Graduation Process

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.

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.

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.

Thesis Format Guide

Format:

The format for the defense is similar to that of our PhD programs. The student will present a public seminar (~40-45 minutes) on the thesis research, followed by questions from the audience. The audience will then be dismissed and there will be a private examination of the student by the Committee (~30-60 minutes). 

Committee Members Role:

• The Committee may suggest changes needed for the thesis to be acceptable as well as examining the student on the content of the research.
• Each member of the Committee must sign approval or disapprove of the thesis and the Oral Defense for submission to the Graduate School (Forms will be sent by the Graduate school for signatures using Docusign).
• There should also be the option to pass/approve with conditions, and this typically means that changes are requested in the written document and the committee would like to see these changes before officially passing the student. Often when changes are requested the committee will still pass the student and leave it up to the mentor to ensure the changes are made, but this is up to the committee.
• It is fine to dismiss the student from the room following the private examination to discuss and then bring the student back in to discuss the outcome with them.

Important Reminders:

Please keep in mind that our MS students have had 1-1.5 years in the lab. So expectations of knowledge base and what was accomplished should be commiserate with this time frame.

The thesis document should be set up like a research paper, with each chapter representing the important elements (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, References). There is no official page requirement and no requirement to have an abundance of positive data. Often students will include negative data, as this provides learning opportunities in synthesizing the results, formulating alternative hypotheses, and generating discussion of next steps and future work.