Posts under the ‘Notes’ category

Evan Anderson, Michigan Tech's MAGS nominee

Three other graduate students were also nominated for consideration.  Jean DeClerck was nominated by her advisors, Dr. M. Ann Brady and Dr. Wendy Anderson of Humanities, and committee member Dr. Victoria Bergvall of Humanities.  Nathan Kelley-Hoskins was nominated by his advisor, Dr. Petra Hüntemeyer of Physics.  Andrew Orthober was nominated by his advisor, Dr. Carol MacLennan of Social Sciences.  All of the nominations were noteworthy for their scholarship, and the evaluation panel had a difficult task in selecting one nominee to represent Michigan Tech.

The Dean’s Advisory Panel, representing each college or school at Michigan Tech, evaluated the nominees.  The faculty on this panel represent a broad range of graduate programs:  J. Gierke (Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences), S. Martin (Social Sciences), D. Flaspohler (School of Forestry Resources & Environmental Science), X. Wang (School of Technology) and G. Campbell (School of Business and Economics).  Next year’s competition will consider applicants who have completed their degrees between October 1, 2012 and September 30, 2013.  An application consists of an abstract of the thesis, recommendation letter from the advisor, and an electronic copy of the thesis.  Please consider nominating your master’s students next year.

Students planning on finishing a thesis or dissertation spring or summer 2013 are invited a seminar designed to help students understand the submission process and answer questions about it.

• When: January 30th at 4:05pm
• Who: Students defending in the spring or summer; faculty and staff who assist students with submission
• Where: Please register online for the event and receive the location. The seminar will be available online as well as on campus.

Once you register, you will receive a confirmation with the location and a reminder of the date and time.

If you are unable to join us, this seminar will be taped and available online.

Significant changes were introduced in the fall based on revisions approved by the University Senate.  Join us to learn about the changes and have your questions answered.

The Graduate Student Government, Graduate Faculty Council, University Senate, and administration have approved the new “Guide to Completing a Graduate Degree and Preparing and Submitting a Dissertation, Thesis, or Report at Michigan Technological University.”

Because this Guide makes the submission process similar for all documents, and the formatting requirements are much simpler, the new requirements will be applied retroactively to all pending submissions and to all new submissions.

The web site has been updated to reflect changes for dissertations, theses, and reports.  Highlights are below:

New Deadlines

• Deadlines to complete a degree have changed. The deadline to submit a final dissertation, thesis, or report to complete a degree in fall 2012 is December 17, 2012.
  • Students defending in fall 2012 may request an extension of this deadline in writing to Dr. Debra Charlesworth (dissertations or theses) or Ms. Nancy Byers Sprague (reports). Requests must be made prior to December 17, 2012.
  • There is no deadline to conduct a final oral examination (defense). Students are recommended to defend well in advance of the deadline to submit a final document to allow sufficient time to incorporate the technical changes required by their committee.

New Formatting Requirements

• Formatting requirements are much simpler with the new Guide.
• A new template for formatting title and approval pages is available.
• The changes are summarized in the sample Review of a Dissertation, Thesis, or Report form.

New Forms

New forms have been released, and only the new versions will be accepted.  A summary of the important changes is below:

• Pre-defense form
  • This form now only asks for the defense time & date along with committee information.
  • Students who have already submitted a Pre-defense form do not need to re-submit this form.
  • Beginning immediately, if an old Pre-defense form is submitted, the Publishing agreement that was in this form will be discarded.
• Report on final oral examination form
  • New form for students completing a dissertation, thesis, or report.
  • Students who have already submitted a Verification of final degree requirements form do not need to submit this form.
  • Contains check-boxes for each member of the committee to provide examination results to the Graduate School.
• Verification of final degree requirements form
  • This form will now only be required for coursework Master’s students and Master of Engineering students.
• Approval of a final dissertation, thesis, or report
  • New form for students completing a dissertation, thesis, or report.m
  • Replaces the “signature page” in the dissertation, thesis, or report
  • Due before the final document is submitted to Canvas, but may not arrive earlier than one week before the final submission.
  • As the Graduate School works toward automating processes, this form will be replaced by an electronic approval process.
• Degree completion form
  • It updates the required number of bound copies for the Library (1 for dissertations, none for Master’s students)
  • Contains the Publishing agreement which was previously part of the Pre-defense form

Students who wish to use copyrighted materials in a thesis or dissertation must show that they have the ability to republish those materials.  One argument students can use is that their use is “fair use.”  This provision of US Copyright allows the reuse of materials if certain conditions are met.  Students sometimes think that all educational use of materials is fair use, but a recent court case illustrates that this is not true.

In order to use copyrighted materials in a thesis or dissertation, there are three simple steps:

1. Determine if permission is needed to republish copyrighted materials
2. Obtain permission for copyrighted materials (if necessary)
3. Document the ability to republish copyrighted materials.

The Graduate School has helpful resources online, including a seminar from our copyright librarian.  Check them out!

This article from Inside Higher Ed’s blog will show you how to love your dissertation (or thesis). Writing can be an overwhelming task, and everyone can use tips on how to manage the writing process and motivate yourself to do just a little bit every day. These tips also apply to any large-scale project, like writing a proposal or journal article.

One of the pieces of advice that we often give students is that the best dissertation is a finished dissertation. Focus on completing your degree and starting the next stage in your career rather than seeking perfection.

This article from the Chronicle raises some interesting questions about how advisors and committee members can work together to help a student write a dissertation.

• How often should the committee meet?
• What type of advice should they give a student?
• What happens if there is an impasse?

Although written for advisors, students will learn from this overview of different models. The article talks about all fields and the differences between them as well.

Note: A subscription to the Chronicle is required to read the full text of this article. Michigan Tech students, faculty, and staff will have access to the articles if they are logged into the Michigan Tech network.

Learn how Endnote can save you hours of time in the library research and document preparation process!

The Van Pelt and Opie Library is offering two, free EndNote Basics workshops for Michigan Tech graduate students on March 26 and March 28.  EndNote is citation management software which allows anyone to easily collect, organize and use their research references.

In this free library workshop participants will learn the basic skills for building a collection of citations, how to manage their collection and how to include the citations in their documents.  The workshop will also go over how to easily create bibliographies.

The sessions will be held:

• Monday, March 26 @ 12:00 – 1:30 PM
• Wednesday, March 28 @ 10:00 – 11:30 AM

Seating is limited. Please sign up today by sending and email to: libraryworkshop@mtu.edu

The University license to Blackboard will expire at the end of this semester, so the Graduate School is switching this week to Canvas (http://mtu.instructure.com) for thesis, dissertation, and report submission.  In support of this transition, the Graduate School will host a seminar on Thursday, March 15th at 2pm (rescheduled due to inclement weather on the original date).  Please register to attend and receive confirmation of the location.

Note that this seminar will only cover the important changes with switching to Canvas. All graduate students will be loaded into Canvas this week.  If you can’t make the seminar, slides will be available online, and a blog tutorial stepping you through the submission process is currently available online.

Additionally, the Degree completion form has been recently updated.  Please discontinue using any old versions you may have previously saved.  The form adds our new programs, and has changed the binding options for theses, dissertations, and reports.

Students who have started submitting documents in Blackboard should continue to do so if they plan to graduate this semester.

Questions?  Please contact Debra Charlesworth.

Students planning on finishing a thesis or dissertation fall 2011 or spring 2012 are invited a seminar designed to help students understand the submission process and answer questions about it.

• When: September 8th at 4:05pm
• Who: Students defending in the fall or spring; faculty and staff who assist students with submission
• Where: Please register online for the event and receive the location.

Once you register, you will receive a confirmation with the location and a reminder of the date and time.

If you are unable to join us, a taped version of this seminar is available online from our May 19th presentation.

Students who are interested in learning more about the formatting requirements and resources available to assist them should visit our formatting web page and refer to our January 27 seminar.

The Graduate School is pleased to announce our summer seminar series.  Join the Graduate School to learn about the following topics:

• May 19th: Submitting your thesis or dissertation to the Graduate School
  Learn important tips about the thesis and dissertation process from formatting to final submission.  Session will include demonstrations of the submission process, and descriptions of all of the forms involved.
• May 26th: Great images for papers and presentations
  Creating high resolution images is a new requirement for theses and dissertations.  Learn what a high resolution image is, and how to create them with a variety of popular software packages.
• June 23rd: An introduction to LaTeX
  The seminar will provide general information on getting started with LaTeX – the document markup language/preparation system – including how to install it on commonly used operating systems [Linux, Mac and Windows] and typesetting a variety of documents [from simple text to journal manuscripts with mathematical expressions, graphics, tables, etc.]. It will also cover how to use the thesis/dissertation templates developed specifically for Michigan Tech.

All seminars will start at 2:05pm.  Please register online to receive an e-mail confirmation, the location of the seminar, and reminders before the event.

Seating is limited – register early!  These seminars will be taped and available on our professional resources web page for viewing later.