Dear students entering your last term of coursework (January 2014 and part-time students entering last term),
As this year’s MA and LLM students have just submitted their dissertations, I just wanted to send out a reminder about your own next dissertation deadline – the draft proposal. This is due 26 September.
The draft proposal is important because it is the first step toward your final proposal. It enables us to assign a supervisor, and it also prepares you to get the most out of your FDR seminars this term.
The draft proposal may be very short, but we suggest that you put some thought into it, thinking about:
1) your overall potential topic
2) what research question you think you might want to pursue (you will usually, at this point, have several that you have not yet narrowed down); do you have an idea of what argument you might pursue?
3) _how_ you will carry out the research – will you do analysis of secondary literature, do some discourse analysis, look at government documents, carry out interviews? Do you need specialized literature that you will only find in one place?
4) How does your topic fit into your field of study? What other literature has been written on the topic?
Generally, a draft proposal will be 1-2 pages. It is intended to give you a good start into preparing, first, the final proposal, which will, in turn, assist you in preparing your dissertation. You will be working on preparing this proposal throughout the term, in your FDR seminars, and in consultation with your supervisor. A good start here helps you throughout the dissertation-writing process.
See you in September!
Best,
AKvK
Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, Ph.D.
_______________________________
Lecturer in Migration and Politics
Director, MA in International Migration
Director, Graduate Studies (Taught)
University of Kent, Pleinlaan 5, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Tel: +32 2641 1721 | www.kent.ac.uk/brussels
See my book: Migrants or Expatriates? Americans in Europe, http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=500005