Prospectus workshop
Each year the department will sponsor a prospectus development workshop. The workshop will be organized by graduate students with faculty members as participants and resource people. Participation is voluntary and although the workshop is aimed at second-year students, it will be open to all who wish to attend.
The workshop plan is experimental and may change over time. We imagine a workshop with two stages:
Stage 1: Insights from faculty on choosing a research question, developing a prospectus, and the dissertation process in general
This stage will consist of a lunch meeting every other week, beginning the week after spring recess and ending in Mid-May.
At each session one faculty member (with a mix by subfields and of junior and senior faculty) will be asked to come to lunch to discuss the process of writing their own dissertation and/or insights from their experiences advising graduate students through this process. Faculty will be given a list of questions to suggest some starting points, but obviously will be encouraged to discuss whatever they believe will be most helpful. The questions might include:
- How did you come up with your initial research question?
- Is this question the same one you ended your project with, and how did it change over the course of writing your dissertation?
- What considerations (job market, publication, etc.) did you attend to in the process of writing your dissertation?
- What was the most difficult problem you encountered during writing your dissertation and how did you deal with it?
Stage 2: Prospectus development seminars
This stage will consist of eight hour-and-a-half lunch meetings each week of July and August.
The lunch meetings will focus on student presentations and discussions. Students will present their work – prospectus ideas, problems they’ve encountered, and so on – and receive feedback from their fellow students.
Depending on the number of students involved, each could present every other week or every three weeks, etc., but this is something they will work out themselves during the initial session. While more advanced graduate students are welcome to attend these sessions, presenting work will be restricted to those who had not yet finalized their prospectuses.