My dissertation proposal defense took place on Thursday morning, and I passed! Yeah!! About 5 or 6 graduate students came, and of course my committee, so it was a small audience.
I was nervous at the beginning of the defense, mostly because I felt like I wished I had made more progress on firming up the research designs between the pre-proposal meeting on Oct. 3 and the defense on Oct. 25. But, the meeting turned into a really interesting (and fun!) brainstorming session, which I found incredibly valuable. It is almost like the ‘defense’ happened at the closed pre-proposal meeting, and the public meeting was more like a working session. So, even though it added some extra stress to my life over the past two weeks, I’m really glad I ended up doing the public defense — I got a lot out of it. There was a really interesting conversation about changes to my experiment design that will hopefully mean less work for me; I need to think about the potential changes a bit more and talk it over with my advisor next week.
I’m not sure I have any reflections or meta-level thoughts about this stage of the process that might be useful for other people. Thinking back, one thing that helped me a lot was having written up little mini-reviews about chunks of literature that I’d read in the past, and rough sketches of research designs; this made it a LOT easier to put together a rough draft of the proposal document than it would have been if I had to start from a blank page. Also, I spent a lot of time over the summer thinking about my research questions and scope, so when it came down to defending why I chose these particular research questions and how they fit together I had a reasonable argument. (This is an example of the kind of ‘tough’ questions that were asked in the pre-proposal meeting, rather than the public defense.)
I feel like my committee was on the same page about what a dissertation proposal should look like, and at what stage one is “ready” to defend the proposal. In psychology, I think it is more normal for students to propose earlier rather than later, maybe after having collected some pilot data, but before conducting any of the dissertation research. The proposal is then an argument for studying a particular research problem in a particular way, supported by a literature review, and including specific research designs and their expected outcomes.
I’m not sure this model would work for somebody on the “three paper” plan, or someone planning to build something as part of their dissertation. It seems like with the three paper plan, the proposal might be more about how the papers fit together than about what the research will be and how it will be conducted. If the dissertation involves building something, the design of that something will in a sense constrain the output of the work (just like any research design bounds the expected outcomes); if producing the design is part of the research problem, it is less clear to me at what stage the proposal should happen.
