Senior Design 2008-09 Pre-Proposals

Here is a suggested outline for your written Pre-Proposals.

 1. Title/Cover Page:

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

 
2. Abstract:

- A short summary (150-200 words) of the whole thing. 

3. Problem Statement:

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

4. Background:

- Summarize relevant background information that you have on the problem outlined above. THis implies doing some research - on-line or by going to the library.

5. Planned Approach:

- Summarize your intended approach - experimental and/or theoretical (as appropriate), the characterization techniques you intend to use and brief explanations as to why they have been selected.

-Discuss briefly what you intend to do by way of experiments - what process parameters you will vary; the # of repeat trials for each condition; 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 be included showing all the major tasks, including the due-dates/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 (the cost of all materials, supplies, cost of using the characterization instruments (check the CRF web page via the DNI web page for the $/hr rate for things like the SEM, TEM, Ramans, FTIR, 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 and numbered...use a format like "Fig. 1: TEM image of single-walled carbon nanotube."

- It's a good idea to number the main section headings and subheadings of the document too, i.e. 2, 2.1, 2.1.1 etc.

- Number the pages.

- Spell check!

RK