Why Write a Thesis?: Alternatives to the traditional route

The thesis as the gateway to a degree is a time honored tradition, dating back to the middle ages. First, it demonstrates the breadth and scope of master's student's knowledge. Second, the long-suffering, mostly independent work put into it indicates that they are ready to work in their fields. Or.. does it?

They want more time in the lab than behind the screen.

This still-new millennium has so far been a time to rethink academic traditions. Collaborative projects are becoming more en vogue, and in fact, more practical.  And if we're being practical, what does writing really have to do with showing one's knowledge in fields like engineering and chemistry? The long-form monograph is having to work hard to argue for its value, especially when even academic readers today have shortened attention spans and prefer to consume data and ideas in more digestible nuggets. Tables upon tables with pages upon pages of analysis? Please no! How about an interactive infographic?

Universities are notoriously slow to change anything but their logos, but alternative theses are nevertheless beginning to gain a foothold at graduate programs around the world, and in the US. So, before you dive into a master's degree, perhaps consider whether you really want to write a thesis? And where can you go to school that will allow you to forgo that long journey?

Some thesis alternatives:

Juried Lecture

A juried lecture is a bit like the oral defense of the thesis... but without a thesis. Granted, since the written component is not as substantial (you may have powerpoint slides, handouts, anything that makes sense for attendees at a lecture), you will be graded harder on the oral and presentational components of your work. Your advisors attend this as they would a thesis defense. This option seems excellent for a student who wants to continue to teach rather than focus on research. Or for someone who is flipping their degree into a more communication oriented role.

Should they write a paper about it? Or show us how it works?

Project and Presentation and/or Report

This option is available at some schools (including NIU) in departments such as Engineering. Rather than spending months working on a written document, the student is able to focus on project management, down to the nuts and bolts and blueprints. The project must be reported on or presented, in order to have something to submit for the degree requirement. Do you want to study something that lends itself better to a project than a "paper"?

Multiple Article Publications (or 3-Part Thesis)

Some departments, especially in the sciences where frequent publication is important and somewhat easier to do than in the humanities, offer a publication option. Often this will consist of  publishing multiple short articles, or writing multiple short article length pieces and submitting those as a thesis. The article size stays manageable, unlike the onerous task of producing a monograph. Some departments at NIU offer this option. Check with graduate directors in the departments you are interested in to find out the details.

Collaborative Thesis

Collaboration is key! It's key to avoiding reproducing work in the sciences, it's key to understanding one another in the social sciences, and it's key to getting something off the ground in engineering, where not everyone can know everything! Collaboration across disciplines is something embraced more and more by universities too. At NIU, we see geologists working with geographers (seems likely) but we also see computer scientists working with geographers and dietitians. Hmm. All of these crossovers, likely and not so likely, lead to better research. We have always known that two heads are better than one. So it is a shame that universities are moving very slowly when it comes to "allowing" a collaborative thesis. While collaboartive work is often encouraged, scholars are producing separate theses and dissertations. Perhaps we could simplify this, and even make the impact of each scholar's work farther reaching.

In the future:

Maybe you could perform your thesis?

Perhaps none of the above thesis alternatives are really alternative enough for you? Consider that in the arts, a show or a recital is often the student's "thesis." Maybe thinking completely outside the box of "school project" or "graduate thesis paper" could lead to even more options for the master's candidate.

Some suggestions we've gotten are a documentary, an interactive website, a database, or a new translation with an introduction. All of these sound as if they would take immense knowledge of a subject, and would easily demonstrate proficiency in researching in that subject.

Who knows how long it will take the slow mechanisms of the university system (and culture) to allow for such potentially amazing collaboration and creativity in research. But I hope we don't have to wait another millennium.

The Future of the Dissertation Is Already Here

This post was contributed by Carolyn Law, Thesis and Dissertation Advisor in the Graduate School at NIU

James Whiton: "Aren't you jealous?"

How did we get here?
To talk about the future of the dissertation, you must understand a little something about its past. To say the dissertation has changed over the centuries is an understatement.

The first three doctorates in the U.S. were awarded at Yale in 1861. A dissertation was required, but only one of the documents survives today, the notorious dissertation of James Morris Whiton. It was handwritten, of course, entirely in Latin--six whole pages on the subject, “Brevis vita, ars longa” (Rosenberg, 1961).

Today, the average length of a doctoral dissertation in the sciences is hovering around 200 pages. There was a dramatic surge in length between 1950 and 1990 (Gould, 2016, p. 28), probably for a number of reasons. For one thing, literature reviews over time have grown because, frankly, there’s just more literature to review now and that body of literature is more easily accessed by students. Also, new theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and experimental procedures are often more complex, unfamiliar, and difficult to explain in academic prose than in earlier eras.

But much of the change in dissertations over the course of the 20th century was conspicuously driven by technology. A dissertation in the 1950s was produced on a manual typewriter with carbon paper. Corrections were made with a razor blade. I wrote my own master’s thesis on an IBM Selectric typewriter. By the time I got to doctoral study in the early 1990s, computers were available, but not universally used.

Memories...

Big change was occurring in the access chain as well. A dissertation has always been a public document, but until very recently “public” did not mean “accessible.” Dissertations were typed directly or photocopied onto cotton-bond paper, bound, and shelved in research libraries. They were very rarely accessed and many (like two thirds of Yale’s PhD class of 1861) have been lost forever.

In 1938, a little firm in Ann Arbor began microfilming and archiving dissertations, mostly because they were a technology company in search of content and the massive stock of dissertations presented a perfect pool of material. UMI is today known as ProQuest International and it is the largest database and repository of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in the world. In 2008, NIU made electronic submission of digital theses and dissertations (in PDF) mandatory. These documents are now discoverable and in some cases fully downloadable anywhere in the world, any time of day or night.

Recognizing the acceleration of technological change in the way research and scholarship are produced and shared in the 21st century, the Council of Graduate Schools convened a symposium in January 2016 on the future of the dissertation, citing “recent controversies about the purpose of doctoral education and the meaning of the dissertation” (Blackwell, 2015, p. 1). What came out of that meeting suggests that the future of the dissertation must include a heart-to-heart discussion of the role of doctoral education in general in the 21st-century knowledge marketplace. That’s changing too. More accurately, it has changed, but graduate education and its grand artifact, the dissertation, are lagging far behind the times.

Where do we go from here?
Graduate schools are just now beginning to grapple with three prominent issues arising in this evolving new-century context: authorship, access, and format. Some of the discussions we must continue to have include:

NIU students collaborating in a study lounge.

Collaboration and Coauthorship 
Most knowledge is created in groups, and in some disciplines the particular skills required to work in teams are absolutely essential to the successful conduct of an individual study as well as the professional development of the student-researcher. Shouldn’t dissertations be allowed to reflect that real-world process?

Open Access 
Knowledge that is not shared might as well not exist, and a dissertation that is not accessible fails to achieve one of its primary purposes. According to Maureen McCarthy (2016), Assistant Director of Advancement and Best Practices for the Council of Graduate Schools, “The idea of the dissertation moving a student from a private to a public phase resurfaced repeatedly” (p. 1) throughout the symposium in 2016. But the public nature of the dissertation in the 21st century is not the same as it was in the 20th. The internet, full-text downloadability, Creative Commons licensing, none of this was even imaginable when dissertations were routinely shelved in brick-and-mortar buildings. On the one hand, such accessibility furthers knowledge dramatically, but on the other hand, that accessibility may run counter to tenure review policies that privilege conventional publication. Shouldn’t dissertation authors choose their own levels of exposure? Shouldn’t students maintain control over their own intellectual property?

Alternative Formats 
In recent years, the idea of the monograph dissertation, an extended discourse on a single topic or experiment, has been challenged. The two most common complaints are that these papers take too long to write and they are not representative of the kinds of writing expected of working researchers. In economics, for instance, the norm now is the “three-article dissertation,” in which the author bundles a series of shorter pieces under a unifying introduction. In other disciplines, the very nature of the “document” itself is being questioned, introducing multimedia, graphical representation, and other digital forms into the dissertation genre. Shouldn’t dissertations be allowed to fly free from the cage of the page when it is technologically feasible and intellectually meaningful to do so?

Dance your dissertation!

These are just some of the questions, not thoughtfully crafted, negotiated policies. But we must ask the questions to arrive at the policies. And we need the policies soon. What do you think? We welcome your comments.








----------------------------------------------------
 References

Blackwell, J. (July 2015). Rethinking the dissertation: An opinion piece. GradEdge [Council of Graduate Schools], 4(6), pp. 1-3. 

Gould, J. (7 July 2016). Future of the thesis. Nature, 535, pp. 26-28.

McCarthy, M. (March 2016). The dissertation’s many futures [summary of the January 2016 symposium on the future of the dissertation]. GradEdge [Council of Graduate Schools], 5(3), pp. 1-3.

Rosenberg, R. (1961). The first American doctor of philosophy degree: A centennial salute to Yale, 1861-1961. The Journal of Higher Education, 32(7), 387-394. doi:10.2307/1978076

A First-Generation Academic

"First-Generation College Student" is a label proudly worn by many undergraduates at NIU. These students used to be the minority. But since the twentieth century's Civil Rights movement and resultant anti-discriminatory provisions ensured everyone a fair shot at education, and since increased government funding and loans enabled more and more students to eke out some tuition, students from all walks of life have flocked to universities and community colleges to do better than their parents did. As an instructor, I am aware of their unique challenges. And I am also aware of their unique advantages; they bring to the culture of the university a fresh outlook and a profound appreciation for the opportunity to learn.  However, their challenges sometimes outweigh their eagerness and talent, and many do not complete degrees.

While this is a big problem for first-generation students, it is an even bigger problem for first-generation academics.  Those of us who come in as first-generation, complete that bachelor's degree, and then stick around for more degrees... well, we are not only entering the realm of university life without much direction, we are entering a culture in which a very small percentage of Americans ever participate.  Academia is its own beast. So the stick-tuitive-ness that got us our bachelor's degrees is not necessarily enough to finish a masters thesis, and certainly not enough to push us through the drudgery that is Ph. D. work and dissertation writing. We need a special kind of help. But no one really knows what to do for us.

But...we're so alone!

Scores of extensive, longitudinal studies have been done on the first-generation college student. Those kids have been around for some time! But the first-generation academic is still a somewhat rare anomaly. Also, the amount of time it takes to produce one of us (years upon years of coursework, going back to school after taking breaks, part-time work while having kids, etc.) means the data just isn't there or hasn't been collected yet, that is, extensive data on who finishes, who achieves success in academia, and what kinds of services, attitudes, or funding, got them through all of it.  This is something that needs to be studied, both for the success of these students and for ensuring that the future fields of technology, education, health, and others, can benefit from an increasingly diverse pool of talents. 

Quite frankly, I think that first-generation academics are the key to revitalizing the stagnating university model. We can innovate how we do research in a budget crisis. We can engage with the community outside of academia and bring our discoveries to bear on the "real world." There, I said it. Academia needs us! Or it might just perish.  Nowhere is navel-gazing stronger than academia, a group that can cut itself off from the struggles of the world (and of their students) by living, working, and socializing among their university bubble. But this phenomenon of the academic enclave does not apply to blue-collar and low-income academics. I take offence when any blue-collar type tries to accuse me of being out of touch, just because I'm doing a Ph. D. ...Sorry, guy, I'm living in your "real world" every damn day. And I can also think abstractly! :D

While the studies are lacking, the stories are not. In fact, our Thesis Office Director, Carolyn Law, published a book entitled This Fine Place so Far from Home, a collection of personal accounts and essays from first-generation academics working in the 1990s.  The pieces range from opinionated, to irreverent, to poignant.  You can check it out here, at Temple University Press.

Think about it -- college is a defining experience for many people. But a decade of college and then a *life* at the university is, well, your entire life! When no one in your family or inner circle has any experience with college, let alone designing experiments and writing monographs, this can mean that not only is your college journey a lonely and confusing thing, but so is the life of the mind to which it leads you. Even the most supportive families can only offer hollow messages of encouragement -- they literally have no idea what we're doing.  Blue-collar scholars, like the ones in Law's book, speak of not being able to fit in anywhere -- afraid of being found out at the university, afraid of getting made fun of at home. (And of course, saddled with the debt of climbing out of the lower classes.) How do we address this? What can universities do to help us find a balance? And, perhaps more importantly, what can they do to ensure that our unique voices are not drowned out by the ideas of the privileged, established scholars?

Let us know in the comments of anything you've read on this. Or tell us about your experience!

Yours Truly,
Daughter of a Truck Driver, M.A.

The Thesis and the Dissertation: Peas in a Pod

We call the document for the master’s degree a “thesis,” and the longer one for the doctorate a “dissertation,” and perhaps you wonder why.

Well, many thoughts on the nature of theses and dissertations have been buzzing through our office lately. Over the past four weeks, we held our fall slate of presentations, workshops, and brown-bag sessions for students working on one or the other kind of document. Several of our programs cover important details behind the Graduate School’s document-formatting requirements. When we look through these requirements closely, it becomes clear that they’re nearly identical for either a thesis or dissertation.

So, then, if the format looks nearly identical, what distinguishes the thesis from the dissertation? A glance at the histories of the two words makes for an interesting way to highlight some differences and similarities between these two important writing projects.

"How do I put it?"

Thesis writers, do you sometimes find yourself wondering how to put your ideas in writing while working on your project? If so, you're not only human (nearly all writers, at some point, wrestle with how to put thoughts on paper or screen) but also hinting at some of the history behind the word "thesis." Like many terms in academia, the words “thesis” and “dissertation” come to us from Greek through Latin. "Thesis" originally derives from the Indo-European root *dhe-, which had the meaning of ‘to set’ or ‘to put.’ The root later formed the central element in the Greek verb tithenai, meaning ‘to place, put, or set,’ as well as the noun thesis. In Latin, thesis referred to the unstressed and later the stressed syllables in a line of poetry. (Stress for thesis writers today is usually of a different nature!) In the English of the late 1500s, “thesis” began to refer to a statement to be proved through logic—in other words, a thesis statement. By the next century, the word’s meaning broadened to include what we in the twenty-first century think of when we speak of a master’s thesis--the formal document presented for the master’s degree.

Scholars at a lecture. Engraving by William Hogarth, 1736

"Contrary to what others have said, I argue that…"

Dissertators, when you explain your project, do you sometimes linger around that point where you need to arrange your thoughts to emphasize how your work stands apart from previous scholarship? Such efforts invoke something of the original spirit of the word "dissertation." It's rooted in the Latin verbs dissertare ‘to debate, argue, examine, harangue’ and disserere, a combination of dis- ‘apart’ and serere ‘to arrange.’ The etymology zeroes in on the general task doctoral candidates must carry out today: arrange an argument based on original evidence as well as on an examination of the surrounding scholarly debate, write it out clearly and convincingly at length, share it with the world, and live to tell about it. (Long sentence, longer ordeal!) The word began to refer to such a thing in the 1650s, around the same time "thesis" began to refer to a similar piece. According to the OED, the meaning of "dissertation" began to be restricted to the monograph produced for the doctorate in the 1930s.

Peas in a Pod

Thus, once established in academic circles, the terms "thesis" and "dissertation,” along with the documents they refer to, grew up alongside each other. No wonder, then, that their format requirements overlap and that we sometimes speak of these two types of documents in the same breath. But in addition to the etymological and historical hints at what these documents do, universities usually separate the two by degree and kind. The thesis is shorter and is a kind of knowledge display. The dissertation is longer and is a kind of original research and significant new contribution to a field.

Of course, the Graduate School also offers clear and succinct definitions for a thesis and a dissertation. Check them early and often. And you can always turn to us if you seek further information or guidance. We’re happy to help!

In case you missed one of our fall programs, note that we’ll be offering presentations, workshops, and brown bags once again at the start of the spring semester. In the meantime, we’re available through email, phone, or walk-in. And remember that our writing group for thesis and dissertation writers, Write Place/Write Time, meets on the second Thursday of every month from 6 to 9 p.m. in Founders Memorial Library (4th Floor East). Look for us there this coming Thursday, October 13. Happy writing!   

Source for the above images: Wikimedia Commons.