Students form a PhD dissertation committee that includes a minimum of four members of the graduate faculty as follows:
You should choose your chair and minor members for the contributions they will make to your thesis work. Your outside member may serve that purpose, but is formally on the committee to guarantee fairness and Graduate School standards.
You may nominate additional people to serve on your committee. If that person is not a member of the UMass Amherst or Five College graduate faculty, the Graduate School will require a copy of his or her CV. (The College of Information and Computer Sciences does not cover travel costs.)
Where to start?
When you have decided on a committee, please email the Assistant Director of Graduate Programs, Eileen Hamel, with the names and contact information of all members being requested. If your outside member(s) is not a member of the Five-College faculty, please include their CV. The proposed committee will be circulated among the faculty for comment. In addition, please send a title and abstract of your proposal. On rare occasions, the GPD or other members of the faculty have raised concerns, requiring that members of a committee be replaced or added. If there are no objections, you will have "formed your committee." Once your committee has been approved by the CICS faculty, it is sent for approval by the Graduate Dean.
If there are any changes to your committee after the Graduate Dean has formally approved your commitee, you must contact the Assistant Director of Graduate Programs in order to have a new committee request sent to the Graduate Dean prior to your final thesis defense. Failure to have your new committee approved will result in delays including a required re-do of your final thesis defense.
Your thesis proposal will normally be defended in your 7th semester.
A thesis proposal describes the work that you expect will become the topic of your PhD dissertation. The proposal should describe the problem that you will tackle and your intended method for solving it, demonstrate that your work is novel, and convince your committee that you are likely to succeed.
To accomplish those goals, a thesis proposal is likely to contain the following:
Remember that a thesis proposal is just that: a proposal. It is not a contract with your committee, but a description of where you believe your research will take you. Some early discoveries may derail later plans, so things will shift. You should keep your entire committee informed of substantial changes in the proposal. In some cases it may be useful to get the entire committee together again between the proposal and the final thesis defense.
Finally, the big question: How long should a proposal be? The unhelpful but correct answer is: long enough to get the job done. It will depend largely on the amount of existing work there is on the topic (the literature search) and the work you've done so far. Ultimately you will have to decide what is necessary for your particular thesis and committee. As a helpful guideline (not requirement), you could expect a proposal to be the combined size of 2-3 conference papers. That might turn out to be 20 single-spaced pages of mostly text. (Don't try to squeeze it into 20 pages by fiddling with margins and font size. It needs to be readable and if more than 20 pages is needed, so be it.) If you get up to 40 pages you are almost certainly including too much.
For those working in LaTex, there is a template that meets all the UMass guidelines. https://github.com/umasscs/umassthesis
You should share your thesis proposal with your committee members at least one week in advance of your scheduled defense date, to provide the committee sufficient time to read the proposal and prepare comments. Please determine an appropriate deadline with your advisor to accommodate the schedules of all committee members.
1. At least 30 days in advance of the proposal defense date the student must submit a title, abstract, date, time, confirmation of committee names, and virtual or in-person meeting details to Eileen Hamel at ehamel@cs.umass.edu. CICS will announce the event on the CICS Events Calendar and by email to the seminars email list.
2. Prepare your signature page according to the formatting guidelines specific to the UMass Amherst Graduate School. You may send your unsigned signature page to Eileen for proofing prior to your defense. It is the student's responsibility to obtain committee signatures. Current rules allow electronic signatures to be used with a tool such as DocuSign. You may use your UMass net id to obtain a DocuSign account.
The college name should be written as "Robert and Donna Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences." And the Chair's signature line should be written with the name "Ramesh K. Sitaraman, Associate Dean for Educational Programs and Teaching".
3. Once all committee signatures are on the document it should be sent to Eileen at ehamel@cs.umass.edu. Eileen will obtain the Chair of the Faculty's signature and submit it to the Graduate School. Please attach a pdf of your proposal for our archives.