Proposals

Proposal guidelines

Your proposal should clearly answer two questions: what you want to do and why we should care. Please don't spend too much time on a literature review unless it is needed to understand what you want to do and why we should care. This is a chance for you to get supportive, helpful feedback on early stage ideas so you should feel free to take some chances and be open about the weaknesses in your proposals.

Each proposal is limited to 800 words. As you will see, 800 words is quite short so use these words wisely. You are encouraged to include figures and graphs to illustrate your ideas, and these do not count against your word limit. All proposals must have clear titles. Proposals must be submitted Saturday at midnight.

Proposal feedback guidelines

You will spend a lot of your career giving feedback on people's ideas. This is an art, and this is your chance to practice that art. The goal of your feedback is to be helpful to the author; it is not make yourself look smart.

In writing your feedback, it is useful to start by summarizing the goals of the proposal as clearly and succinctly as possible. Then, you can describe things that you liked about the proposal. Finally, you can make suggestions about how the research described in the proposal can be improved; the more concrete and specific your suggestions the better.

Proposal review must be done between Saturday at midnight (when the proposal is posted) and Sunday at midnight.

Proposal feedback feedback guidelines

In order to help you learn more about how to give feedback, the author of the proposal will give you feedback on your feedback, such as which parts she found most helpful and what changes she plans to make based on the feedback.

Final project

More soon.

You are encouraged to collaborate on the final projects with someone from outside of your field. One way that you could find collaborators is to think about earlier proposals that you really thought were interesting.