If you are considering pursuing your graduate degree, we feel safe in guessing that a lot of your focus is on selecting a program that you are passionate about. We think this is great. We love to work with graduate students who are passionate and fired-up about the research and work that they are doing now, and who are excited about their future careers. We would never advise a student to pursue a path that they would find dissatisfying or boring.

You only do this once – write that dissertation proposal. And the frustrating part of this proposal is that your advisor and committee seem to have some need to reject it the first time it is submitted. Will always be asking for changes or additions.

Writing a research proposal can be a tough project if you have never written one before. Usually, these documents are prepared as students get ready for their theses and dissertations, and they must be approved either by an advisor or dissertation committee before work can begin.

A thesis is, above all, a research project. It is not a research paper. You are now going to become a researcher yourself, not merely report the research of others. And, of course, your degree is riding on this scholarly piece, so you will want to avoid some of the pitfalls that are most common.

It’s so easy to get discouraged and frustrated while working on your dissertation. Your proposal has been approved and you have been sent off to spend the next 1 ½ years pretty much on your own, except for an occasional meeting with your advisor. It can be kind of a lonely feeling. But there are steps that you can take to keep yourself on track.

The first step in the approximate 1 ½ year project of getting that dissertation finished can be the hardest – selecting that topic area and then developing a research question that you advisor and your committee will approve. There’s a lot that goes into coming up with dissertation ideas that will be acceptable and, as well, be of sufficient interest to you that you will be excited about conducing the research and producing the huge document that accompanies it.

If you have never produced a case study before, you are in for a unique experience - one that most grad students in business, economics, sociology, psychology, political science, education, and health care/medicine will have.

You’ve been around the block a time or two. And you certainly can provide a pretty decent answer to the question, “What is plagiarism?” But just to be certain, let’s define all of its facets. First and foremost, plagiarism is using the words or ideas of another as your own. The “words” part is pretty easy. If you use another author’s exact words you use quotation marks or set it off, single spaced, with credit being given.

Chances are, you have never written a thesis proposal. You are about to learn how. When you are ready to begin your thesis, you and your advisor will discuss possible topics for a good thesis, and ultimately you will pick one. But this is just the beginning. The next step is going off on your own to conduct some preliminary research on that topic, so that you may develop a good research question and a hypothesis.

You have the next 12-18 months to create the most major academic work of your life – your dissertation. If you have already submitted your proposal, you have submitted a timeline for completion, and that will be your general guideline, as you go through this process. Make no mistake about it – dissertation cannot be accomplished without a big-picture plan.