How to Write a Students Project Proposal - (2024)

See more videos and subscribe to the Proposal Kit YouTube channel

In this video we're going to show how to create student project type proposals. In many cases students do use Proposal Kit in a few different ways. One could be for writing grant submission proposals for student projects, for PhD thesis reports or just writing fictional business proposals for a class project.

We'll illustrate a few different student project type documents in a few different design themes. In Proposal Kit we have hundreds and hundreds of graphic design themes so you can start out with a design theme that has pre–made graphics and logos which will save you a lot of time setting up a visually complex document. We'll have the headers and footers, background graphics, logos, designs, color schemes all worked in.

We'll illustrate a few different design themes. Whichever one Proposal Pack you purchase that is what all of the documents you create will visually look like and that one design theme you can create any kind of document with. We'll illustrate this first student project document with our Computers #6 design.

Now we just happen to have all of our 500 plus designs in our Wizard here for the demo. Whichever one or more you've purchased will be what you can select in the list here. We've got our Computers #6 design theme selected.

Whenever we're going to create a new document we just click the Document Projects button. Click the Add New Project button and you'll be on the project screen. We're going to turn off the Excel dynamic linking because most students are going to have a basic version Novice Edition of the Wizard and you're not going to have the Excel dynamic linking features.

This just speeds up the demo. The Excel dynamic linking is an Expert level, Professional Kit feature. We'll click the Pick Documents button here.

This is the button you'll click to select the chapters that make up your document. You'll see the first set of check boxes here. These are just the 40 most common chapters used in most proposals.

You actually have access to over 2000 chapters and you get to all 2000 by clicking this drop down and scrolling down through all the subcategories. Every time you pick a different subcategory the list of topics will change. You can use the Search by Name, if you want to find a Budget template, Mission Statement, whatever kind of topic you're looking for just search for it here and you can those to your list.

We're going to illustrate how to quickly get set up using the Quick Start tab. There's hundreds and hundreds of pre–made layouts of chapters. If you click this top drop down you can just narrow that list down we're just going to select the Student Project Proposal list because we have a handful of layouts of chapters that are specifically for student projects and we're going to pick the Computer Lab for Students Educational Proposal layout.

You'll note we picked the Computer #6 design theme to match with the computer lab proposal. Once you highlight one it'll show you what list of chapters. Out of the thousands of chapters this one has a specific 18.

We'll import this into our project and you can see the list of chapters for this document. We can move chapters up and down, change the order, we can remove chapters we don't need and you'll see anything that was imported from the Quick Start list is checked off on whatever list of chapters you're looking at. We can add additional chapters using these check boxes.

Once we're done with our selection of chapters click the OK, Use Selected Templates button and we're back on the project screen. Because we used the Quick Start list it pre–filled in the project name here but you can name this project anything you want. You can fill in the Company Data and Client Data.

Company Data is going to be your name and address information, your phone numbers, email addresses, website and so on. We'll just use ours for this demo and Client Data will be whoever you're writing the proposal to. This could be a fictional company.

If it's a fictional student project, if you applying for a grant this can be the organization or team that you're submitting the grant application to. If you're doing a thesis it might be to whoever you're writing the report to. Okay, once we have all of our chapters selected, all of our options, our data we click the OK, Save Project button and just wait for the Wizard to build you the Word document.

All right, this document's been generated. We'll take a look at it and you can see the name and address information merged in, the list of chapters. This list of chapters has been selected for a student computer lab proposal.

It's ready for you to start filling in the details. Things like the budgets, the financial topics – with the Novice Edition these are just Word tables you're just going to type in your line items and amounts. You do have access to the calculator spreadsheets that you can do your calculations in and you'll just type in the totals over here.

If you're using the Professional Edition that gives you the option to dynamically link the cells of spreadsheets into the Word document. That's probably a little overkill for most student projects but that is an advanced expert level feature. Now we'll illustrate a second student project type document.

We're just going to change the design theme. We'll pick the Contemporary #19. Like before we'll click the Document Projects, we'll dd a new project and we'll use the Quick Start list again.

This time we will pick a PhD Thesis Proposal. This is a general purpose list of chapters for that type of document. Obviously there are so many different ways something like that can be written.

There are over 2000 chapters to pick from and this one has 30. You can completely customize this list of chapters once you import it. This will give you a basic layout to start with and you can use the other tabs Add Templates, Search by Name to completely customize this list of chapters.

Once we're done click the OK button and like before whatever you put in the Company Data and Client Data that is what's going to get merged in and you'll probably give it a more expansive title to really outline the specific type of thesis you're doing. When we're all done filling in the Company Data, Client Data, have our options selected click the OK button and the Wizard builds us a Word document. Okay, this document has been generated we'll take a look at it.

You'll see our company name and address information merged in, the client data information, current date and so on. This is the Contemporary #19 design theme. As we scroll down you can see the Table of Contents and all the chapters that were selected for this PhD thesis document.

As you scroll down you just see everything is ready to start filling in with your actual information. This will be your actual information, you won't ever see our company name or website logo or anything. This is merged in from the Company Data screen and this is just ready to edit in Word.

I'll illustrate a third student project type document and I'll just change the design theme again. The student project proposal this was actually pitching a ranching, like a chicken ranching educational project. We're actually going to illustrate that with a matching design theme.

Once again click the Document Projects button we'll add a new project. Click Pick Documents go over to the Quick Start and we actually have this as a Quick Start layout as well, Ranching Educational Grant Funding proposal – This was actually a student project proposal to get some funding to do a ranching project educational proposal for a group students and this one actually has pre–written content as well. The general purpose templates will actually be filled in with the actual proposal in this case and like before you can remove chapters, add chapters.

If you add chapters to a sample the new chapters you add obviously were never part of the original proposal so those will be general purpose fill in the blank pages. We'll just stick with the original set of 18 chapters and once again when you fill in the Company Data this will be your name and address information. The Client Data in this case since it's a grant it's going to be whoever you are submitting the proposal to for the grant.

When we're ready to build the document just click the OK, Save Project button and wait for it to build the document. All right, now this document has been generated we'll take a look at it. Now you can see instead of general purpose cover letter text this has been text pulled in from the sample.

We didn't fill in the client data information who the grants being submitted to so these are tags but this would be replaced with whatever you would put in the Client Data screen. What we put in the Company Data screen got put in here so this would be your name and address information that would get merged in. Here is that ranching design theme since this is a poultry ranching project proposal.

Here are the list of chapters and you can see this is the sample content instead of the general purpose fill in the blank content. The sample is ready for you to finish filling in. Financial related topic pages like the Budget, Funding Request and so on those will have associated Excel spreadsheets and you can use these to do all your calculations and then just type in the line items and totals into the Word document.

If you're using the expert level Professional version you do have the feature where you can dynamically link Excel spreadsheet cells to the Word document and have the Word document auto update as you're updating your calculations in the spreadsheet. That's probably a little overkill for most student project proposals especially since those are usually one–off documents. With the Novice edition you can just type in the numbers directly into the Word document.

So that is all there is to creating all types of student project type proposal report documents using Proposal Kit.