COMMUNITY TIPS from Faculty, Staff and Students
Thesis and dissertation writing tips
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Be mindful of the emotional ups and downs that come with long-form writing. It’s hard!
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Consider developing an annotated table of contents for your thesis or dissertation to help structure your writing and guide your readers. Here is an example.
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Reference management software, citation management software, or bibliographic management software is software that stores a database of bibliographic records and produces bibliographic citations (references) for those records, needed in scholarly research. Once a record has been stored, it can be used time and again in generating bibliographies, such as lists of references in scholarly books and articles. Modern reference management applications can usually be integrated with word processors so that a reference list in one of the many different bibliographic formats required by publishers and scholarly journals is produced automatically as an article is written, reducing the risk that a cited source is not included in the reference list. They will also have a facility for importing bibliographic records from bibliographic databases.
FOR EXAMPLE: Zotero (/zoʊˈtɛroʊ/[7]) is a free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials, such as PDF and ePUB files. Features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes, and bibliographies, integrated PDF, ePUB and HTML readers with annotation capabilities, and a note editor, as well as integration with the word processors Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, and Google Docs. It was originally created at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and, as of 2021, is developed by the non-profit Corporation for Digital Scholarship.
GC manual
Here is the Graduate College Thesis Manual.
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Students should reach out to GC Thesis & Dissertation Specialist L. Boyd Bellinger directly (larnhe2@uic.edu) to initiate the process, which involves completing a fair use checklist and meeting with the Scholarly Communications Librarian.
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Graduate College Policy and Guidance for the Use of Generative AI in Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Policy: Graduate theses and dissertations are intended to demonstrate and provide a record of independent thinking, original research, and technical mastery in a field of study. The core contribution of the thesis, as determined by the author’s advisor(s) and thesis committee, must be the original work of the author and cannot be that of any other party or generative AI. Therefore, the student’s research and writing as presented in the thesis must represent that effort, even if AI tools are used as support. That is, the student’s original scholarship, including writing, critical thinking, and analysis, must be evident regardless of other included supportive materials.
Any AI use must receive documented pre-approval by the student’s thesis committee and must be limited to a clearly defined scope. To confirm adherence with this expectation, a clear and comprehensive statement must be included as an appendix of the final thesis or dissertation describing the role of generative AI in the scholarly process and what was authorized as appropriate use. The student and the thesis committee are responsible for ensuring any permitted use of AI aligns with disciplinary standards and reflects the student’s independent judgment and originality. Unauthorized use of generative AI tools is considered unauthorized assistance under UIC’s code of academic integrity. Unauthorized use of AI tools may also be considered a violation of institutional policies on academic honesty and plagiarism, including those related to integrity in research and scholarly activities.
Guidance: Students and advisors should be aware of the potential risks and limitations associated with generative AI, such as ethical concerns about plagiarism from the content on which the AI was trained, the possibility of inaccurate information, accountability issues, and data security and privacy concerns. It is crucial to critically evaluate AI-generated content and ensure that its use aligns with the norms and standards of the student’s discipline. In particular, students must review and are responsible for the thoroughness, accuracy, and objectivity of all included AI-generated content. Using Generative AI in graduate theses puts the student at risk for future challenges to their expertise or routine scanning of prospective employee’s theses for plagiarism and generative AI. If you need to use AI services, use secure AI services provided by the UIC IT (ACER) office.
Individual programs or departments may have additional policies or restrictions regarding the use of AI tools in graduate research that go beyond these guidelines. It is the student’s responsibility to understand and follow any department-specific or discipline-specific guidelines. Students should contact their department for clarification if needed. As the field of AI evolves, these guidelines may be updated to reflect new developments.
Letters of recommendation and job/grant application tips
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Give your recommender ample time and documentation so that they can write an effective recommendation on your behalf. They will have specific requirements for you but as a baseline consider providing the following with your request for a recommendation:
- Six weeks lead time
- Copies of the job, grant, or other listings
- Copies of your cover letter, CV and other documentation that you will be submitting
- A meeting request to discuss your goals and review your application documents
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If it’s been a while, request a faculty member, ideally one of your letter writers, to do an evaluation of your teaching. You have been honing your teaching abilities and maturing as an instructor…let this shine through in the recommendation letters that get written on your behalf!
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This is one of the main ways you and your research are discoverable by the wider world. In the past, we have had grad students get invited to conferences or asked to contribute to edited volumes based on their website profiles.
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Here are some notes from a workshop run by Professor Finegold several years ago:
- Clearly communicates the scope of the project, the material being analyzed, and the central argument being put forward.
- Lays out the stakes of the argument or approach (why what you’re doing is important, what sets your project apart).
- Demonstrates your own preparedness to complete the project (familiarity with existing literature, archives, etc.)
- Considers audience (assume non-specialists, avoid jargon)
- Provides a reasonable and thought-through summary of the budget, goals, and/or timeline for the period of the award that is being sought.
- Does all of this concisely, within the specified word or page limit.
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- “Doctoral Student” = prior to being ABD;
- “Doctoral Candidate” = ABD.
- “Fellowship declined” = you were awarded it but decided not to accept it (e.g. you took a different opportunity instead; this can and should go on your CV);
- “Fellowship unfunded” = you applied but were not awarded it (these are generally not included on your CV, but should be included in end of year progress reports).
Tips for positioning yourself for the academic job market
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- The Chronicle for Higher Education (accessible through the library)
- Inside Higher Ed
- The New York Times Education section
- Publications in the general area of Critical University Studies
- e.g. David Rieff, Desire and Fate, 2025, which begins:
- THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION that is sweeping across much of the rich world—with its mix of authoritarian subjectivity most radically expressed by the conviction that human beings are whatever they feel themselves to be and by a kind of lumpen Rousseauism in which what are now called ‘indigenous ways of seeing’ are taken to be at least reason’s equal and, by many progressives, reason’s superior—is without serious precedent. To be sure, many of its elements have obvious antecedents. Here are four of them: Communism’s ambition to create a new kind of human being; the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s demonization of the past yoked to an insistence that people express their repudiation of it publicly; the old European fantasy that pre-modern societies were fundamentally morally innocent; and the therapeutic revolution as it popularized (obviously, what Freud originally had in mind was something else entirely) and fetishized an imperial self that deserved fulfillment just because it was a self, and insisted that if the story one told about oneself couldn’t be realized, then one had been cheated by one oppressive order or another.
What is new is the synthesis: two seemingly incompatible world views—radical individualism and the radical communitarianism we rather unsatisfactorily call ‘identity politics’—easily coexisting within the same utopian narrative. But what also sets it apart is what—despite a certain amount of Marxist boilerplate that flies about in the academe—is its absolute intolerance of everything—White Supremacy, Patriarchy, heteronormativity, and so on—except for capitalism.
- THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION that is sweeping across much of the rich world—with its mix of authoritarian subjectivity most radically expressed by the conviction that human beings are whatever they feel themselves to be and by a kind of lumpen Rousseauism in which what are now called ‘indigenous ways of seeing’ are taken to be at least reason’s equal and, by many progressives, reason’s superior—is without serious precedent. To be sure, many of its elements have obvious antecedents. Here are four of them: Communism’s ambition to create a new kind of human being; the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s demonization of the past yoked to an insistence that people express their repudiation of it publicly; the old European fantasy that pre-modern societies were fundamentally morally innocent; and the therapeutic revolution as it popularized (obviously, what Freud originally had in mind was something else entirely) and fetishized an imperial self that deserved fulfillment just because it was a self, and insisted that if the story one told about oneself couldn’t be realized, then one had been cheated by one oppressive order or another.
- e.g. David Rieff, Desire and Fate, 2025, which begins:
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Your exam list headings can be included on your CV and in your cover letter. They are likely to be most helpful for you on the job market if they correspond to the wider areas that you might be hired to teach rather than the more focussed topic of your dissertation. Regularly reviewing job listings can help you think this through.
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This is common sense but is not always thought through systematically.
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If this is done rigorously in a manner in which you are as educated in and accountable to the second field, you can apply for jobs there as well. Be careful to avoid cavalier, lowest-common-denominator “interdisciplinarity.” This can lead to not being taken seriously in either field. When selecting a second field, be mindful of the extent to which it has job openings and the degree to which it is comfortable with cross-disciplinary scholarship.