bringing it to each of your committee members individually and getting their feedback. This has several benefits, it gives you nice one-on-one facetime with your committee members and gives you a chance to get to know them a bit better, it helps them to see your story early and therefore sets their expectations for your proposal, and it gives them a chance to give you honest feedback in private....

This post assumes you have already prepared your presentation, written your thesis proposal, and ideally gotten feedback on your proposal! Once you’ve gotten this far, you’re nearly done! By now, you have written your complete document and your committee has had a chance to read it, you’ve prepared your presentation and script (hopefully with feedback from your committee members), and you have scheduled this date when all of your committee members can be present at once!...