How to Write a Dissertation Prospectus

How do you write a dissertation prospectus that your committee will actually accept? I'm Dr. Steve Tippins. I've worked with over 300 doctoral students in this process, helping them complete a doable and finishable dissertation, starting with their prospectus. Let's start with what is a prospectus? A prospectus is an idea, it's a pitch in some people's minds. This is what I want to do. And your committee job is to say, okay, I buy into that. It's not everything. It's just a short document to say, here's what I want to do and here's why I think it should be done. The purpose of your prospectus is feasibility. Can this be done? Or I like to say, is it doable? And you're showing your committee. I've looked a little bit at the literature, I've looked a little bit about methodology. Here's what I plan on doing. Your prospectus doesn't have to be perfect. It needs to be a map, a roadmap. What am I thinking thinking about doing? Because many times it's going to change the more you get into it. And that's, you can go do that in your proposal. But your prospectus is, hey, committee, here's what I'm looking to do. Will you buy in? Your committee may give you feedback and that's important because their job is to help you make this process doable. This document doesn't have to be perfect or exactly what you're going to end up doing, but it is a plan for moving forward. And your goal is to get your chair and your committee to buy in this. Then you can move forward. Ultimately, what you're doing in your prospectus is you can think of it as the who, what, when, where, why type stage. Okay, what do you want to do? What's the problem? Who are you going to do it on? What has been written before? Why is this important and when? Meaning I'm going to look at this time period or I'm going to look at this other areas. So if you're answering those questions within the format that your institution wants, you're most likely going to be successful with your prospectus. Your prospectus is not intended typically to be a 70, 80, 90 page paper. Think of 10, 15, maybe 20 pages. Most institutions now have some sort of template for this too. Your prospectus is most likely going to start with your title, then an introduction of what you know is going on. I'm talking about food systems in Africa, or I'm talking about educational opportunities in the upper Midwest in the United States or stock price returns. I need to have a problem statement. Hey, the problem is we don't know X. And that problem statement comes out of your literature. So I'm going to have to have a very short literature review. Sometimes you're just even listing 5, 10 articles that support that. Then my purpose, the purpose is I want to go after the problem. I'm going to need some research questions in there because they want to know what you're going to do and they want to know your methodology. It's going to be a qualitative study and it's going to be a case study or it's going to be a quantitative studying. I'm going to use analysis of variance. And they have to line up with your research questions. In some institutions they like to see a timeline. This timeline is at this point a really good guesstimate because there's so many things out of your control at this point, but you don't want to show them a reasonable time period. And then your references that you're going to use. Now one thing you want to be aware of is there's a lot of institutions now that are using a. Not a rule, but. But they'd like to see a large percentage of your references in the last five years. That's not talking about maybe methodology or seminal research, but most, and I'm talking 80% in the last five years. And always remember, especially your prospectus, but when you move into your proposal that five years counts from when you finish your dissertation, not from where you are now. So if it's December of a year and you're starting something the next year, you're probably going to finish in the next three weeks. So you have to think of the next year as the fifth year and go backwards from there. That's just important. Schools look for that. So let's think about common mistakes. One of the things I've seen is people come into their prospectus with an idea that's wonderful, but it's huge and broad. And when you really think about the concept of doability, if you want to look at the impact of on health of people eating pop tarts for lunch for eight years, I gotta wait eight years to collect the data. And I don't know about you, but I don't think most people want to spend tuition dollars for eight years just waiting to have data come in. So the breadth, you want to keep this concise and doable. Okay? And I've seen some people come in to do things and I'd Say, great, do you have 20 years to wait to collect this data? And their answer is no. I said, okay, then we need to make this much more concise and tight. Your document, your prospectus, is not your entire dissertation. It's the idea. You don't know the answer, so keep it as an idea. And not knowing an answer is another area. I've seen too many people come in and say, here's what I'm going to do, here's why it's important and here's how it's going to change this area of the world. Well, what that means is, and from your committee's eyes, that means is you already know the answer and now you're going to go apply it to make some change. Well, if you already know the answer, why are you going to do the research? There's no need to do the research if you know the answer or said another way, you're advocating for something. And the idea behind research is answering questions. I've seen a number of people, I just saw one yesterday who was saying, oh, and here's what's going to happen and here's how it's going to change this profession. And you know, they're just starting, they don't know if it's going to change their profession, but they're thinking it might. I was talking to someone recently who had their idea in their prospectus that said this model that I'm creating is going to change the way that school systems are run. And by doing this in the school system, it will save money, it will help in retention of employees and number of other things. But they hadn't done the research yet, so they don't know that there's anything to support that. They're basing this idea on their life experience. And it's wonderful. Life experience is amazing and it can lead you to start on research topics. But life experience means I haven't done research on it, academic research on it. So they're going to quickly tell you, no, you can't do that. You don't have a justification for doing this. So start at the beginning, understanding you're answering a question. One another area where probably the biggest area where people have issues in their perspectives is something called alignment. And alignment means are all the pieces of my prospectus and dissertation going in the same direction? For example, I need a problem statement. The problem is we don't know the effect of having pop tarts for lunch every day on health of 32 year olds. Then now I need a purpose. Well, the purpose of this and many times you list your methodology of this quantitative longitudinal study is to determine the impact of having pop tarts for dinner for 32 year olds. Well, my problem statement said lunch and my purpose statement said dinner. They're saying different things. So when you start saying different things in your problem statement and your purpose statement and then your research questions go in another direction, your committee is going to pretty quickly come back and saying, you know, this might be interesting, but you're not in alignment. And by saying not in alignment, that means your problem's going one way, your purpose is going another way, and your research questions may be going yet another way. So make sure they're all going in the same direction. Most likely before you submit your prospectus, you've had some interaction with your chair. Don't ignore it. Put it in there. They'll remember. Okay. Make sure you've included the chair's thoughts on this topic. One other sure way of getting something sent back quickly is missing parts of the prospectus. Now, again, if your school has a template, that means they want all of those things, so do all of those things. If you don't do them, they're going to look at the template or look at your document and say, well, number three is missing. Send it back. And every time, every single time you do something like that, what you're doing is wasting your own time because you know you're going to have to do it. So do it at the start. Instead of sending to them and losing 1, 2, 3, 4 weeks of time having them send it back to you, why don't you just do at the start, submit it a day later, and you're still ahead of time? Okay, so those are some issues. What are some ideas about saving time doing this correctly? Well, one, if I've mentioned a rubric, if your school has a rubric, find it and use it to work with your chair on this. Send them the ideas early if they think it's undoable. No matter what, you're going to save some time. You can also ask fellow students to see copies of their prospectus and get ideas of what was approved. One of the issues is finished dissertations are easy to find. Proposals are basically parts of finished dissertations that's easy to find. Most schools don't just publish the prospectus, so you may have to ask your chair for a copy of one if they're willing to give it out, or other students, because that's easy for them to give out their own information. Your goal at this point, you're not trying to prove that you're smart. You're not trying to prove anything other than I know what you're looking for or what you're going to ask for, and I've provided it for you. I provided a short document that shows there is a problem and there's a path to go after that problem. If you're writing your prospectus and you're looking for assistance, we can help you at Beyond PhD Coaching inside our free dissertation help community. You'll find first, lots of other people to talk to about what you're doing and what you're going through. And you'll find numerous free resources that are there to support and help you finish not only your prospectus, but the entire dissertation journey. Click the link below to join our Free Dissertation Help Community. Congratulations on reaching the stage of working on your prospectus practice. Don't make it over complicated. Provide what they're looking for the who, what, when, where, why? Type questions Understand your university's specific requirements. Many times a rubric that can help you and understand doability is what you're putting forth. This is an idea that needs to be done and can be done. And good luck.