November 5, 2011

  • Presenting my PhD proposal

    Presenting my PhD proposal

    #Studies

    Yesterday morning I made final touches to my PhD proposal for a doctorate in #Industrial_Engineering. Small cosmetic changes but crucial for communicating progress and showing how a line of logic flows through my presentation. I changed some of the order of slides. I planned for enough time to ensure that I can go through the presentation at least twice. I felt confident when I got into my car to go to the university.

    I met with my professor a his offices. He was still busy sending away an e-mail so I sat and chat with another PhD candidate. He is 56 years old and doing a PhD, defining a three dimensional knowledge cube with which he can improve a commercial success event - the likelihood of making a sale when a potential buyer of a product make the decision to buy. He hopes that by defining and using this cube he would be able to better predict the likelihood of a successful sale. In the mean time Prof finished and the three of us first went for a lunch in a quaint little shop in the outskirt of Stellenbosch. I enjoyed the time to get to the know them a bit better on a personal level. What a person orders from the menu and the way they address the waiter is always tells something interesting about the person. We drifted between small talk and the upcoming presentations. After lunch we headed to the venue where we met with one of the panel members. 

    The panel already had a morning of listening five proposals for dissertation for a Masters degree in Industrial engineering. What was left for the day was our two PhD proposals and one more presentation for a masters's dissertation. The presentation for the masters was very ambitious. The young man wanted to investigate three very huge areas of Innovation, Knowledge management and Strategic alliance to investigate how it overlap. I recommended that he rather choose one of these areas and then look at how that area can be improve the using the other areas. His current proposal would be too wide and lead to nothing. Other people also commented on his presentation ... all in a positive manner with the aim of showing him how he should change his proposal to ensure better success in delivering his dissertation. 

    My fellow #PhD candidate did his presentation in terms of the knowledge cube.  Although he did an excellent job, they pointed quickly to a flaw in the methodology...an area he agreed was lacking. He will have to go and rethink his hypothesis...to incorporate the better the emotional decision making side of the buy decision. His cube mainly focused on product characteristics and not on the influence of the decision maker's state at the point of the success event.

    I did my presentation in full Toastmaster mode...filled with energy, eye contact...pauses, gestures etc. etc... I gave a short but comprehensive historical review of how Industrial engineering developed as a discipline to address the type of problem I will be addressing. At completion the head of the Head of the Department's immediate comment was that it was the best presentation they have heard.... Of course that left a big smile on my face. Lots of positive comments followed. They could not find anything wrong with the proposal but express valid concerns about how I would validate the final end result and requested that I make sure my hypothesis place the focus on the reference framework I want to deliver and not on the improvement of democratic processes....since the latter would be difficult to proof. Another panel member made an excellent proposal on how I can approach the validation in a more structured way. It is a good suggestion which I will look into when finalizing the proposal. 

    One of the panel members from another university said he was overall impressed by the quality of the presentations...It is much better than that he experienced at the other university...I think the professor was happy with that comment. 

    I felt tired afterwards. (The previous night I went to bed at 3:00 am and got up at 6:00.) The rest of the evening I did nothing...just relaxed and replenished my energy levels. I am satisfied that I am one step further down the path towards this goal that eluded me for such a long time. I still have to make another presentation to an external panel of experts before I can say the proposal has been adopted. Small steps finishes the journey.

     

     

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