The application for the master and PhD programs at the CS department was last month, and several students asked me advice on their research proposal. So I decided to write a short text summarizing the general advice I gave them this year.
Note that the advice below is for writing a research proposal for graduate school application in Japan, or a MEXT scholarship application. Some of this advice might not be applicable to situations (specially not for grant writing!) but I hope a lot of the advice is still useful in general.
I usually start by encouraging students to think about what is the objective of the text they are writing, and who is going to read it. For the research proposal that you submit to an admission process, the who is easy: professors at the institution who will evaluate your proposal. So you can afford to be a little bit more technical than usual. As for the objectives of the text, I would say that there are three:
- Explain what you want to research,
- Show that you are prepared to do this research, and
- Convince the readers that your research is worth doing
The first objective speaks to the clarity of your text. The person reading it should have a very clear idea of what kind of research you want to do when they finish reading your text.
The second objective speaks to the "admission" part -- the reader should get the impression that you have enough knowledge about the research field, and computer science in general, to do a good job at graduate school.
The third objective is similar to the first one, and it may look that they could be joined together, but I think it is worth it to think separately about the necessity to make the project clear, and to make the reader excited about it.
Keeping these objectives in mind when you read and re-read your project will help you self-evaluate, and consider which parts could be improved.
As for the text itself, I recommend that you try to touch the following points. How much you will write, and whether you should break the text down into sections depends on the size and format of the proposal, but you should have at least one paragraph for each topic below:
- Objective
- Idea / Inspiration
- Current Approaches and their limitations
- Proposed Solutions
- Expected Benefits from the research
Objective: Briefly explain what you want to research, and why. What problem you are trying to solve. This paragraph should be a good summary of the research project as a whole, or in other words, the "pitch".
Idea / Inspiration: Explain how you came up with the idea of your project. Was it based on your experience? Inspiration from nature or society? Improvement on existing technology?
Current approaches and their limitations: Show that you have surveyed the field, and know what are the current approaches to the problem that you are trying to solve (or the knowledge you are trying to clarify), and what are their limitation.
Proposed Solutions: Go back to your idea, explain it in detail, including the parts that need to be developed / clarified during the research. Compare and contrast to the limitations of current approaches.
Expected Benefits: If you complete your project successfully, who will be happy about it? (Possibly someone other than yourself :-)). What benefits can be expected? What other new research directions will be opened?
Of course, this suggestions are based on my own experience in Tsukuba. But academic culture is very different in other countries. Make sure to ask for advice from your prospective advisor!