Ph.D or Masters Proposal Format
1.
Cover Page: Complete the proposal submission form,
which is available at http://www.latech.edu/documents/gsform10.pdf.
2.
Title Page: This provides the your
committee and other reviewers of your proposal with important information that
he/she can reference quickly. Include:
a. Your institutional affiliation (
b. The title of your proposal. This should be descriptive of your
project. Do not use a
title like, “Proposal for Graduate Work.”
c. Your name.
d. The date of transmittal.
e. The
statement: “Thesis proposal for the Masters in Biomedical Engineering at
Louisiana Tech University,” or “Dissertation proposal for the Ph.D. in
Biomedical Engineering at Louisiana Tech University.”
3.
Tentative Title: This
title will be the same as on your title page.
4.
Project summary: This must be no longer than ½ page in length. Include 1) The major
problem you intend to address and why it is important, 2) The specific aspect
of the problem that you will address, 3) A statement of how this problem will
be addressed, 4) The expected benefits of the project. The summary should be 1 to 2 paragraphs
long. It will probably be the first part
of the proposal that the reviewer reads.
Since it can slant the reviewer’s attitude toward your entire proposal,
it is highly important that your summary be straightforward and clear.
5.
Objectives: This
section should be approximately ½ page. It tells the reader what you intend to do in
your work. It is a good idea to put the
objectives into a context, so you should use the basic outline below.
a) Identify
the clinical problem that you are addressing.
This will be a general problem (e.g. heart disease, cancer, arthritis,
bone breakage, tuberculosis, aortic valve stenosis,
etc.).
b) Identify
the specific aspect of that problem that you intend to address. For example, if you are working on a sensor
for detecting glaucoma, you should stat that you are addressing the problem of
detection.
c) Give
some information to indicate that a given aspect of the disease has not yet
been satisfactorily addressed.
d) State
any recent advancements that will enable your work to
succeed. (e.g.
a new method for sensing pressure, or previous work by others in your
laboratory).
e) State
the specific goals that you intend to accomplish with an indication of how they
will be accomplished. If this is a
design proposal, state the design criteria that your final work will
fulfill. If it is hypothesis-based
research, state the specific hypothesis that you intend to test and describe in
general terms the specific experiements you will
carry out to test the hypothesis.
6.
Related Research: This section provides the reader
with the background of your research and its motivation. It has five underlying
purposes: 1) To give the reviewer enough information that he/she can understand
what will follow, 2)
To establish in detail the importance of the problem, 3) To show that there is
a need to solve the problem, 4) To
demonstrate that the problem has not yet been solved, and 5) To show that the direction you propose is
the next logical step in the evolution of the solution. Achievement of these five goals will demonstrate
a high likelihood that the project will be successful and demonstrate that you
are knowledgeable about the subject. Do
not add irrelevant information in this section.
Rather you show your understanding through a cohesive argument that
addresses the primary purposes. When
this is done, the reviewer will be convinced of your competency. Think carefully about what information is and
is not needed. If you are designing a
new total knee replacement, for example, it is appropriate to list several
reasons why people need knee replacements and give figures as to the prevalence
of each one. If your project addresses a
specific disease that requires a specific type of replacement, you will need to
explain what is different about that disease and what the problems are. However, it is not appropriate to give a complete description of the pathological
processes involved in each knee-degenerating disease. Under the major heading of Related Research
you should use the following sub-headings:
a.
Background: Tell the reader what he/she needs to know
to understand the rest of the proposal.
b.
Analysis of Need: Provide a logical argument that
states the problem, justifies that it is a problem, and states why the research
you propose is needed. If your proposal
relates to a design, think about what the design criteria are, and justify each
one in this section. If it is a research
proposal, review the progress that other researchers have made toward answering
the specific research question you are trying to answer. Also discuss any papers that have contributed
to raising the question you are attempting to answer.
c.
Current Status: Establish how other people have
approached this problem, and state why they do not address the specific problem
you have raised.
For example, in designing the glaucoma test, you should describe any
competing tests that are available and state why they do not solve the problems
that you are addressing.
7.
Research Need: Give a statement of the problem you
intend to solve. This statement should
follow logically from the “Related Research” section. For design proposals, re-state your design
criteria along with a brief statement as to why they are selected as design
criteria.
It is critical that the
subsections of the above sections be supported by current literature
references. References from the world wide web, though often useful, are not sufficient to
show that you have made a thorough study of the literature. Refereed journal articles, rather than world wide web pages, must make up the bulk of your
references for your argument to be convincing.
8. Preliminary Results: If you
have already obtained some results since you started working on this problem,
provide them here. This section will, to
some extent, support the major purposes of the Background and Significance
section, however, its major purposes are to show 1) That the project you
propose has a strong likelihood of success, based on some preliminary
experiments that you have done (feasibility), 2) That you have some expertise
in the field based on in-lab experiments you have performed or unpublished results from
others in your laboratory.
9. Research Plan: This section is designed to
convince the reader that you have an idea as to how to proceed and that your
plan is organized and feasibile. Subheadings of this section will be:
a.
Detailed design: Give a detailed description for the
experimental design. Provide a figure
that shows the essential parts of the experimental apparatus. Describe this figure in the text. The describe the
protocols to be used to answer the specific research questions you have set
forth earlier.
b.
Data Analysis: How will you evaluate the experimental
data? This section will include any
statistical tests you will need to make and a statement of how theory and
experiment will be compared.
c.
Organizational Structure and Schedule: State
how the project will be divided up among the design team. If you need expertise in a particular area
(e.g., mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, etc.) state this and
give the role of the expert in that area.
Give a time table of specific landmarks in your design and display these
in a Gantt chart. Do not make this general (e.g. project
definition, evaluation of solution, etc.), but be specific about your project
(e.g., selection of knee material, machining of joint, etc.).
12. References: You should use references primarily to back up
specific statements you make throughout the proposal. Cite references with the (author, date)
format. For example, “Nussbaum et al.
(1990) states that …,” or “Myocardial infarction is the result of coronary
artery thrombosis (Nussbaum et al., 1990).”
Remember that “et al.” is an abbreviation for “et alii,”
so there is a period after al., but not after et. Cite your references as: Author List, Date, “Title”, Journal, Volume,
17. Miscellaneous: Use good grammar, spelling and
organization. These aspects are
paramount in convincing your audience that you have the necessary competence to
carry out your work. Make your report as
easy to read for a reviewer as possible.
Make tables and figures as complete as possible. Do not make the reviewer flip back to the
text to find out what “Alternative 1” is, or what a particular abbreviation
stands for. Make table and figure
captions self-explanatory. In general
the table or figure caption should tell the reader what the overall point of
the figure/table is. For example, do not
say simply: “Figure 3: Number of Diabetics vs. Time.” Rather say: “Figure 3: Number of Diabetics
vs. Time. This figure shows
that the number of diabetics have increased exponentially in the past 10
years.” Number all pages. The proposal
must be typed double spaced, with 1 inch margins on all sides. Use 11 point Ariel type.