hello hello welcome to ivana's nosqlife today we will talk about topic that so many of you asked me to cover so many times and finally finally i am ready to talk about that this is about phd research proposal how actually to write a good phd research proposal and i decided that yes i can just do that but it would be even more very valuable valuable valuable to first talk there is also i don't know if you've seen but in some of the phd vacancies like pg position opened on the internet in norwegian universities what i found that some of them they want the research statement to be submitted together with other documents so that's why today in today's video we will not only cover phd research proposals but we firstly also will talk about phd research statement what does it mean what is the difference between the research statement and phd research proposal which one is written them and how to make both of them the best quality possible and that's why we will talk about immigrant structure and what are the good research questions because this information you will need to know to make a really great phd research proposal so let's start [Music] let's first talk about difference in phd research statement and phd research proposal um for instance now it is opened many different phd positions that entail you and i just as a comparison took two in the first one and there is no requirements as a research statement one but in the other one that is actually new week where i live and there is a requirement to submit the research statement so what what the what is the research statement right so research statement um it is much smaller version of the phd research proposal and it also has a bit different structure it's more something like it has some bits of the research proposal but it also has a bits of cover letter if you apply to regular tube why is that because in the uh research statement it should supposed to be really short uh typically they will write down the number of pages they are limiting you to so in this case it is three pages max and i think in majority of the cases you will see the same requirement so it is a short version while the phd research proposal it can be like 10 15 pages uh also depends on the university department and people you're working with so in the research statement what we focus first of all our research interests second of all it is initial plan so how are you planning to execute your phd you like your research in the coming three years then you also need to describe your education previous previous research previous like your competence how it's actually related to the project where you will do a phd or like your pgd project in general and also you need to write down why are you associated for this position this part of information typically we do not put in the phd research proposal so we don't have these parts why you suited for this position or how your previous education competence is connected or related to the project this is what we don't put in phd research proposal so to make sure and most typically a phd research proposal is not written beforehand when you apply for phd but it's really rare cases where you need to have it beforehand and typically to write a good one you will need to have additional information but we will talk a bit more about this later so just keep it in mind so this is kinda about this research statement but then the question is okay if let's say that these like personal parts it depends on you and it's like how is you today just from inside of you you need to write and then about how your education is related to the project then the question is what is the project right where to find this information so this information typically it is provided in the part about that position so in phd vacancy you will have a part about the position and there it will be a description of what is kind expected or what is wanted but sometimes it could be not clear enough for you or maybe some parts that you are like oh if i had a bit more details that would help me a lot to make a great research statement yes what to do then so i would recommend you to make a first draft so sit and write your plans like your interests first then initial plan initial plan should have from my perspective briefly but should have information about which research questions you think would be interesting then it can be one two like a main question something like that that you want to focus on in the coming three years then the methodologies methodologies so the methods that you are planning to use like which type of experiments you think would be needed to conduct in order to answer that question and also your publication plan for these three years just an assumption so what you would consider so this is for me like initial plan what you're focusing on uh maybe like two paragraphs of what is uh already published related to the topic then the question then the methods why those methods and not the other ones and typically i would recommend you to for to use some methods that you experienced in mixed in together with something slightly new so it could be good and then in the end you finalize it it can become chart with the plan of publications so how many articles and approximate some journals or something you could mention depends like how comfortable you are with that information and then you can keep saying that and then you by planning it in such way so you actually can mention now why you suited for this project because you describe it and uh for instance how your education is related to what you described early this is like the first draft then i would come back read it and find some stuff that could be improved that is still like a bit shaky or ambiguous or could be done a bit better and then you actually in every phd position vacancy you will have a contact person's listed in the like really below like in the last bottoms of the vacancy description and there it's supposed to be associate professor or professor listed as a contact person contact this professor with the questions like to if they could clarify for you small details and then depending on this description in about the position you can for instance uh ask um what could be like application area is the phd a part of ongoing project or like or it's not a part of any projects at all is there any you can also check actually this professor and see his publications and what he has done and also use this information to write your research statement and to make a good questions so this is after you receive information from this professor come back and rewrite your research statement based on the more details that he provided to you shape it the lead a little bit and then you are ready to submit it so but still we haven't covered about research questions right so now we will go to the next topic it is about phd research proposal and focus on the structure first phd research proposal can be written in different ways and typically i would recommend you this is i didn't do it exactly like that but i would recommend you to try to keep it in mind in rat structure and try in some way to integrate it and use it of course you will not have all of the parts but still the flow in your document needs to be very similar so firstly generically what is imran for those maybe you don't know but this is how we call the introduction methods result and discussion introduction methods result and discussion so this is how we name this structure and in reality this is really good structure because it gives you really nice flow that everyone is used to and let's see in 2015 how looked my phd research description this is my here pg phd project description that i actually wrote in uh like submitted in november 2015 so almost six years ago can you imagine that and actually when i finished my topic sounded completely different but this is kind of a preliminary estimation of what you're about to do so this is what i submitted when i applied for my phd position as you can see i started right away with the background and i did some small research review where i started with the typical introduction what is additive manufacturing and then what are the key aspects of additive manufacturing what the researchers in the world are working on and why it is so important and so on so then as you can see i started separating my micro kind of topics you can also do this because you see here it's like almost one part but if you have a more precise project description or if you already have talked with your supervisor you can make it uh look a bit better than this maybe you will have a bit less topics than i had so then you can see i focused on literature review on especially material and mechanical properties of finished parts than on long process time through parent homogeneous here so this is what i saw that is important for the project where i was a phd and then also i needed to highlight and it's the same about you you need to highlight some lack of knowledge or lack of research that is focusing on some specific things in your topic and also you need to show it would be nice if you can find articles in which people emphasize the importance of things that are not investigated and for instance they say that it should be done in the future quite many articles have something like that in the introductions quite often it could be in the discussion parts so this is where you need to check it out and as you can see um the very critical part it's they do not provide information as a lists uh you need to provide it in a way like you describe it and also you need to rephrase stuff so kind of read couple of articles and then write together some small paragraph on the topic and just reference the common statements uh in the end of the sentences this is my recommendation to you so as you can see it's kind of every single aspect of any like every single step of i am i actually try to cover a bit uh individually and for instance this post processes of finnish parts of them it's extremely small but i still include it i could have provided it uh and joined together this long process time for instance so it's like what i see now it's actually i can see that it's very broad very many different small things so i could have picked uh less topics but go a bit more deeper as you can see i have 11 pages so what i see now actually i would recommend myself back for 2015 and to go maybe a bit more in the details but smaller uh subset of topics i think it's too broad so for now i know that it's too broad and then actually control and optimization of process and product parameters this is more or less related to what i was about to do so that's why i think all of these topics beforehand i could have put them a bit differently and less some emphasis on them and tolerances it also was together with control and optimization so this is what i did in my background to have the literature here where i needed to emphasize what is done and what is not done and then what is not done kind of representing the object don't say that i like it very much how i wrote here i would recommend myself now to go back there and write down kind of preliminary research questions it's hard to define them in the very beginning but it's really nice to have two three research questions and then the main goal then it shows that especially if you have a three years it would help you so i would go a bit deeper in the background and then instead of this like following subjects is proposed to consider to have less of the topics and that's why less of the research questions so it would look much better so this was i'm not happy how it's done now in my uh project description but in 2015 i didn't know all of this stuff and i didn't know what is a phd right and i saw that i have three years i can do so many different things in reality it takes a lot of time you need to read a lot uh you have a different challenges about equipment using lab and so on and so on so typically the first proposal it's not the same as what you deliver so more you work in the topic um more your work is shaped and also more knowledge you get you understand in the very beginning what maybe was not that good so for instance each of these topics on its own could be researched for some number of years so uh that's why it's like what i understand now but i think before that i didn't understand the complexity of like how much time actually takes to do all this stuff so as you can see there is many different topics and some of them on its phone can take up to four years and maybe even longer to work on but i see already that i covered the second one that i was working on and i think that i also to some extent not like this i actually use the machine learning models but for defining new tolerance tolerances so actually it's close to it but still in the result i worked in the different stuff so this is like what is funny that it helped me but i said that i didn't do that good job at that time and it happens so scope this is what i said about limitations it's a scoop so for instance in my case i needed to say which type of editing manufacturing process i will be working on and which type of material because i needed it to limit myself i couldn't cover everything and also we didn't have equipment to do everything so this is where scope or limitations of the work i would recommend you to try to think of some stuff and include it as well uh so for instance type of ad prefecture is it a scoop what is that so this is like not good do not do like this in the same top types of material so if you have a scope just keep writing further and do not do this separations as i did this is wrong uh also i think this is a part of the scope where i try to define which material properties i will be looking at being honest i it's a again too much and it will require you a lot of experimental work that is expensive and this is i didn't know the same mechanical properties i think that i've seen in different articles what people did and i just listed everything what i saw but i also use like what it's considered in the study um in reality i worked uh only with four mechanical properties it was elongation and break you yield stress elastic modulus and pencil strands that's all other stuff it's like completely different testing equipment then you need to have to evaluate it so and this for the result or out of one testing machine so these small things by that time i didn't know but as you can see it's still that's rookie the same on process parameters this is kinda i think that i mainly show how it works with the literature and when i found like what you need to focus on and different conditions that you need to look at finally then i came to the research method so all of this stuff and how to on like how to the research on these eight topics i wanted to present research methods as you can see i listed that i will design 3d models with complex geometry this was the wrong one i don't like to do hard and i actually didn't design anything at all literature review i listed and i said that few stages printing out models that are designed this is experiment you can call it done testing the build model with various x-ray techniques i didn't use this one at all i only did mechanical testing that's all and also dimensional measurement so because it actually didn't have an equipment to do this but i didn't know that that well by that time i also didn't do fine element analysis because on my first year of phd in the literature you actually found that for my material that i'm working with it requires material models said that people throughout 20 years couldn't develop the complete full that are useful only partly covering some stuff but they would not like you you are not able to use them in the practice so this is where my machine learning idea came so as you can see i did so many different failures in my project description but this part i like a lot expected results so even like understanding of some topics then what type of factors or frameworks metrics algorithms all of this needs to be listed here and also what do you do with the data and you know as you can see even i was considering that my data could be used for creating your standards uh very ambitious i would say so but not realistic and the work plan that i proposed when i was applying so i knew that i will have 25 of teaching so as you can see 25 of teaching it means that either you like the full year that you are working or it is 25 of your time in a year that is 1680 hours approximately so find out what is 25 of them that you designate to the teaching every semester in my case i was playing like that literature review i was planning to do throughout all my phd and then like taking courses because in phd in norway you had you need to finish like to take courses for 30 credits at phd level or 20 credits at a phd level and then 10 credits can be done at master level with self-study course that you define yourself as your supervisor and then like my methods that i defined at which times i was planning to do them and also as you can see conference and journal proceeding when i'm planning to publish articles so this is also you can see journals typically take time about like a year in conferences it can be a bit uh quicker and then when i was planning to write thesis this is actually i didn't do anything in 2016 17 and 18 actually focused mainly in 2019 i was writing but i still would recommend i know other phds who did it throughout the whole phd and it was good because uh in the last year if you for me i used articles kinda less rafts but actually if you don't do it throughout the year you will forget what you did in 2016 when you're at 2019 this is like absolutely sure so you need either to have some notes or like you need to register and your discussions like what do you think what have you read and with the good references because then it will be hard to find it and then defense so this is like what i was planning and you can see like reference list 21 article that i read to write this project proposal so as you can see i have made some mistakes for instance here i would recommend you to have main objective and research questions to have less topics than i had be more realistic and then in the background to focus a bit more deeper on those uh topics that you want to work on and not like every single thing inside the area so this was also my mistake so because i didn't know what needs to be there so i try to put whatever i could so that's why i try to understand the description of the phd vacancy information about phd and then if you miss some details ask your ask professor if you need to send me the project description beforehand before you start phd if you need to because yeah then thank you you also will need to submit another one after you uh start phd on faculty of engineering for instance we take one generic course which every phd needs to take and it's not include this city credits and in this course uh we actually as a result we kind of write again a phd project description and that needs to be a bit more realistic than this one and try to make it like 10 pages so um i hope that i am like i showed the main thing so i would call it like introduction and have some background on the topic uh i would add here research questions in the end and limitations and then a new part i would made as a methodology with some methods and showing the connection to research questions this is what i would do now when i went through the process and i understand a bit more what is to be a phd what are good research questions i see so many times that students really struggle with this thing like to define research questions and i remember back then when i was a student uh i had a really nice nice professor who explained to me really quickly and easy what is a good research question and now i will share with you this small secret so your research question need to be formulated in such way that you cannot answer yes or no and you cannot answer like really in a short sentence so a good research question is a question that can be answered only through the discussion uh i want to give you a couple of examples of bad and good research questions so the bad research question it could be is higher energy in the machine better is it popular to work on identity manufacturing so this is very bad question research questions but good research questions would be which process parameters have larger effect on the mechanical properties and how to control them or how to control and manage variation during 3d printing process so as you can see on like this those two are good examples that they are good research questions so this is all for me thank you very much for watching until the end well remember that on sunday 25th july uh at 5 00 pm see it here time zone i will be waiting for you to come and ask me questions about phd uh this project description so i would be happy to see you and thank you very much for watching until the end don't forget to like the video so more people will see the content and they could benefit of it it helps a lot and write your questions for comments if you cannot come but you still want to ask me something leave the comments under this video i will check them out and prepare answers to your questions and we'll give them on sunday see you soon bye
2021-07-30