Tips for Writing a Project Proposal

Tips for Writing a Project Proposal

This is good practice! You will need to be able to write compelling proposals for the rest of your college career and in many professional occupations, so start on the right track.

The Question

All good proposals start with a research question or hypothesis. The trick is to think of something specific enough that you can get a good handle on it and cover the topic fully, while thinking big enough to find enough information to analyze. Doing a ‘project about volcanos’ or ‘something about global warming’ is not specific, ‘the effects of global warming on my hometown’ is too specific. Try to come up with a single theme around which you can build a project. Some good questions are:

What are the specific effects of aerosols on the ozone layer?

Is there a case for returning to the morphological species concept?

What effect do overzealous researchers in helicopters have on polar bear health?

How much carbon-sink potential has been lost by the last 10 years of rainforest burning?

Or, you can begin with a hypothesis. State a position and set out to find as much information as possible pertaining to the subject, parse it out, and see if your hypothesis is supported or rejected. Some examples of hypotheses are:

The temperate forests absorb more carbon dioxide per acre than does the tropical rainforest.

The oceans are contaminated more by the effects of runoff than by direct dumping.

The dodo is not extinct.

Methods

The next step is to address how you plan to figure this out. Once you have stated a question or hypothesis, explain in a short paragraph the specifics of what you want present in your project (statistical data, comparisons of historical and recent data, the evolution of a paradigm, etc.). A good way to start this is by working out a rough outline of the major topics and sub-topics that you will investigate. Example for a hypothesis:

I believe that there is convincing evidence that the temperate forests of the northern hemisphere absorb more carbon dioxide per acre than does the tropical rainforest. I will analyze statistical data taken from both locations over the last 20 years (give a source) and conduct literature review research in order to discover if we are attempting to save the wrong carbon sink from destruction. If so, I will state some policy recommendations for how to best manage our carbon-sink sources on this planet.

Example for a question:

What are the specific effects of aerosols on the ozone layer? I will do a literature review of the major chemicals contained in aerosols and their specific effects on the destruction of atmospheric ozone. The different chemicals have different specific effects on the breakdown of ozone. I will describe which ones are the most harmful and must be banned immediately (i.e. if there are one or two key chemicals that catalyzes the reaction), and which ones we could probably live with. In order to accomplish this, I will run statistical tests on the data (give data source), comparing how much of what chemical ends up in the atmosphere every year and how much damage they do alone and synergistically.

The best way to do this is to first write a working outline of the types of data you will use, how they will help you answer the question, and where you will find them (or have already found them).

Sources

In order to write a good proposal, you must do the literature search before you start writing. This step cannot wait until last, because it may influence how you state your question and how you present your intended research to your audience, and it will influence how you conduct your project work. Once you start with a working question, hit the library homepage ( and see what sources you can find. Peer-reviewed journal articles are the best, so I suggest going to the ‘Indexes’ page on Mirlyn and searching all the science journals for your specific topic. In addition, there are many web-based resources that you can link to from the Global Change homepage (see the Lab 4 week page for quick links), and you can always go to Google to look for other University sites (these can also be accessed over Mirlyn).

You must cite the sources that you are considering for your project, so that your audience knows that you are looking in the right place and getting solid information from which to draw. For this particular project it is good to have at least eight sources, three of which must be non-web-based. In general, the more sources you can bring in to support a point, the more water-tight it is. Don’t worry about sources that repeat what other sources state, this only adds more weight to an argument. For notes on bibliographic style, go to: