Preliminary Project Proposal

The project proposal, as its name implies, is a description of a project that you could potentially work on as your graduate or master’s project or thesis. It should be a project in the specific narrowly-focused topic area that you picked. This is only a preliminary description of a project idea and not expected to be a complete and polished graduate project proposal. The requirements include a description of the proposed work, an evaluation of the merit (especially technical merit) of the proposed work, as well as a list of references to be consulted in the future.

Your description of the project should be enough detail so that the scope of the proposed work is well-defined, and the merit of the proposal is evident. The merit of the proposal is essentially about showing that completing the project would require a significant amount of learning about biomedical information systems-related topics, as well as application of  related concepts; think of this as the academic portion of the merit. Other aspects of merit for the proposal include evaluating the potential uses and benefits for the project. These could include health, political, social, or other benefits as well. There is no length requirement on the project proposal; it should simply be sufficiently descriptive of the proposal. You may assume that the project topic description has been read by anyone who reads your proposal; you do not need to redefine any concepts defined in the project topic description. A copy of the project topic description should be turned in with the proposal.

The final part of this preliminary project proposal is a list of 12 to 20 bibliographic sources that you will have read by the end of the term as part of your preliminary investigation into your topic area and project. You may include the sources you read in preparing the project topic description. As much as possible, you should pick sources that are focused on and relevant for the project you are proposing. And you should try to pick a wide variety of sources, from in-depth scientific academic articles, to overview chapters from a standard textbook, to more generic articles meant for a wider general audience (not necessarily an ISC-related audience). In terms of counting sources, you can count a chapter from a book as one source, so that two chapters from a book would be two sources. Check out more project guidelines on the assignment guidelines page.

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