Writing a thesis about animal intentionality and tool use is totally hot right now. A thesis about Robert Louis Stevenson’s use of the supernatural to symbolize evil? Not so much.
For graduate students who want to take the temperature of their dissertation’s thesis statement, there’s a Web site that went up earlier this week allowing students to vote on how hot each others’ theses are. The site offers no criteria for judging a thesis statement, and the voter has only two choices: “hot” or “not.”
The Web site, called Is My Thesis Hot or Not, is part of the online graduate student community GradShare. So far, there are about 75 theses posted and 5,000 votes. Although the site is intended for posting thesis statements, most of the current submissions are titles or research questions. And most of them are decidedly not hot.
There’s also room for comments so voters can explain why a thesis is hot or not. Some comments are serious and thoughtful. Many comments simply state, “This is not a thesis.” One commenter suggested that the thesis about Stevenson would have been hot … if an undergraduate had written it.
So what makes a thesis hot? Apparently not typos—one student is torn apart in the comments section for misspelling “operations.” And apparently not looking into a pop star’s gender—a thesis questioning Lady Gaga’s womanhood has more than 100 “not” votes. Full sentences that make clear, sophisticated assertions? That’s pretty hot. At least for now.
4 Responses to Is Your Thesis Hot? Or Not?
eckelcc - April 16, 2010 at 5:10 pm
I checked out this site. It is very hard to navigate — the only way to look at the thesis topics seems to be to rate or skip the one that pops up, at which poin another pops up. There is no way to look at them all or list them with ratings. Needs improvement!
drgunn - April 16, 2010 at 5:30 pm
eckelcc – I’m not affiliated with the site, but I believe that’s by design. If you could see all of them, the most popular ones would continue to become more popular and new material would be neglected.
lisa_l_spangenberg - April 16, 2010 at 7:32 pm
I love the not-so-delicate rights grap from ProQuest:By posting Content, you are granting permission to ProQuest and others to access and use it in connection with the Services, the Site and otherwise in connection with our business. Further, by posting Content to the Site, you are granting ProQuest the perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed. I get that it’s non-exclusive; that’s just ducky. But they’re claiming world-wide rights to use anything at all, forever, in any format.http://www.gradshare.com/terms.html;jsessionid=45D28F08557A3B8203A2C0863ECFFEEF
joshhibbard - April 18, 2010 at 8:35 pm
The website should also allow the user to make their rating (“Hot” or “Not”) *before* seeing the results and comments of others. It should also allow more than just the title of the thesis. The research questions or even a working abstract would help one decide if it truly is “Hot” or “Not.” Overall, a fun idea… However, I oppose conducting research based upon if the topic is “Hot” or “Not” as perceived by others. If the research believes their topic is “hot” and it will contribute understanding/knowledge, then they should conduct their study.