What makes a good introduction for a dissertation? Graduate students practice critiquing one another’s thesis chapters, but they rarely read the introductions — usually because those are written to ...

There’s not much good to find in a destructive pandemic, but here’s one potentially positive outcome: Covid-19 may bring graduate schools to a long-needed reckoning with the dissertation requirement.

At my university, we offer a master’s degree in criminology and a criminal justice program with two options for courses of study, or tracks. The first track requires students to take a series of ...

Do you have any suggestions for motivating graduate students to meet their dissertation-writing deadlines? I'm working with several bright and energetic students, but they all have difficulty meeting ...

Once you have passed your comprehensive exams, the time has come for you to complete the dissertation proposal. In this memo, I give you some of my thoughts on ways to approach the proposal. Also, I ...

The transition from structured classroom work and research to writing a dissertation can cause graduate students to feel isolated, like they’re writing in a vacuum. To help them feel more grounded, ...

Each year, seniors must decide whether to write a senior thesis. The year-long course (History 99) requires intensive research in primary sources and culminates in a major piece of writing (usually 60 ...

Every spring, hundreds of fourth-years turn in their theses, research-based projects that sometimes take years of preparation to complete. For students in some majors, the thesis is a requirement for ...