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.

This is Part Two of a two-part series on Temple Grandin and the importance of "different" minds  Last month we talked about how to succeed in higher education in spite of mental disabilities (and how to excel because of them!). 

This month we discuss what kinds of contributions different minds like Grandin's (who is autistic) can bring to higher education and to university research. Today she is a renowned professor of Animal Science, but Grandin unexpectedly stumbled upon her talent for working with animals when her poor high school behavior landed her at a special school, one where kids of all abilities were put to work as ranchers. Years later, combining hands-on ranching experience with hard-won knowledge, Grandin earned a Ph. D. in Animal Science. Not your typical academic path!

So what is unique about the contributions of someone like Temple Grandin to scientific research? Her hands-on approach, necessitated by her autism, stuck with her as she began her career as a scientist and author. For instance, she expects her students to think in concrete particulars, rather than abstract theories about animals. Animals don't care about your theories about them. They only have behaviors, not theories -- and behaviors we can observe and respond to. Grandin believes that her autism, which enables her to be present in the moment, helps her to connect with animals and to see why they behave the way they do. Her "walking in their path" approach to working with cattle in particular has resulted in significant discoveries that have changed the way slaughter houses and ranches contain and move livestock.


Grandin's research and developments enrich her classroom teaching, because she brings outside knowledge and novel approaches in front of students who are studied in textbook theories and laboratory work, but not necessarily experienced in field work or real world problems addressed by science. So Grandin's inability to be an ivory tower academic, a pure scholar, is really a valuable trait -- she can't do anything but tell it like it is, and show students how to do concrete things.

The concreteness of Grandin's work also allows for many collaborative opportunities. With projects in the field (sometimes a literal field!), many minds are needed to do the work, interpret the results, and write up the reports. Most of Grandin's peer-reviewed articles are based on collaborative work, or are co-authored. She relies on the writing abilities of others and on their abstract minds, but they rely on her for the nitty gritty details of experiments and inventions that solve real problems with animals, from pigs, to dogs, to cows, of course. Increased collaboration is one of the important ways that contemporary research is changing.

While Grandin's work is exceptionally groundbreaking, many more minds like hers, and other "different" minds as well, are invaluable to academic research, applied research, and classroom teaching. The university is adapting, and will continue to adapt, to the next generation of knowledge workers. They will have autism, ADD, mental health issues, and various learning disabilities, but they will be prepared for academic work -- all because education is finally capable of reaching many young people who could not be reached, even a decade ago. It could be the overactive mind of someone who can't focus, the empathy of someone who has lived a lifetime with depression, or the transposed figures seen by a student with dyscalculia that lead to new approaches in history, social science, and math. And these thinkers, working together with their neuro-typical peers to pick up all the pieces, may be the key to developing novel solutions for the practical problems of the 21st Century.

The Collaborative Dissertation

Soooo many authors...

Yesterday, I completed the drudgery that is teaching undergraduates how to cite their references in APA format. As we went through all the little details, commas here, periods there, I found myself marveling at how many papers had multiple authors. I always knew this to be the case for papers in the sciences and social sciences, but as I wrote all those names and "et als" out on the board I thought, "Why are scientists expected to write their own solo dissertations? None of these people are writing alone!"

Writing the dissertation can be the loneliest time in an academic's life. In the case of the humanities, it actually does reflect much of the work we will do once we get a job someday (please, please, please...). But in the case of the hard and soft sciences, that isn't so. Researchers in the fields most often work in teams. The American Sociological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science both offer extensive articles and blog posts on collaborating. Everyone is doing it!

So it seems that no one person can or should handle all the moving parts of a major experiment, be it conducting gene therapy on mice, or surveying survivors of assault. Science and social science require objectivity. Placing an experimental project meant to add original material to scientific discourse -- dissertations must be original contributions -- into the hands of an amateur scientist (the doctoral student), no matter how brilliant, seems like a recipe for existential and experimental trouble. Results could be compromised and things could be overlooked or fall through the cracks, when a researcher has to plan it all, do it all, document it all, and write it all up.

More importantly, for the students' sake, placing such a weight on the individual is not indicative of, or good training for, collaborative work that they will eventually engage in. It does them a disservice to expect such a strangely isolated project of them, at a time in their lives when pressure is high, pay is low, and finishing the project is the only thing that lies between them and their career. Weathering this experience as a team, or even as a partnership, could make it far more bearable and fruitful.

Looking at tissue cultures is more
fun with friends!

This is not to say that every science dissertation writer is actually going it all alone. Certainly, collaborative research feeds into students' dissertations and into professors' papers all the time. But no one but the writer is given top billing. Usually, only one student gets the Ph.D. for that dissertation. And where does that leave the others who put long days and nights into the scientific work that created it? Should working on other students' doctoral research grant a junior grad student a master's degree? Or should senior students simply plan and execute the entire project together, as equals?

A search for collaborative dissertations comes up thin. They are catching on in education, where all kinds of collaboration are non-competitive, daily occurrences (give me that lesson plan, eh?). Collaborative dissertations are, according to a 2015 paper, a "disruption" in composition studies. This is odd considering Comp teachers are teachers too. And in the sciences, the co-authored diss is still highly uncommon. However, some researchers and universities hope to change this.

NIU Chemistry students make one of
their colleagues disappear.

In 2014, two students at Saybrook University completed an important study on diabetes -- together! -- as their dissertation.  The dual-authored document is a far better model and far better practice for writing scientific papers for publication. Charlene Conlin and Carlene Phelps offer some awesome insight into the basic requirements of doing such work as a team:

• Mutual agreement on what the researchers intend for their dissertation, both in process and in outcome.
• Ego minimization when necessary to achieve the greater good.
• Organization in the form of intentions, goals, and timelines.
• Resiliency in the form of drive to keep going until both get to the finish line. (It seems particularly important to have someone else relying on to you to get done!)

You can read the rest of their advice and more about their study here.

Why collaborative dissertations have not caught on, seventeen years into this new millennium, I can't say. We've rethought every kind of document we create, from music to film to the news. But we still think of a dissertation as a monolithic monograph and a rite of passage, rather than a learning opportunity that will prepare students, especially those in the sciences, for a long life of collaborative work and collaborative writing. Why do you think we cling so tightly to an outdated dissertation model?

For more on the future of the dissertation, keep reading!

"I'm not sticking my hands in there unless someone else does it first!"