Advising Notes

The following notes are for intended advisees and for those on whose dissertation committee I serve.

It is a work in progress.

It is not intended for others to adopt; I may add requirements that others may find excessive.

Criteria and Standards

General

• Spellcheck all documents before sending them to me for review.
• Use active voice. The "doer" in the sentence should be clear.
• Omit needless words; excessive verbage clutters.
• You may want to experiment with style-check.rb from my software page or via gem install style-check

Thesis Proposal (Document)

• A thesis proposal must propose a thesis. (Not a piece of software, not a paper, etc.) A thesis should be:
  • Arguable / Falsifiable: The statement can be doubted, or experiments could be designed to show that it is false. Great if the reader is likely to believe it to be false.
  • Clear / Precise: Each word in the thesis statement should have a clear definition. What you mean by "efficient" or "high-performance" should be in the text (not necessarily in the statement itself, but nearby).
  • Unified / One Sentence: Explain the central idea using just one sentence; if that sentence is too hard to craft, there are too many distinct ideas.
  • Narrow / Tractable: The scope of the thesis shouldn't be too large for you to address. If there are aspects of the problem you will not address, narrow the problem to what you're covering.
  • Original: Your work; someone else didn't have the same thesis statement.
  This formulation from Maner, quoted by Wright State ,
• Use my intro outline template if you're stuck.
• Related work should focus on the key contribution of the other project and how your work is distingushed. There's a related work exercise that is less useful than the intro exercise, but has more detail.
• Chronological ordering is not likely a good one: put important stuff first.
• Covering all your publications is not necessary. (The committee may discuss progress writing papers independent of the thesis.)
• At least one (preferably two) high-quality published paper(s) should act as an anchor, to convince that the final third of the work is all that remains. (Papers need not be published, but must be of that quality.)
• Limit to 20 pages single spaced.
• Should be ready for the committee three weeks before the proposal presentation.
• For your reference, and although Washington had somewhat different criteria and milestones, you may look at my thesis proposal and my self-critique and advice for others that I wrote soon afterward.

Thesis Proposal (Presentation)

• The problem
• The thesis
• Your contributions
• How your work fits in the context of related work.

• Invisible graph lines. Gnuplot green on a white background is a typical offender.
• Text or figures not described. A big and detailed picture recycled from another talk, from which a small piece is useful, often causes such confusion.
• Outline slides, if the outline is a close variant of the classic: problem / hypothesis / procedure / results / conclusion.
• Unnecessary big picture context. Bugs are bad, the Internet is good, software is ubiquitous. We get it.

Dissertation (Document)

• I don't care what the official style guidelines are. For me, prepare a version single spaced 10pt with 1.25'' margins. I use a tablet to read and email to comment, so double spaced is unnecessary.
• Read the UMD style guidelines.

Dissertation Defense (Presentation)