Being a Doctoral Student: The Dissertation Stage

Stage 2: The Dissertation Proposal

Some universities call it a prospectus. Some call it a proposal. In most cases, it means that the doctoral student has written a high quality draft of the first three chapters of the traditional dissertation format: an introduction to the problem and terminology, a review of literature making a cohesive argument for the research questions, and a methodology section describing in detail the context of the study, the processes of data collection, and the methods of analysis. It should be acknowledged here that not all universities approach it in this traditional format, but for our purposes we will proceed with that format.