Graduate School Newsblog

Category: Tutorials and Help

Tutorials about online processes and software students use.

Prepare to Graduate: Submit a Graduation Application

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In order to complete a degree at Michigan Tech, all students must submit a Graduation Application and let the Graduate School know their plans to attend commencement. This post will explain the difference between graduation and commencement and explain how to submit the Graduation Application.

Graduation vs. Commencement: Understanding the Difference

Graduation is the official act of completing all academic requirements and earning your degree. Your actual diploma will be shipped to you approximately six weeks after the semester you complete your degree. You must complete all of your curricular requirements and apply to graduate in order to receive your credential.

Commencement is the celebratory ceremony. It is an opportunity for friends and family to acknowledge your hard work. Students who attend the commencement ceremony receive a diploma cover when they walk across the stage. The Graduate School hosts a single annual commencement ceremony at the close of spring semester. A commencement application is required to participate. You can read more about this later in the blog.


Submit a Graduation Application

To begin, view your academic audit (a VPN connection required to access the audit) to ensure that all the course and non-course requirements are complete with either a green check, or half-moon in the progress indicator on the left. Your advisor, graduate program assistant, or our Student Guide will help answer your questions.

The deadline to submit a Graduation Application is Friday of Week 5.


Locate the requirement titled Graduation Application

degree audit showing the "graduation application" section.

Click the link (blue text) which will take you to Experience. Search for the card titled: Prepare to Graduate.

"prepare to graduate" section in Experience

Click on Submit Graduation Application and select the credential that you are completing. If you are earning more than one certificate or degree, you will need to submit a graduation application for each one.

Graduation Date: Select the term that you will complete your degree or certificate requirements. (Do not select your commencement term here, that will come later.)

  • You may need to advance to page 2 to see your graduation term (e.g. 202508 (Fall 2025) or 202601 (Spring 2026)).
  • If your plans change, you can update your Expected Graduation term on your Degree Progress Checklist.
Student Graduation Application Section

Continue to Page 2.

Ceremony Attendance: The Graduate School hosts a single ceremony at the close of spring semester. Answer the question “Will you attend the ceremony?” with your choice. If your plans change, email gradschool@mtu.edu.

the Graduation Date section in the Graduation Appication

Complete the name and address fields and submit your application.

"name" section in the graduation application
the "addresses" section in the graduation application

Return to your Academic Audit and click the refresh button above your student M number so the latest, most accurate information, appears in your audit.

the Academic Audit section

Verify that the Graduation Application is marked as complete. If it is not, please contact the Graduate School for assistance.

graduation application section when checked as completed

Your audit will include information about commencement and a link to the Commencement Application if you indicated that you will attend the commencement ceremony. See our Commencement Application blog post for more information.

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Prepare to Graduate: Submit a Commencement Application

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Graduation is the official act of completing all academic requirements and earning your degree. Commencement is the celebratory ceremony. It is an opportunity for friends and family to acknowledge your hard work.

All students must Submit a Graduation Application to graduate and earn their credential. See our first blog post for information about that process. If you indicate that you will or might attend commencement, we will need additional information that wasn’t collected in the Graduation Application. You will provide us that information by completing the Commencement Application.

View your Academic Audit and click the refresh button above your student M number so the latest, most accurate information appears in your audit.

the Academic Audit section

Locate the Commencement Application requirement to find the current link to the application and click on it to open the application. If your Graduation Application is not complete, the Commencement Application will not appear on your audit.

commencement application section

Provide the information requested in the Commencement Application. You will need to be logged in with your Michigan Tech credentials to access the application.

commencement application form heading

Within three business days, the Graduate School will review your application and enter your information into our database. If you are attending commencement, you will receive a confirmation email when your application has been processed.

Return to the Academic Audit in a few days to verify your commencement application requirement is complete.

commencement application section when checked as completed

If you chose not to participate in commencement, that will be confirmed in your application.

commencement application section when checked as completed and indicating non-attendance

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Degree Progress Checklist – a Michigan Tech App

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The Graduate School is pleased to announce a new Michigan Tech app, the Graduate Degree Progress Checklist.

The checklist contains a personalized list of all items students are required to complete for each graduate degree they are pursuing along with the date received. Please note that most forms are manually entered in banner, and may require up to five business days to show as received on the checklist.

The top of the list has overall requirements for students. Note that your list may not include all items, since coursework students are no longer required to complete Advanced RCR training.

The top of the Degree Progress Checklist indicating overall requirements for a graduate degree.
A screen shot of the top of the Degree Progress Checklist indicating overall requirements for a graduate degree.
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How to review a dissertation, thesis, or report

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Beginning in fall 2021, faculty advisors will be asked to review and approve dissertations, theses, and reports in Digital Commons. This will replace the Approval form, and will allow faculty to see the work their student has submitted and be notified when it is published. This process is similar to reviewing a journal article.

When your student submits their work to Digital Commons, the Graduate School will assign the work to the primary advisor to review. This is a manual process that will generally be completed on business days from 8am-5pm. You will receive an email requesting you review the submission – click on the link in your email. The email will be from “Michigan Tech Graduate Publications” and “@dcmtu.bepress.com”.

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Check if your Dissertation, Thesis or Report is Complete

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Students can check whether their dissertation, thesis, or report submission is complete on our Michigan Tech app, the Graduate Degree Progress Checklist. Additional details about the submission process can be found online for dissertations, theses, and reports.

First, log into the Graduate Degree Progress Checklist using your Michigan Tech ID and password.

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Reviewing a scheduling request for a final oral examination

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Students schedule their final oral examination (“defense”) by submitting information about their dissertation, thesis, or report and defense though their Degree Progress Checklist.

When a defense request is submitted by the student, the committee will be notified of the details and the advisor will also be notified to review the request in Workflow. If the advisor is missing the appropriate roles to review the workflow, the Graduate School will be notified immediately and will initiate updating the faculty record. Banner access for advisors is described on our web page. Please contact the Graduate School if there are any technical issues.

The advisor will log into Banner Workflow and select the scheduling request to review from their worklist. It is expected that faculty will review these requests within two business days.

Advisors will review the information provided by the student.

A portion of the form to show the scheduling information submitted by the student for the defense.

After reviewing the information, select “Approve” or “Reject” at the bottom of the page.

At the bottom of the scheduling request, select “Approve” or “Reject”

Return to the top of the form and select “Complete” to save the approval decision.

At the top of the form, select “Complete” to save the approval decision.

The committee, advisor, and student will be notified of the advisor’s decision. If the decision is to approve the defense scheduling, the graduate program director and assistant will also be notified. Committee members who are not Michigan Tech employees may not be notified; please confirm details with them individually.

If the committee does not receive the dissertation, thesis, or report with sufficient time for review prior to the defense, the advisor may request that the defense be rescheduled. Please contact the Graduate School to reschedule the defense.

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Notifying the Graduate School of a final oral examination

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A final oral examination (“defense”) is a milestone for students completing a dissertation, thesis, or report. To schedule a defense, students arrange a date, time and location for their committee to meet following the procedures in their graduate program. Once this has been determined, students must notify the Graduate School of their defense information on our Michigan Tech app, the Graduate Degree Progress Checklist.

Log into the Graduate Degree Progress Checklist.

Select the degree of interest by clicking on the arrow next to the degree in the list. If a degree is missing, please contact the Graduate School.

A screenshot of the degree progress checklist showing the list of degrees available for this student.
A screenshot of the degree progress checklist showing the list of degrees available for this student.
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Embedding fonts in Microsoft Word

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Embedding fonts in a dissertation or thesis is a requirement for ProQuest and the Graduate School.  We recommend using Adobe Acrobat to embed fonts for files created in Microsoft Word.  If you do not have access to Adobe Acrobat, this alternative method will allow you to embed fonts directly from Microsoft Word.

Step 1. Click the file tab at the top of the page and select the “Options” menu from the bottom left.

Screen shot showing how to navigate to Word Options.
Screen shot showing how to navigate to Word Options.

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Using the Redaction Tool in Adobe Acrobat Pro

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One of the requirements for a Thesis, Dissertation, or Report to pass our formatting checks to make sure that all signatures in your document are properly obscured to protect the identity of the signer.  To help you figure this out, we’ve created a step by step blog post on how you can use the Redact tool in Adobe Acrobat Pro to remove signatures.

 

To begin, you will need to open your document or the letter which you need to redact a signature from in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Make sure that you are using Acrobat Pro as the redaction tool is not available in Adobe Reader.

Example
We will use this example letter to guide you through the redaction process.

 

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Checking Your Margins Using Double-Side Formatting

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Welcome back to the Michigan Tech Graduate School Newsblog. Since Thesis, Dissertation, and Report writing season is in full swing now we thought it might be helpful to give you a brief reminder on how you can check your margins before submitting your document to the Graduate School.

There are two ways described in “The Guide” to format your dissertation, thesis, or report: Single Side and Double Side formatting. In the post below we will walk you through how to use Adobe Acrobat Pro to check your margins in a Double Side formatted document. If you’re using Single Side formatting, click here to access our previous post on that topic.!

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