I'm Professor Gillian Wright, Professor of English and Irish Literature in the College
of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham.
One of the things we ask for when you apply to the University of Birmingham for a Postgraduate
Research programme is a research proposal.
And, to understand what a research proposal is – think, plain and simple, what is your
area of research and what is the thing in it that really matters?
It is definitely a proposal, you don't need to have the answers yet, but it's setting
out – for us – that you've got your own ideas, that you have a research area that
you want to shape, and that you've got distinctive ideas about how to address the questions that
are big in that area.
The best piece of advice I can give you for writing a research proposal is to bear in
mind what we call 'the four Ps'.
That means the person, your preparedness, the project and the place.
So, to unpack each of those terms a bit…
We need to know a bit about you as a person, where you've come from and your academic background,
your area of interest.
Your preparedness: we need to know about what kind of study you've done before, what kind
of skills you've developed on those study programmes.
Or you might have related skills from outside your academic studies – your professional
life, or voluntary work, for instance – that show how prepared you are for that particular
research programme.
Crucially the project – does it add up?
Does it make sense?
And finally, does that project need to take place here?
Think about the place; think about the University of Birmingham.
What is it about this institution that would make it a really good place to carry out your
work.
To write a good research proposal, you need to include enough information.
That means not just setting out the general area but crucially, what are the one or two
really significant questions for your area of research.
It can be quite a challenge to decide how big or how small you need to go, so expect
to work with a potential supervisor on just how to figure that out.
But you should always have one or two striking research questions.
In your research proposal you should also include some of the context – what is going
on in the field?
It's really useful to think about what's going on now and what you think is missing.
So, for some areas that will mean that nothing much has been done since the 1950s and now
is the
time when it needs to be updated.
In other areas, there's a lot going on but there's still a gap, or an angle of approach,
or a particular way of researching it that has been missed.
So think about what's going on there already, and how your project can build on existing
work in the field.
So there's the question, and the context.
There are two other useful elements that should go into the research proposal.
One is how you're actually going to answer your question, what people call 'the methodology'.
What is it?
What actually are you going to do?
Don't be afraid to think of that as the nuts and bolts bit – it's okay to say that you're
just going to sit down and read, and write with a pencil.
But often, there'll be types of research that are very specific to the project, such as
interviewing, or fieldwork, or trips to an archive.
And here it helps to think about what this method is, why it's the right one for your
project, and how it stands to advance your research.
So it's not just that you're going to sit in the archive and look at pretty books, or
pretty images; you also need to say something about what you're actually going to do to
interrogate that information, and why.
And finally, you need to think in your research proposal about what your research and your
analysis will uncover.
You don't need to have the answers yet, but you need to have a good idea as to where your
research might lead, and what kind of conclusions you might reach.
Think of this really as what original contribution might you make to your research area.
Before you start writing a research proposal, the most important thing you can do is make
contact with a potential supervisor.
Typically you might start by sending them the draft of an idea and giving them a flavour
of what your academic experience is up to that point.
Crucially, if you make contact with us we can help advise you on your research proposal,
and that's a really important step with a research degree programme.