| name | generate-thesis-directions |
| description | Generate precise research-proposal sketches, thesis questions, and advisor-ready conversation starters from a deep student profile, recent paper evidence, and chair or supervisor matches. Use when asked for research proposals, thesis proposal ideas, proposal directions, topic hypotheses, or questions to discuss with a potential advisor. |
Generate Thesis Directions
Turn evidence from a deep student profile, papers, and chair matches into precise research-proposal sketches that a student can discuss with a supervisor.
Workflow
- Start from an in-session student profile and a small set of chair/researcher matches. If the profile is shallow, ask targeted follow-up questions before generating final proposals.
- Use recent papers and official chair/lab pages gathered by
find-recent-papers and find-university-chairs as grounding evidence.
- Read
references/research-proposal-rubric.md before finalizing proposals.
- Generate 2-4 proposal sketches, each narrow enough to become a first supervisor conversation.
- For each proposal, state the research question, motivation, method, expected evidence, feasibility assumptions, required background, advisor fit, and first validation step.
- Label uncertainty and avoid presenting proposals as official open topics.
Output
For each proposal include:
- working title
- research question
- motivation from cited evidence
- possible methods/data/evaluation
- fit to chair/person
- prerequisites
- feasibility risks and how to de-risk them
- first question to ask in a meeting
Rules
- Say "proposal sketch", "possible direction", or "conversation starter", not "available thesis topic".
- Do not invent datasets, hardware access, supervision capacity, or chair approval.
- Prefer fewer, sharper proposals over many generic ideas.
- Make the student's personal fit visible: why this proposal fits their skills, curiosity, and preferred working style.
- Do not treat old bundled chair, researcher, or paper profiles as the primary source.
- Do not depend on the old UI, backend API, database, Docker, Celery, or FastAPI app.
