I was speaking with a colleague earlier this week and we were talking about the dissertation proposal process. One of the topics we touched on was the idea that the proposal can sometimes feel bigger or more significant than the dissertation as a whole. We kept referring to the idea as “Yes, but what about the rest of the dissertation?”, which we used to mean that there is sometimes so much focus on the proposal, the proposal, the proposal that what gets lost is the idea of the proposal in context of the larger project.

From my experience, people sometimes get over-focused on the proposal because it is easier than considering the project as a whole. In any case, there does seem to be a thread of common experience related to difficulties completing the proposal quickly.