Is Your Thesis Hot? Or Not? --- check it out !

Is Your Thesis Hot? Or Not?

By Mary
Helen Miller

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.