How to Write a Thesis Proposal for TU and KU: Structure and Common Mistakes

15 July 2026 · 7 min read

Whether you're doing an MBS thesis at TU or a research project at KU, the proposal is where most students lose the most time — not because it's long, but because supervisors send vague proposals back again and again. A strong proposal answers three questions clearly: what exactly are you studying, why does it matter, and how will you study it?

Start with a narrow, researchable title

"Impact of Social Media on Business" will be rejected — it's a topic, not a research question. "Effect of Instagram Marketing on Customer Purchase Intention in Kathmandu's Coffee Shops" can actually be researched: it names the variables, the population and the context. If you can't say what data you would collect, the title is still too broad.

The standard structure

Introduction and background — the context, and the specific problem statement.
Research questions and objectives — usually one general objective and 2–4 specific ones, each measurable.
Literature review — enough to show the gap your study fills, organised by theme.
Methodology — design, population and sample, data collection tools, and analysis plan.
Expected outcomes, limitations and a realistic timeline.
References in the style your department requires (usually APA).

Match objectives to methodology

The most common substantive rejection: objectives that promise one thing while the methodology measures another. If your objective is to "examine the relationship between X and Y," your methodology needs variables, a sample size justification and a statistical test — not just a questionnaire. Walk each objective through your method and check the data you'd collect can actually answer it.

Mistakes supervisors reject immediately

Copy-pasted literature review with no connection to the specific research question.
A sample size with no justification, or a population that's impossible to access.
Objectives written as activities ("to distribute questionnaires") instead of outcomes.
References that don't follow one consistent style, or citations missing from the list.

Your institution's own format overrides everything here

This guide covers what every Nepali thesis proposal has in common, but the document that actually governs your submission is the format your own institution publishes. TU's Faculty of Management, the Institute of Medicine, the Medical Education Commission and Pokhara University each issue their own guidelines, and they differ on things that get proposals returned unread: margins and line spacing, whether the objectives come before or after the problem statement, how the references must be styled, and what has to appear on the cover page.

If you are writing for the Medical Education Commission in particular, do not work from a general TU or KU template. MEC has its own research proposal and thesis guidelines for postgraduate medical programmes, with its own required section order and its own ethical approval requirements, and a proposal built on a management-faculty format will come back.

We keep a separate guide for each of the formats students ask about most. Use the one your programme is assessed against:

MEC Nepal thesis and research proposal guidelines — Medical Education Commission postgraduate format, section by section
MEC Eligibility Certificate for studying medicine abroad — The same commission's pre-departure requirement, documents and fees
IOM (TU) thesis format guidelines — Institute of Medicine, for MBBS, MD and MS submissions
TU thesis proposal format — Tribhuvan University's own proposal structure and cover page
TU thesis guidelines 2026, compared across faculties — FOM, Education, FOHSS and IOST: margins, spacing, APA edition and the 20% similarity rule
MBS thesis proposal format, with a sample — FOM's 8–12 page proposal, section by section
Kathmandu University thesis format — What KU schools publish, including the KUSMS ethics (IRC) submission
BBS 4th year project work proposal — The proposal behind the three-chapter BBS report
TU MBS thesis format guidelines — Faculty of Management, for MBS candidates
PU thesis proposal format — Pokhara University, including the BBA and MBA variants
PU MBA Graduate Research Project (GRP) format — Why it isn't called a thesis, and what it actually requires
TU MA English thesis format guidelines — FOHSS, for close-reading and critical-theory theses
TU MA social science thesis format guidelines — FOHSS, for sociology, rural development and population studies

Where your department has issued a format document of its own, that document wins over all of the above, including this page. Ask for it in writing before you start rather than after your first draft comes back.

Before you submit

Read your department's proposal guidelines — TU faculties and KU schools each have their own format, page limits and chapter names, and following the wrong template is an automatic revision. Then have someone critical read it: if they can't restate your research question in one sentence, neither can your supervisor.

If you'd like expert feedback on your proposal draft — structure, objectives, methodology fit and referencing — Assignment Nepal's researchers can review it. Message us on WhatsApp at +977 9768768340.

Need the full dissertation written chapter by chapter rather than just the proposal reviewed?

Research proposal format in Nepali (शोध प्रस्ताव) — The same structure with Nepali headings and typing rules
Dissertation writing help — Proposal, literature review, methodology, analysis and discussion, with supervisor revisions worked in between drafts

Not sure if your work has plagiarism? Don't worry. Send it to us.

Tell us what you need checked and when it is due. Your document is checked without being stored in any student-paper repository, so the check never counts against your real submission. The reports come back with what each match means, not just a percentage.

Plagiarism report — The full similarity report on your assignment, proposal or chapter: every matched source listed, every flagged passage marked, and a plain read of which matches matter and which are your reference list doing its job.
AI report — The AI writing indicator read separately from similarity, because the two scores behave differently. If the flag looks like a detector artefact on work you wrote yourself, we tell you so, and what evidence answers it.
Thesis report — Similarity and AI reports for a full thesis or dissertation, run chapter by chapter so a problem in the literature review is found while you can still fix it, with each flagged passage explained for your supervisor.