Preparing a thesis
Important References:
- Cal Poly Pomona Library
- Master’s Thesis Regulations
- Theses can be turned into Adobe Acrobat files and made available on the Web. Here is the beginnings of an on-line library of theses from the Biological Sciences department.
Information
It's not easy to get a Master’s Degree. There are all the courses to take, the committee to assemble, the months or years of research, not to mention writing the thesis. But the most frightening part is formatting the thesis in a format acceptable to the Library. Although the nightmarish proportions of this activity have decreased since the advent of computers and laser printers, it is still a hurdle, and one that many students don’t even think about until the last moment.
The physical format of the thesis has its beginnings in the first universities of the United States, and beyond that in a history stretching through universities and monasteries of Europe and Asia back to the dawn of written history. As you grapple with margins, pagination, and such, be thankful that you are not writing on the prepared skin of a sheep with a pen made of a primary feather of a goose, or making impressions in a clay tablet with a sharpened reed.
Beyond the historical detritus, the thesis format serves three purposes:
- Permanence—Your thesis is supposed to last for the better part of forever, or at least for a century or so, thus the requirement for high-quality paper. The paper requirements at Cal Poly Pomona are actually inadequate—ideally you would use an acid-free or preferably buffered “archival” paper, which is often no more expensive that the ordinary 25% rag paper that is specified.
- Binding—All the pages of your thesis will be aligned, squished flat in a press (you thought you were under pressure), sewn together, and then the edges are sliced off with a high-speed rotating knife. (If you've ever wondered how book manufacturers line up the edges of the pages so evenly when you have trouble just lining up ten sheet of printer paper, they don’t. They cut them after binding.) All this binding and trimming turns an 8.5" × 11" sheet of paper into something approaching 7.5" × 10". If you didn't allow adequate margins, parts of your thesis would be bound under or sliced off.
- Uniformity—Just as a scientific paper has standard sections so that readers will know where to find the information they need, a thesis has a uniform order of presentation.
Because information is presented in different ways by different disciplines of scholarship, the format of the content of your thesis (such things as sections, citation of references, and such) is determined by your thesis committee. If your committee is cooperative, they will allow you to use the formatting conventions of the journal to which you will eventually submit it (see Preparing a manuscript for publication). But the margins, pagination, and most of the pages that precede the body of the thesis are all determined by the Library.
Assignment
- Obtain the Master’s Thesis Regulations from the University Library. Read them. Learn them.
- Prepare the following items. You may use actual data or make it up, but the name of the author of the thesis must be you and the department must be Biological Sciences. (You may not use the made-up data in the Library examples.)
- Title page
- Signature page
- Abstract page
- At least two consecutive numbered text pages. These may include graphs from the graph assignment.
- Print the pages on ordinary 8.5 × 11 paper (not the 25% cotton stuff that the library requires) and turn in the paper.
- Create an Adobe Acrobat file of the pages (assuming that the software is available).