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Capstone Proposal Guidelines

Overview

The Capstone Proposal is a short, roughly 5-page document, designed to establish the scope of your capstone project. In the Proposal, you clearly state your Central Hypothesis and Specific Aims. You then detail the project approach and the steps that you will take to ensure scientific rigor in your project.

This will help you and your mentor review your experimental design and ensure that your experiments have scientific rigor. This will also help you define the scope and expectations of your project with your committee.

ONLINE Resources

The structure of a capstone proposal is loosely based on the structure of an NIH Application; more specifically, the Research Strategy part of the NIH application.

An NIH application is far more complicated than what we are looking for in a Capstone Proposal. That being said, you review the following information to get a general idea of how to structure your Proposal. Make sure that you focus primarily on the information of the research strategy section.

Organization

The Capstone Proposal contains the following sections:

Sections in a Capstone Proposal

  • Title
  • Significance
  • Outlook and Innovation
  • Approach
  • Budget
  • Timeline
  • Citations

Sections

Title Page

Come up with a title that is straightforward, clear, and partially understandable even to non-experts. The punnier the better. Also include your name and the names of your committee members, their departments, and their emails.

Significance

The Significance section is used to describe concisely and realistically the goals of your proposed project and to summarize the expected outcome(s). With this section, you will set the stage for your specific aims and the central hypothesis of your capstone project.

The Significance section should be organized as follows:

Organizational Components of the Significance Section

  • Background. What is the current state of knowledge of the anatomy in question?
  • Rationale. What is the missing gap, controversy, or problem to solve?
  • Central Hypothesis. Your hypothesis stated as a testable statement
  • Specific Aims. The main objectives of your project. What you will do to test your Hypothesis and resolve the Rationale.

Background

The Significance section introduces your Capstone project. The first sentence of the Significance section should clearly outline the overall purpose of your project. Ideally, the very first word in the first sentence should convey this purpose effectively. Then, you follow with several sentences that provide an overview of the current knowledge and observations in the relevant clinical, research, or educational field of your project. Your background section should only cover information directly pertinent to your project—we don't need a comprehensive Wikipedia entry here. That being said, this is a Modern Human Anatomy Capstone project, so you be sure include a discussion of anatomy relevant to your project.

Critically, your background should set the stage for the rationale.

Rationale

The rationale is the reason why your project should be done in the first place and highlights a missing gap in the relevant clinical, research, or educational field.

Background versus Rationale

Background: We know this and this and that Rationale: BUT, we don't know this

Your rationale should inform the hypothesis.

Since we don't know this, we need to test it in some fashion.

Central Hypothesis

A scientific hypothesis is a testable statement that explains what is expected to happen in an experiment, based on the prior knowledge and observations that you introduced in the background. It is a tentative explanation for what is missing in your rationale. A good central hypothesis anchors your different Specific Aims to a common theme.

State your hypothesis as a testable sentence (not as a question). In the proposal, the central hypothesis should be a stand-alone sentence, prefaced by "Central Hypothesis" in bold.

State your Hypothesis as a stand-alone sentence

Central Hypothesis. your hypothesis here.

A strong hypothesis should be well-focused and testable by the Specific Aims and experiments. If you have more than one hypothesis, state each hypothesis as a separate bullet-point

Specific Aims

Follow your central hypothesis by stating your specific aims.

A specific aim is a concise statement within a research proposal that clearly outlines the primary goal or objective of a study, that details what you intends to achieve.

You should have at least two specific aims. State each Aim as a single bullet point, as follows:

State your Specific Aims as bullet points

We will test this hypothesis with the following specific aims:

  • Specific Aim 1: your Specific Aim 1
  • Specific Aim 2: your Specific Aim 2

Outlook and Innovation

In this section, You should discuss the Outlook:

  • What’s the payoff to the world once you have completed your Aims?
  • Who cares?
  • Why is this important?

You should also detail the innovative scholarship, creativity, and any new knowledge that your project will be creating.

  • New concepts, approaches, and/or methodologies.
  • Improvements on previous approaches.

Section Format. You can state your outlook and innovation in paragraph form or as bullet points of innovations.

Approach

The approach section is where you expand on your two Specific Aims and explain how they will answer your overall hypothesis. Here you will outline your methods and statistics.

Your approach should clearly demonstrate scientific rigor: the strict application of the scientific method to ensure unbiased and well-controlled experimental design, methodology, analysis, interpretation, and reporting of results.

Your aims should be related, but one aim shouldn't depend on the outcome of the other aim. It's nice to have two aims, in case one aim doesn't work.

Also, design your aims so that multiple outcomes are interesting. For example, if your Aim is to demonstrate that "A causes B" and A doesn't cause B, then your aim comes to an end. But if the question is “Does A cause B or non-B,” then either outcome will be interesting. Make sure that both B and non-B make sense in terms of your central hypothesis.

Approach Format

Break your Approach down into two sections that discuss your two specific aims.

The very first sentence in your approach should start with the words, in bold,

Specific Aim 1:

Following the colon, you should then re-state Specific Aim 1. After that sentence, you can go then on to describe how you are going to test your aim. At a minimum, you should have two paragraphs in your Approach. The first paragraph will start with the words Specific Aim 1: and the second paragraph will start with the words Specific Aim 2:

Make sure for each Aim that you cover the following:

  • Rationale — what is the gap this aim will be filling
  • Discussion of Preliminary results (if any)
  • Overview of the methods and statistics that will be used
  • Expected outcomes and interpretations
  • Potential Pitfalls and Alternative Strategies

Budget

If you need to buy anything for your capstone project that your mentor cannot provide, then you are going to need a budget.

In this section, create a line item budget for any purchases necessary for your capstone. Be sure to detail the rationale for each line item. Make sure that your budget does not exceed $1000.

To receive the funds, you will need to fill out a separate request form and submit this form to the finance committee. Please note: Items purchased without a budget and request form will not be reimbursed.

If you do not intend to request funds, please state that No Funds will be requested.

Timeline

The timeline for your capstone project should include the following:

  • Current progress
  • The dates you plan to complete your aims.

Detail your current progress in meeting your goals.

On Time and Tense

A note on time. Write the aims of your proposal in present future tense: "Anatomy is great. We will do this and we will do that."

On the standard MHA Capstone Project timeline, you will write your capstone proposal in the fall semester. So, you may have already started to work on what you are "proposing." That's fine, but you still write your proposal in future tense.

In the spring semester, we will switch to writing the written report, which is a final accounting of what you accomplished for your capstone project. This report is written in past tense, even though as you are writing it, some of the results may be not be completed. That's OK. You want to manifest the completion of your report, plus, its standard to write reports, things that you tested, in past tense.