Summer Programs at the Thesis Office

This Summer at the Thesis Office we are offering several of our perennial programs to help you complete your thesis or dissertation.  Some of these were not offered in the Spring session, so here is your chance to check them out! In addition, some programs we offer are now online or hybrid online/in-person formats to make them accessible to all. If you would like to attend any of these workshops, please register here.

Create and Nurture a Productive Thesis/Dissertation Committee
Tuesday, June 4, 4PM

In this online presentation and Q&A, learn methods for creating a functional committee and making work with your committee count. Hear about best practices for common committee blunders and difficulties. Participation and sharing is encouraged!


Demystifying the Thesis/Dissertation Submission Process
Monday, June 10, 4PM

In this online presentation, Thesis Office advisor Carolyn Law will explain the ins and outs of submitting your completed thesis or dissertation. NIU has strict requirements for the "final product," and those requirements can keep you editing even after you've defended! Know what to expect and how to prepare for the final step of the process.


Tables/Figures/Pagination for Theses and Dissertations
Tuesday, June 11, 2PM

If your thesis or dissertation includes tables or figures, this is definitely the workshop for you. And if it doesn't include them, this might be the workshop for you anyway! One of our most common complaints from students is about page numbers, which can be a huge bugbear if your document is not set up properly. Come get it all straightened out in this workshop -- bring your laptop and be prepared to do some good work. This is an in-person event with ample time for workshopping, in Adams Hall room 103.


Writing Your Thesis/Dissertation Proposal
Tuesday, June 18, 4PM

This hybrid workshop will be an in-person presentation and discussion that is Facebook Live fed to our Facebook group. This interactive workshop will address typical characteristics of a successful thesis or dissertation proposal as well as offer practical strategies for organizing the key elements. Breakout sessions will allow for generous time for questions and small-group discussion. Bring your laptop and specific questions to maximize the workshop’s effectiveness!

Last year we had more attendees than ever at these events. Please keep taking advantage of them! We're here to help.

Register for any of these events at The Graduate School's workshop calendar.

Submission Process – Upcoming Informational Presentations

“Everything is ready to go, and I believe the formatting is perfect. I should get a degree just for that – haha!” – quotation from an NIU graduate student.

We agree with this student’s sentiment: getting a thesis or dissertation ready for submission can be a degree-worthy task! And for some of us, the same goes for submitting the thesis or dissertation electronically (at which point the document becomes an Electronic Thesis/Dissertation, or ETD).

For instance, did you know that your thesis or dissertation must be submitted with keywords for indexing? Do you know how to embed all fonts into your document before submitting to Proquest? Do you know who or what ProQuest is and does? Are you aware of your embargo options and when to use them? Are you planning to order bound copies of your project when you submit?

You must manage those tasks or choices as well as a few others when submitting your ETD. Knowing a little about the process before submitting really helps!

Our website offers detailed instructions about exactly what to do before, during, and after submission of your ETD. 

ProQuest, NIU's publishing partner for theses and dissertations, also includes many informative resources to help you through the steps of submission.

Even after looking through these materials, however, many still have questions about submitting their ETD. Carolyn Law, our Thesis Office Advisor, will demystify the entire process in our upcoming presentations, open to all NIU thesis and dissertation writers:

• The first session of “Demystifying the Submission Process” is Wednesday, June 8, from 2 – 4 PM in Founders Library room 297.
• The second session (same presentation – no need to attend both) is Wednesday, June 15, from 6 – 8 PM in Wirtz Hall, room 104.

We still have availability for either session, but we do ask that you register via email at thesis@niu.edu – please always include the name of the presentation and the date you wish to attend in any registration message.

If you can attend one of these sessions, I bet you'll feel much more comfortable with the process of submitting. If you are unable to attend, we will offer these presentations again in the fall. As you know, you may always contact your director or the Thesis Office for help as well. We hope to see you soon!

Who is ProQuest?

So just who is this ProQuest? And why should I care?

Well the short answer to the first question is that ProQuest is NIU’s publication partner for all theses and dissertations approved for graduate degrees. As for the second question, you should care because ProQuest provides NIU with the platform for submitting theses and dissertations to the Graduate School for review and ultimate approval. After that, ProQuest preserves and distributes your thesis or dissertation forever, within certain parameters over which you have some control.

ProQuest is an international, for-profit corporation headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It started out as R.R. Bowker, but its rise to fame really came under the name of University Microfilms International (UMI). From the development of microfilm in the 1930s to the construction of 21^st-century digital repositories, ProQuest (under several different names over the years) has been a consistent leader in the technology of document preservation, including historical newspapers, archives and libraries, and (of course) theses and dissertations.

Now for the “why should I care” part. Well, first . . . because ProQuest supplies and maintains the infrastructure of NIU’s submission platform. When you click the SUBMIT NOW button on the Thesis Office website, you will be magically transported to the land of ProQuest, called the ETD Administrator. Rest assured, however, that the NIU Thesis Office is the custodian and administrator of that platform and your work remains in the secure, trustworthy hands of NIU (Carolyn Law, to be precise) until the very end.

The second reason you should care is because you’ll be asked up front to make some decisions about the eventual availability of your work after you graduate. You would be well advised to do some homework about these decisions before you start. THE SUBMISSION PROCESS – linked to the Thesis Office website – covers the most frequently asked questions.

Then a few weeks after each graduation term, the Thesis Office sends the electronic files of all the approved theses and dissertations (now called ETDs) to ProQuest, where they are ingested into massive databases, deposited in NIU’s Huskie Commons (our institutional repository), and tagged and indexed for online search engines.

To learn more about ProQuest in the big-picture sense, you might want to explore their website, www.proquest.com. It’s really quite an interesting enterprise for any scholar, academic writer, or researcher.

Closer to home, the Thesis and Dissertation Office offers a special presentation called Demystifying the Submission Process for graduate students preparing to submit. This 2-hour program walks graduate students through the specific steps of the process and answers all of your questions about publication options, Open Access, copyright, and more. This semester, Demystifying the Submission Process will be offered on Wednesday, March 9, 4:00 – 6:00 pm in Wirtz Hall 104. Advance registration is appreciated. To register, send an email to thesis@niu.edu with Submission Process in the subject line.