I'm in my second year of an MA in English Literature and just had my thesis proposal rejected for the second time. My advisor says the scope is too broad and I keep trying to cover too much ground in 80 pages. Didn't see this coming after putting in about 3 hours a day for 4 months on it.
The program requires a 75% minimum on the proposal defense to move forward, and I'm at risk of losing funding if I don't get approved by week 32. I've narrowed my focus to postcolonial narrative theory in contemporary African fiction, but now I'm second-guessing whether that's still too wide.
Has anyone gone through multiple proposal rejections and come out the other side? I'm deciding whether to switch advisors or stick it out. The department only allows 3 attempts before you have to reapply to the program entirely, so I can't afford another miss.
Two rejections isn't unusual in humanities programs — my advisor told me 40% of proposals get sent back at least once. What helped me was writing a one-paragraph elevator pitch first, then expanding outward. If you can't explain your thesis in 3 sentences, the scope is probably too wide.
Spend a full week just writing your research questions before touching the proposal draft again. Three clear questions you can actually answer in 80 pages beats a vague continent-wide argument every time.
Postcolonial theory in African fiction is a massive field. Pick one author or one decade rather than the whole tradition. My proposal only passed when I narrowed from '20th-century Latin American fiction' to a 10-year window in one country. Night and day difference in how the committee responded.
I went through something similar in my MA in History. Switching advisors mid-program actually saved me — my new advisor gave written feedback rubrics before every submission. Don't feel locked in just because you've been with the same person for a year.
Most departments also have a hardship extension process that isn't widely advertised.
I went through something similar in my first year, and honestly the scope thing is the hardest lesson to learn because you think covering more makes it more impressive. It doesn't. My first proposal tried to trace a theme across like six authors spanning two centuries and my advisor basically said "this is three dissertations, not one." What changed the second time was I picked one author, one text, one narrow theoretical lens, and asked a question I could actually answer in 80 pages without fudging it.
The thing that helped me most was writing out my argument in two sentences max before I wrote anything else. If I couldn't do that, I hadn't narrowed enough yet. It's frustrating to feel like you're making the project smaller when you've already invested so much, but a tight proposal that does one thing well is way easier to defend than a broad one that gestures at everything. You've got time to redirect this, month 6 isn't as late as it feels right now.
I've been exactly where you are. My first proposal tried to trace feminist theory across three decades of postcolonial literature and my advisor basically laughed me out of the room. What I didn't understand then was that a good MA thesis is a deep drill, not a wide net — pick one text, one angle, one argument and defend it to death. The second time around I narrowed to a single author and a five-year window and it got approved in two weeks.
Honestly the scope problem is super common and it's fixable. If you're doing philosophy-adjacent lit theory, stuff like ma/questions/philosophy helped me figure out where the actual exam expectations sit versus what feels important in your head. Sometimes you realize you've been writing for a scope that doesn't match what the program actually wants. Start with your single strongest claim and build outward from there, not the other way around.
I was in almost the exact same spot two years ago — double rejection, six months in, ready to email my advisor that I was done. What finally clicked for me wasn't some breakthrough idea, it was just getting brutally honest about what I actually couldn't cut. My advisor kept saying "too broad" and I kept thinking I was narrowing it when I really wasn't. The moment I stopped trying to argue three things and committed to arguing one thing really well, the third proposal went through in two weeks.
Don't quit. Seriously. The rejection isn't a sign you're wrong for the program, it's usually a sign you're still thinking like an undergrad trying to prove you know a lot. MA committees want to see you know how to make a focused, defensible claim. Pick your one argument, cut everything that doesn't directly serve it, and resubmit. You've already done the reading. That's actually the hard part.