A Prospectus for the Rest of Us!

In a few weeks, I will have officially completed my third year as a PhD student (or my fifth year of my MD/PhD quest, which sounds a lot sadder). Part and parcel with this achievement comes a fairly major institutional requirement: I have to submit my 20 page research prospectus by mid June. Completion of the prospectus promotes me to "candidacy." (I only recently realized the significance of this term. My e-mail footer for the last three years had ended with "PhD Candidate." Apparently, by doing so, I've "lied to thousands of people" since coming to Yale).

Like most things I do, I've approached the whole prospectus writing process in a seriously manic, yet somehow careless, fashion. The way this is supposed to work is that you first come up with a question, then talk to your committee (or those who you intend to con into being on your committee), then write the prospectus based on those ideas, and then carry out the research. My process has been almost opposite: do the research, form the committee, get confused between several ideas, talk to the committee, toss around two more large ideas, and, ultimately, set off on writing the prospectus. In some sense, I've treated the prospectus as something that comes into place once I've generated enough data. The problem with doing this is that your ideas might be so disparate that they do not naturally fit together into a thematic dissertation (though you can make the theme as vague as you want, perhaps, to get around this) or you explore so many things that you are confused between different directions you could pursue. This is my problem now. I am fairly confident about two of my papers, but the lead paper - well, that remains something to be decided!

That being said, for the purposes of the prospectus, none of this actually matters! The point is to have something coherent down that the graduate committee thinks is interesting, doable and illustrative of your knowledge of the field. Not everything you write in the prospectus has to work out. Given this, perhaps the best thing to do is to find something you are broadly interested in, figure out some specific questions and data sources you could use, get the prospectus done early and then go to town. This is what I would advocate to other grad students in the pipeline and I am certainly in position to do this right now.

But, for whatever reason, I don't want to submit my prospectus until I am confident that all three papers I propose will materialize in the final dissertation. Given what I just said, this is irrational: I think this is a pretty good example of cognitive dissonance or, more precisely, some kind of pre-emptive action to avoid cognitive dissonance. I don't want to hand in something other than what I said I would hand in - I don't want to appear inconsistent over time.

Well, it's time to bite the bullet. I am currently working on finishing up this prospectus. I plan on studying the astonishingly quick transition of low and middle income countries from malnutrition to obesity, particularly focusing on the intersection between biology and economic factors that may drive such changes (paper 1), as well as intergenerational transfers of health status. (papers 2 and 3).

Hopefully, whatever I produce and hand in will follow this script. And if it doesn't...well, I guess thats OK, too.