Milestones

Time management is crucial for a successful thesis. You will work closely with me and your co-advisor(s) to establish a set of internal deadlines in order to make steady progress on your thesis. We will start from this working set of milestones, which are set by quarter.

	Reading Goals	Writing Goals	Experiment Goals
Fall Q1	Clarify Research Question Collect & Read Main Papers	Summarize Related Work Outline Methods	Identify Data Summarize Data
Fall Q2	Identify Supporting Papers	Draft Background Chapter Outline Methods Chapter	Reproduce Paper Results or Prototype New Ideas
Spring Q1	Read Theses & Papers for Formatting Examples	Write Methods Chapter Outline Main Results	Implement New Ideas & Analyze Results
Spring Q2	Find Papers that Support/Refute Findings	Write Results & Discussion Revisit All Chapters	Visualize Results

Deadlines

You will submit thesis proposals in the middle of Week 2 and be assigned thesis advisors by the beginning of Week 3; refer to the Moodle page for more information. We will start from these working set of deadlines. Deadlines may shift and they may be tailored to each project. We will also have smaller milestones for group meeting activities.

If you are starting thesis in Spring, swap “Fall” and “Spring” in the table below.

Deadline	Milestone	Description
Fall Week 4	Research Question	A document describing (a) a brief introduction to the topic, (b) the research question, and (c) why the question is important to study. Include at least two citations.
Fall Week 7	Annotated Bibliography	A document with a list of at least ten papers that are relevant to your project. For each paper, write one paragraph that (a) summarizes the main contributions of the paper and (b) explains why the paper is relevant to your question.
Fall Week 11	Methods Outline & Updated Bibliography	An updated annotated bibliography with at least 15 papers and a document with a brief description of your methods. The methods outline can take many forms - it can be a list of steps you plan to do, pseudocode for existing or new methods, or instructions for running a tool.
Fall Week 14	Reflection	A document that describes (a) your current progress in thesis, (b) your planned progress for spring semester, and (c) your immediate next steps. Be sure to address your progress in writing, your progress in reading, and your progress in experiments/analysis. This is an opportunity to re-evaluate the thesis question or goal, and adjust if necessary.
Spring Week 4	Background & Methods Chapters in Thesis Template	Move all of your existing drafts to one of the thesis templates. Your thesis should have complete Background & Methods chapter drafts and ideally an outline of your results chapter.
Spring Week 8	Results & Discussion Outlines/Drafts	Outline your results in the thesis template, and add any results you currently have. Outline the main points you want to discuss in your Discussion chapter.
Spring Week 11	Full Draft	Your thesis draft should have full drafts of all chapters. This is the deadline to guarantee Anna’s feedback - any writing submitted after this week might not get reviewed.
Spring Week 14	Thesis Due	Submit your approved thesis to the registrar before 3pm.

Feedback

After submitting each milestone, you will receive feedback from me within one week in the form of edits directly on your document and, in some cases, a summary of your progress so far.

You can submit drafts for me to review at any time! I will aim to get you edits within two weeks if you submit additional writing. Please send me reminders if you don’t hear from me in these off-deadline editing requests.

As we get further into spring semester, I will focus on giving you feedback for parts that I have not read yet (rather than feedback on parts I’ve already edited). Note that your thesis must be approved by me before being submitted to the registrar, and I will require reviewing certain parts of the document (the Discussion, Results, etc.) before giving that approval.