Is it always this difficult to propose?<\/p>\n
The third milestone1<\/a><\/sup> in the PhD process here at Imperial College is to submit a research plan. Similarly, once a supervisor has been agreed, the funding body supporting my PhD studies requires that a proposal be submitted.<\/p>\n The plan for College does not have to be terribly long (four pages); there will be substantial overlap between the plan I write for college and the proposal sent to the funding body. A number of people has assured me that it is likely that my plans will change during the PhD, such that the planned work in the proposal is not that which I end up submitting.<\/p>\n I am extending some work which formed part of my MSc, and as such, my supervisor and I have talked at reasonable length about what work I will do over the next three years. We have met with my second supervisor and talked about applications of the methods we will develop.<\/p>\n Then why is actually getting the plan down on paper so hard?<\/p>\n According to my student handbook, the research plan “should demonstrate a sound understanding of the research to be undertaken”.<\/p>\n So then for me, the difficulty arises when I attempt to explain with some degree of fluency the background to my study. I am new to the field of statistical genetics, or at least, the statistics part. When it comes to the concepts relating to genetics, I feel at home; however, and I am not a statistician. Trying to express with some degree of fluency the statistical concepts which do not (yet) trip off my own tongue feels laborious.<\/p>\n I was advised to The current draft of the proposal reads like a hotch-potch of other people’s descriptions of what I am going to do, where I have taken a line from the introduction to a paper here, a series of equations presented in a textbook there. My handling of statistcal concepts feels clumsy, and I plead with my supervisor to proof-read my work carefully because the errors might not be obvious to me.<\/p>\n At the minute, putting together a coherent proposal feels extremely challenging. At different stages of an academic career, I imagine that the that the difficulties are different. As one gets more familiar with the field that one is proposing, do the challenges change?<\/p>\n Is it always this difficult to propose? The third milestone1 in the PhD process here at Imperial College is to submit a research plan. Similarly, once a supervisor has been agreed, the funding body supporting my PhD studies requires that … Continue reading write a lot of waffle<\/del> keep the proposal general and non-technical. With my biologist’s mind<\/a>, I interpreted this as “do not put any maths in”. However, if my PhD studies are going to cover statistics, I can see that learning how to waffle using mathematics<\/del> express basic concepts clearly and succinctly is going to be a necessary skill, as it is likely that I will have to write the background to my study many times.<\/p>\n
\nfn1. The first being register with college, the second being register for an MPhil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"