JHU Mechanical Engineering Dissertation Proposal Template

This is an unofficial LaTeX template for the dissertation proposal for PhD in Mechanical Engineering program at Johns Hopkins University. The program does not require any specific formatting, however, provides some general guidelines on the sections with a suggested page limit to be included in the proposal. This template is created based on those general guidelines.

It is the user's responsibility to discuss with their advisor(s) and committee members about the formatting and styles of the proposal.

Table of Contents

• Description of the repository
• How to use the template on Overleaf
• Document formatting
  • Main proposal document
  • Response document
• Basic user guidelines
  • Before you begin
  • Main proposal document
  • Response document
• Contributing to the project

Description of the repository

File name	Description
01-main.tex	is the main .tex file based on the LaTeX article class in which you will write your proposal. This has all the packages, their settings, customized macros, and the main text section.
02-response.tex	is another plain article class-based .tex file that you can use to prepare your response to committee members in case they make suggestions for your proposal. I hope you do not have to do this. You can use it for writing responses for your journal or conference articles as well.
references.bib	is a biblatex file that contains all the bibliographic items. Use Zotero or some other citation manager to generate the biblatex file with all the citations. I suggest adding all the citation files (for the main proposal and subsequent response) to one single file which means updating the same file when writing the response to avoid clutter.
figures.pdf	is the pdf file that contains all the figures for your proposal. You can also add multiple figure files as well in the main project directory. If you prefer to add a subdirectory for the figures, then you will have to specify \graphicspath{} in the preamble of the document.
01-main.pdf	is the output template PDF file when for the main proposal document
02-response.pdf	is the output template PDF file for the response document.
README.md	is this file that contains all the details related to the template.

Go through both of the .tex files to see what packages have been included and what options are invoked to obtain the current formatting. You can tweak the options or add more packages to format the document to your preference or field-specific requirements.

How to use the template on Overleaf

Since Johns Hopkins provides the Overleaf premium account for all of its affiliates, I recommend using Overleaf for this template. Follow one of the two approaches to get started with this project on Overleaf. Then go through the 00-main.tex file and other files to see how the template is structured.

• You can download/clone this repository from GitHub, and compress it as a zip file. Go to Overleaf, Click on New Project -> Upload Project, then upload the zipped folder. You can now work on the project.

• If you have your Overleaf and GitHub account linked and want to have copies of the project in both places, you can fork this repository. Then go to Overleaf and click on New Project -> Import from GitHub, it should list the forked project for listing. Once imported, you can start working on the project.

• Once the project is opened, for the main proposal document, compile 01-main.tex and for the response to the committee document, compile 02-response.tex. You will have to compile them separately. These files should compile separately without any errors; you may ignore warnings (if any). In your first submission to the thesis proposal committee, response text should not be necessary. During resubmission (if your committee members require you to do so), compile them separately and if you need to submit them as one document, just merge them using the Preview app on macOS or online PDF tools.

Note

This template is not available on Overleaf Gallery as it takes time to release any big fix or minor updates (Overleaf also discourages doing such as well). For the same reason, this is also not available as a class on CTAN since it will require the user to have access to the most updated version of LaTeX distribution, and making the updates available will be difficult.

Tip

Although it is very convenient to write your document on Overleaf, strongly consider backing up your work using Git or GitHub integration or the Dropbox sync feature. This may save you from losing your document in case of an accident. The latter approach of using this template may save you from hassle.

Document formatting

Main proposal document

• The margin used in both documents (proposal and response) is 1.0in for all sides with no header and special footer except for the pagination at the bottom center inside the margin. Look into this first to understand how space is managed in LaTeX.

  • The title page of the main proposal document does not have any pagination. The pagination counter starts from the abstract page with the Roman numeral ii and continues throughout the front matter. For the main text in the proposal document, the pagination resets in Arabic starting from 1. The pagination is placed in the footer (bottom center) of the document.

• The document is typeset using Latin Modern Roman font (loaded using the lmodern package) with a single-spaced 12 pt font size for the main text.

  • For the proposal title, I used \large\bfseries\MakeUppercase (boldface 14.4 pt).
  • For the section headings, I used \singlespacing\large\bfseries (boldface 14.4 pt) with an underline throughout the width of the page.
  • For the subsection headings, I used \normalsize\bfseries (boldface 12 pt) whereas for the subsubsection headings, I used \normalsize\itshape (italic 12 pt).
  • For the table and figure captions, I used \small (10.95 pt).
  • For the footnotes, I used \footnotesize (10 pt), and footnotes are single-spaced with 0.5\baselineskip spacing between each footnote.

• The title page of the main proposal document is inspired by thesis/ dissertation formatting provided by the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Library but it was customized to my preference since there is no specific guideline/ requirement to it. If you have more than two committee members besides your advisor or have multiple advisors/ co-advisors, you can use the minipage environment to fit the full committee on the title page. You may change the style of it entirely to fit your necessity (spacing, details of affiliation information, etc.)

  • The title page starts with a statement that is placed 1 inch from the top of the page followed by a tentative title for the thesis and the author placed with 0.5 inches and 0.25 inches spacing relative to each other. These contents are center-justified on the page.
  • Thesis advisor and proposal committee members with their affiliations are included next in a left justified on the page. Depending on the situation, you may need to change the format of this (see below).
  • Location and date are placed in two different single-spaced lines followed by the committee members.
  • An optional copyright statement is placed approximately 1.5 inches from the bottom of the place in a single line.

• Front matters are placed following the title page in this order: Abstract, Table of Contents (ToC), List of Tables (LoT), and List of Figures (LoF).

  • In case you do not have any table or figure, you will not need LoT and LoF, respectively.
  • The section headings for these environments are placed 1 inch from the top of the page.
  • Text in the Abstract is single-spaced.
  • The Table of Contents (ToC), List of Tables (LoT), and List of Figures (LoF) are single-spaced. The titles of these environments are treated as of a similar type as the section headings, i.e., the same font size and type with underlining below them.
  • Spacing between sections, tables, and figure entries in the TOC, LOT, and LOF are 0.75\baselineskip. Spacing between two consecutive subsections and subsubsections in TOC are smaller.

• Following the suggested outline by the department, in the main proposal document, the following sections are included, however, you can include other sections by consulting your advisor or committee members.

  • The Background and significance section has a page limit of 2 pages.
  • The Research objectives section has a page limit of 1 page.
  • The Proposed methodology and results section has a page limit of 4 pages.
  • The Planned publications section has no page limit. This section contains a list of papers you already published or planning on publishing.
  • The Timeline has no specific format/ limits on the page. You should include a chart or table showing a tentative timeline to finish the project.
  • The Acknowledgement section is optional. Thank the people who helped you along the way and funding sources as well.
  • The Bibliographic references lists all the citations from your main text following a specific format based on your discipline

• For the main text of the main proposal document, there are three levels of paragraph-style environments (section, subsection, subsubsection) for writing. All of them are shown in the Table of Contents as well.

  • The spacing around the section, subsection, and subsubsection headings are chosen to be default offered by the parskip package. The paragraphs do not have any indentation with \baselineskip spacing in between them.

• The default spacing between rows inside a table environment is single-spaced to be consistent with the overall document formatting.

• Captions for the table and figure environments are placed at the bottom of the environments. The caption starts with boldfaced Figure and Table labels, respectively, for Figure and Table, and uses chapter-wise numbering separated by a period between the section label and the number of the corresponding environment followed by a colon before the long caption.

• Equation numbers are also preceded by section numbers as defined by the following command:

  \numberwithin{equation}{section}       

• The back matter includes the bibliographic references in a single-spaced format with 6 pt (0.5\baselineskip) between each bibliographic item. The default bibliography style is the Nature style bibliography. Depending on the discipline, you may have to change it; the details are given below.

• Currently, no appendix section is available, but you can add it if you need to.

Response document

The response document is based on the standard LaTeX article class that does not have any specialized title page. The document has a standard title-author block at the beginning of the document. The document has a 1.0-inch margin on every side. Arabic numeral 1 is used for pagination from the first page placed in the bottom center inside the margin with no header.

• It does not have any special front matter (abstract, list of different environments, etc.) as well.

• For each member of the committee, the document has a dedicated section that starts on a new page and contains the questions and responses as numbered items. To provide your response, you can add figures, tables, citations, etc. as needed.

  • Tables and Figures have the same format as the main document.

• The back matter of the document has a Bibliographic reference section which is of the same format as the main proposal document, i.e., single-spaced bibliographic items with 0.5\baselineskip between them.

Tip

If you change any formatting or do further customization, one of the best possible ways to check consistency in spacing is to load the fgruler package as below in the preamble (you can change the options by looking into the documentation of this package).

\usepackage[unit=in,type=upperleftT,color=red,showframe]{fgruler}

Basic user guidelines

Before you begin

Overleaf has a huge collection of tutorials and examples on different LaTeX-related typesetting topics (margins and page size, math, table, footnote, and bibliography management). You will most likely find what you need there. If you would like to do something specific, your best friend is Google; someone on TeX StackExchange has perhaps done it. Currently, both of the documents are filled with randomly generated text by the blindtext package and some example environments. Remove them to get started with your writing.

Main proposal document

The preamble section of both of the .tex files has been subdivided into multiple sections to make the code understandable and readable. A simple descriptions of the sections are below:

• Most of the necessary variables to customize the format and the style of the document are included at the beginning of the .tex file in the LIST OF VARIABLES FOR FORMATTING section. You can customize different spacing and font style options using these variables. For most cases, tweaking these variables to your needs and preferences will be enough to get the desired formatting.

• The most common and popular packages for writing your dissertation proposal are added in the LaTeX CLASS AND PACKAGES sections. Check the packages; add any additional package you need and/or customize your options there. For some packages, they are already loaded with the options specified in that section. For some other packages, options are specified in the PACKAGE OPTIONS section. Based on the declared variables and loaded packages and their options, formatting-related customized settings are available in the DOCUMENT FORMATTING section.

• Some essential macros related to different redefined environments are available OTHER MACROS (will be discussed below).

• Add your math macros to the MATH MACROS section. Some examples of simple math macros are added there in the template. You can add more.

• If you do not like the default font of this template (Latin Modern Roman), you can try a different font or combination of fonts. However, you should be careful about having consistent typesetting, especially between math and text. Follow this old discussion on StackExchange to learn more about fonts in LaTeX.

  • This TUG page lists fonts that provide math support. But Overleaf may not have all of the packages listed there, and some of the packages may raise conflict with other packages that are already loaded. You can try and figure out which works best for you.
  • The font package has been loaded using the \usepackage{\FontPackage} command in the DOCUMENT FORMATTING section of the preamble. Depending on the Font you choose, you may have to add additional options/ packages (follow the above webpage) and simply changing the \FontPackage variable may not work.

• If you find the main text is too tightly spaced, you can space out the content by using \onehalfspacing or \doublespacing instead of \singlespacing for the main text in both .tex files. In this case, you will have to change the spacing for other environments as well to have a consistently formatted document.

• In case you change text spacing, you most likely would need to change the spacing around the headings of different environments that are managed by the parskip package. I found the default settings to be working fine for me. But if you would like to customize it, you can add the following command in the preamble:

  \titlespacing*{<environment-name>}{<space-left>}{<space-before>}{<space-after>}

• The table of contents (ToC), list of figures (LoF), and list of tables (LoT) are considered to be equivalent to unnumbered sections in this template. The tocloft package was used to manage this typesetting for the title. If you do not want any or one of these items to appear in your document to keep the document concise, you can comment out or delete the relevant commands in the FRONT MATTER section of the 01-main.tex file.

• Every section (numbered or unnumbered) is followed by a \titlerule. If you do not like the appearance of it, you can delete it to make it appear a little bit more cleaner and less distracting. Check the DOCUMENT FORMATTING section in the 01-main.tex file.

  • However, the \hrule command is added to the ToC, LoF, and LoT in the front matter section of the 01-main.tex file manually. If you would like to remove them, look into the FRONT MATTER section in the 01-main.tex file.

• I used the unnumbered \sect{}, \subsect{}, and \subsubsect{} environments in the main proposal document to avoid confusion with the numbering scheme of my objectives, tasks, and subtasks. These environments are defined in the OTHER MACROS section in the preamble.

  • If you would them to be numbered, you can change them to a standard numbered section and subsection by using the default \section{}, \subsection{}, and \subsubsection{} environments.
  • If you like any sections to be unnumbered and also not appear in the TOC, then you can use standard * environments; such as \section*{}, \subsection*{}, and \subsubsection*{} etc.

• Add all of your figures to the main directory. You can also add the figures to a specific subdirectory if you would like. In that case, you will have to define the subdirectory in \includegraphicspath{} command.

  • Regardless of the file extension and program you use to produce the figure, it is a good practice to ensure the fonts within the images are embedded.

• If you would like to customize the spacing inside a table globally throughout the document, you can change the variable \GlobalTableSpacing. However, I suggest doing it locally by defining a group for each table (StackExhange or StackOverflow is your friend here) where you can redefine \arraystretch for the individual tables as needed. Also if the table is wider than the page during editing, you may want to use the landscape tables which are placed sideways and may go over multiple pages (someone on StackExhange or StackOverflow has done it for sure).

• For wide tables, you can use the sideways environment from the rotating package which will print our table in landscape mode.

• For enumerate and itemize environments, customize the spacing to ensure it is consistent with the spacing of the document (the default is single-spaced, however, you can change it as mentioned before).

• To use colors in your writing (such as hyperlinking or text coloring) or drawing, you can consider using the xcolor package with the dvipsnames option (already loaded with this option in the preamble). Check using colors in LaTeX on Overleaf.

• You can use the \linenumbers command from the lineno (already loaded) package anywhere inside the main text document when you would like to have line numbers on the left margin. It might be useful during the drafting stage.

• You may consider using the microtype package to have a better typography of your document. Check details on using microtype package for writing a thesis here.

  • Customizing the settings for this package is an involved process and requires some effort. It also depends on the font type being used. Thus I kept it as minimal as possible. But you are welcome to explore more.
  • It is best not to use the protrusion option from the microtype package for the TOC, LOT, and LOF. So they are locally deactivated around these.

• The name of your bib file has to be specified in the BibFileName variable in the LIST OF VARIABLES FOR FORMATTING section. If your bib file has a different name than the given file, then change the variable name or the file name.

• To change the default form of the bibliography (currently, a Nature style is activated), look for the following command and change the options based on your need and/or preference. Depending on the discipline, you may need to use different citation formats such as IEEE, ACM, APA, ACS, AIP/ APS, AMS, MLA, etc. As an example, APA and IEEE styles are also shown in the template as well (commented). Customization can be done by changing options within [ ... ] of the following command.

  \usepackage[ ... ]{biblatex}

• For other citation styles, you may have to scavenge through the internet a little bit to have a properly formatted bibliography. Learn more about the citation styles in BibLaTeX and check out biblatex-related packages on TUG.

• Bibliographic references are printed using the following command which will ensure the citations included in the \mybibexclude{} command are not printed.

  \clearpage \phantomsection
  \BibTextSpacing
  \printbibliography[title={Bibliographic references},heading=bibintoc,notcategory=mypapers]
  \clearpage

Caution

BibLaTeX is a more modern and flexible package (compared to the natbib package and BibTeX engine) primarily based on the biber backend engine. The biblatex package works differently than the older bibtex package (which is still available and widely used by many journals). The .bib file for biblatex is a little different than the one for bibtex. If you have a bibtex compatible file, then change the option from backend=biber to backend=bibtex for the biblatex package. But you may get warnings and errors thrown by the LaTeX compiler in this case.

Tip

Use a citation manager to generate a biblatex compatible file directly. I use Zotero with the Better BibTeX plugin and export my .bib with the Better BibLaTeX compatible format.

Response document

The LaTeX code of the 02-response.tex file has been arranged in a similar way as the 01-main.tex. So most of the suggestions given above will apply to this as well.

• Questions or suggestions are written in a different color (RoyalBlue) than the actual response using the xcolor package with the dvipsnames option. You can change the color to your preference. You can use this package to add colors in other cases as well; check using colors in LaTeX on Overleaf.

• For tables, figures, bibliography, footnotes, and any other special environments, follow the suggested format given above for the main proposal document.

Tip

If you find all the packages and their settings and macros to be overwhelming and distracting during writing and editing, you can cut and paste all these contents to a separate my-preamble.tex file (name it as you like) in the project directory. Then you can use the command \input{my-preamble.tex} to make your main file appear cleaner and less distracting. See managing a large project on Overleaf.

Note

Sometimes even if you have done everything right after fixing an error, Overleaf still may not compile your files because of cache. In that case, click on the Logs and Output Files option beside the Recompile button, then click on the Clear cached files button at the bottom, and Recompile the files again.

Keep writing ... and good luck with the proposal/ candidacy 🎉!

Contributing to the project

This template was kept sufficiently general purpose for with some customization examples for special packages or macros for demonstration purposes. Since there are no specific formatting requirements available, I do not plan on actively maintaining this repository. But if you have questions, I would be happy to help! Also, if any package becomes obsolete or you have better ideas to implement something, you can create an issue or make a pull request.