Doctoral project management

An orientation prompt that most people answer as a tour. The second half asks what the recommendation deck tells you about your own project idea, which is a judgement.

This is a recruitment task with a deadline and an approval gate, and it is yours. Treating it as paperwork produces a committee member who agreed politely and is unreachable in month four.

Four criteria are named and only one of them can fail invisibly. Each point can be clear, simple and correct while the set of them does not hang together — and alignment is what the committee reads for.

The tasks you control are the easy part. What decides whether this timeline survives is the queue at the IRB and the availability of people who do not report to you.

Nothing here is intellectually hard and that is exactly why it goes wrong. This is a completeness check across two systems, and the whole point is to fail it now rather than at the IRB in Topic 3.

There are no findings to present — the project has not run. What is being defended is a set of decisions, and the committee's job is to test whether they hold together.

This is the first pass, so it will be wrong in places — and that is fine. What it must not be is internally inconsistent, because every later document inherits this structure.