Pre-Proposal Guidelines

As per today's group meeting, here is a suggested outline for a Pre-Proposal.

 1. Title/Cover Page:

- Indicate the project title, your name and affiliation, your advisor's name, mentor's name [if known], and Course # information [MATE 491 for Seniors, MS Thesis for BS/MS] and the date.

 
2. Abstract:

- Short summary of the whole thing. 

3. Problem Statement

- Describe the nature of the problem your project going to investigate/address, together with a rationale...why is it a problem? Keep this brief and as specific as possible.

4. Background:

- Summarize relevant background information that you have on the problem outlined above.

5. Planned Approach:

- Summarize your intended approach - experimental or theoretical [as appropriate], the characterization techniques you intend to sue and brief explanation as to why they have been selected.

-Discuss briefly what you intend to do by way of experiments - what you will vary, # of trials, what you hope to correlate to what...i.e. an overview of your planned experimental matrix...your design of experiments.

6. Timeline:

- A Gantt chart should included showing all the major tasks, including the deadlines etc. for reports and presentations.

- There are websites [e.g. http://timios.net/Gantt/] where you can develop Gantt charts and then save them for importing into your documents. 

7. Budget:

- A cost summary including Personnel/Labor [+ Fringe] costs; Direct Costs [cost of materials, supplies, cost of using the characterization instruments (check the MCF web page via the DNI web page for the $/hr rate for things like the SEM, Ramans, Optical Microscope, Nanoindenter etc.); Indirect Costs [Drexel's Indirect cost rate is 50%]. Indirect cost is typically charged on the total cost of Labor + Direct Costs.

 8. References:

- If any to date.

9. General:

- Figures can be included, and should be properly captioned...number the figures, use a format like "Fig. 1: TEM image of single-walled carbon nanotube."

- It's a good idea to use numbered main section headings and subheadings, i.e. 2, 2.1, 2.1.1 etc.

- Number the pages.

- Spell check!

Hope this all helps.  

 
RK