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.