Finding and Proposing a Ph.D. Dissertation Topic

What makes a good Ph.D. dissertation? How do you find a topic? When should you propose?

The crowning achievement of a Ph.D. degree is the dissertation—a document that captures a coherent body of research that contributes to overall knowledge in a particular field.

To many Ph.D. students, a dissertation can sound daunting—it’s a long document (usually at least 100 pages, often approaching 200 pages) that encompasses several years of work. In actuality, the dissertation is not quite as mammoth as it sounds, because much of the research that is done over the course of the degree program is ultimately written up as publications, and often some (if not most) of the content from those publications can be re-purposed when writing the dissertation itself.

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The challenge in writing a dissertation is not so much in writing the document itself, but in preparing to write it, by virtue of doing the research, and weaving a set of smaller research projects into a single coherent narrative. The reason a computer science Ph.D. takes five years is not because it takes five years to write a dissertation. Rather, it takes about three to four years to identify the topic of the dissertation, and about one to two years to…