Where do you keep your thesis?
Anna Kushnir
Thursday, 23 October 2008 18:18 UTC
This is a bit of innocent fun I picked up at Unbalanced Reaction, a blog written by a visiting assistant professor at an undisclosed university.
“The other night, I was digging through a cabinet trying to locate the top to one of my coffee travel mugs. Underneath a pile of books I noticed some (vaguely) familiar gold lettering. There, wedged between my fireproof safe and Paris travel guide was my thesis.
I remember, back at the start of graduate school, thinking that I would always keep my thesis on my bookshelf in my office. I figured it would be inspiring to the undergrads that came to my office hours.
Ha.
So. I gotta find out if I’m the only one. Where do you keep your thesis (or where do you plan to store it)?"
Where do you keep your thesis? Framed in a blinking neon frame for all to notice and comment on, or stuck in the back of a dusty shelf?
Updated 23 October 2008 18:18 UTC
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Oh dear… I plan to put it on the bookshelf next to Stryer’s Biochemistry textbook, but now I’m not sure how long it will be there… Both my MSc theses are not as nicely bound, so they’re just in a magazine box in the bedroom, but I have been looking forward to putting my pretty bound PhD thesis in the living room.
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My copy is on CD – somewhere. The bound copies are in my advisors office (maybe) and the University library.
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You didn’t make a bound copy for yourself, Craig? How come? I made one for practically every member of my family! It’s so nice to have a physical representation of all my years in grad school.
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I’m with Craig. I was actually too broke to have more than the necessary number of copies bound.. anyway, one of them is safely in the British Library – they’ll take much better care of it than I ever could :)
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..oh, but nobody will ever actually find it – I just tried to link to my search result, which clearly didn’t work. I give up now!
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Anna,
I’m with Steffi – too broke at the time. While a bound copy might be nice (I can always order one), I know that the library will keep better care of it (based on the care of my MS thesis).
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It’s the norm to print quite a lot of thesis copies in finland. According to regulations you have to distribute your thesis to certain locations, departments and whatever.
This number is reduced if you also publish it in electronic form.
I had 100 copies printed and have plenty of them left. Whenever I go to a conference I take a few with me to hand out as a business card, or when people visit the lab and are interested in the topic I give them a copy.
I have copies at home, on my desk and in a box in the storage room here.
And on the net as an eThesis.
I don’t like the eThesis because it is missing the publications that are present in the back of the hardcopy.
Financing the printing wasn’t really a problem because the University provides 1000€ exactly for this purposes.
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Mark’s comment reminds me: I have a pile of dissertations at home from friends and past labmates in Holland and Switzerland. Because they have so many copies, they hand them out to everyone at their defence, lab, etc. I’m in the acknowledgments of all the ones I have (except one, I think, which was from someone who was writing up when I just joined a lab).
I want to give a copy of my thesis to everyone who is going to end up in the acknowledgments, but there is no way I’m printing that many copies of the expensive format that I’m supposed to me.
If I was really motivated, I could reformat the pages for double-sided paperback binding, and print a few more, but I don’t have energy or funds (the accepted units of motivation) for that kind of silliness. -
“that I’m supposed to me”
I think I meant: “that I’m supposed to make”. Brain is gone.
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Makes me think: where on Earth is that damned thing that took up so much of my life back in the last Century..?
(For you youngsters out there, some of us not only had to buy printer paper, pay for binding and photocopying, but we also had to buy printer ribbons and our own daisy wheels. Oh, and by the way, there were no PCs – we had to blag time on the mainframe after hours, and use vaguely unapproved word-processing software. Diagrams were all drawn by hand using a Rotring pen. And, of course, we had to eat the odd cup of gravel to keep body and soul together).
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