Graduation Process

Forms to Submit to Graduate

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There are 4 forms you need to submit to graduate.

All forms and specific instructions for completing them can be found on the graduate school resources page under the forms tab: https://graduateschool.cuanschutz.edu/forms-resources/resources.

Exam Committee

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You can and should begin to assemble your committee now.

The thesis committee must include the primary mentor plus two additional faculty.

• The chair can be any of the three members but must have a Regular Graduate Faculty Appointment, and
• the other voting members must have at least a Special Graduate Faculty Appointment.

The Graduate Faculty directory can be found here. As soon as possible, let Kelly and I know who will serve on your committee. We will follow up with them and get the approvals in place for their faculty appointment(s) if they don’t have one.

The committee will be responsible for

• reading your thesis and
• examining you during your oral defense.

Thus, it is recommended that you choose faculty who have relevant scientific expertise to your thesis project. To prevent conflicts of interest, we ask that members of your committee not be married, related, or from the same lab.

If you have a co-mentorship, only one of your co-mentors can serve as a voting member of your committee (the other is still welcome to attend the entire exam) and you must have two additional faculty committee members.

Exam Scheduling

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For exam scheduling you should:

• Plan for a total time of 2 hours.
  • The first hour can be booked in a larger conference room or auditorium as this is for a public presentation of your work (~45 minutes talk with ~10 minutes for questions).
  • The second hour of your exam is a closed-door oral defense of your written thesis with your committee. You can book a separate smaller conference room for this portion.

Nicole is your best resource for helping you book appropriate rooms!

Please let Kelly, Nicole and Scott know once you have scheduled your defense.

Written Thesis

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The written thesis must follow the graduate school formatting guidelines attached, but generally the thesis should be divided into 5 chapters –

• Introduction,
• Methods,
• Results,
• Discussion/Conclusions, and
• References.

This follows the format of a typical research paper except that each section is an entire chapter.  I have also included two examples from former BSBT-MIM students.

Your written thesis should be provided to your committee at least two weeks prior to the exam date so they may have plenty of time to critically review it. You will have to submit your thesis to the ProQuest database. If there is some thesis work that should not yet be visible to the general public (i.e. pending submission to academic journal or patent application), the “publication” can be embargoed.  The decision of whether the thesis is copyrighted and/or embargoed is up to you and your PI. You should have this discussion as soon as possible before your defense.