Master's Research Project Timeline

Dear Master’s Students—

In order to give you the most helpful feedback possible in preparing your Master’s Research Project in time for May graduation, and to be fair to the time demands put on the faculty to carefully review your work, you must have a 1st draft of your proposal to your Committee by March 1st. This is what the overall time line should look like:

Sept/Oct: Identify a research topic, get approval from the Education Director (me), line up a committee (one Chair from the list of approved chairs in the department Graduate Handbook, a department faculty member; a committee member from outside the department).

Oct/Nov: Get a proposal draft to the committee; set a proposal presentation date with Sheila McCart; start your RSRB application.

Nov/Dec: Present proposal to the department and start data collection (if doing primary data collection) or start cleaning data( if working on a secondary analysis of an already existing data set).

Jan/Feb: Collect and analyze data; start writing.

March 1st: First draft to your committee. Note: Early submissions before this deadline are welcomed.

March 15th: The committee should have comments back to you for revisions/edits/further work.

March 30th: Second draft to your committee.

April 7th: T he committee should have just a few further required changes

April 10th: FINAL draft with committee sign-off in Pattie’s office.

May: Graduation!!

Remember: The proposal, which is done in the Fall, already contains the project Research Question(s); Background and Significance; Lit review; Methods of data collection and analysis. Once the data is analyzed the student just has to write the Findings, Discussion/Conclusions.

If you miss the March 1st deadline you cannot graduate in May. However, you can continue to work on your project for submission to Pattie until August 15th without incurring any additional registration fees. The same time rules apply: You must get a first draft of your research project paper to your committee 6 weeks before it is due to Pattie. As soon as you get committee sign-off you can use your M.P.H. or M.S. initials after your name. If you don’t finish by August 1st, you’ll have to enroll for the Fall semester and pay $1,035.