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“Lol My Thesis” Showcases Painfully Hilarious Attempts to Sum up Years of Academic Work in One Sentence

in Comedy , Education | January 9th, 2014 1 Comment

Image from Ph.D. Comics

A true fact about the the­sis stage of an advanced degree: What­ev­er the aca­d­e­m­ic field, whether writ­ing a fifty page bachelor’s or master’s the­sis or 250 plus page doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion, at some point, you will need to win­now your argu­ment down to an abstract sum­ma­ry of a cou­ple suc­cinct para­graphs. Then, one inevitably finds—when rid­ing ele­va­tors with col­leagues and men­tors, talk­ing to rel­a­tives over hol­i­day din­ners, jus­ti­fy­ing one’s exis­tence to friends and acquaintances—that the whole damned thing needs to some­how reduce to one intel­li­gi­ble sen­tence or two. It’s all any­one has the patience for, hon­est­ly, and it saves you the trou­ble of try­ing to recon­struct com­plex argu­ments for peo­ple who won’t under­stand or care about them and who gen­er­al­ly only asked out of polite­ness any­way.

But how, how , to cram years of research, agony, tur­moil, crush­ing fail­ure and soar­ing epiphany into bite-sized con­ver­sa­tion­al nuggets with­out gross over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion to the point of tau­to­log­i­cal absur­di­ty? Can it even be done?! The blog “ lol my the­sis ,” start­ed last year by a Har­vard senior study­ing Human Devel­op­men­tal and Regen­er­a­tive Biol­o­gy, sug­gests that it can, but not with­out hilar­i­ous results. Part of an explod­ing genre of aca­d­e­m­ic par­o­dy (and pro­cras­ti­na­tion) sites, lol my the­sis proud­ly ven­tures forth in its mis­sion of “sum­ming up years of work in one sen­tence” with open sub­mis­sions from cur­rent stu­dents. Many of the sub­mis­sions are from the sci­ences, and many from under­grad­u­ate the­ses, but a fair num­ber also come from human­i­ties and post-grad­u­ate stud­ies. Take, for exam­ple, the fol­low­ing sub­mis­sion from an MFA Cre­ative Non­fic­tion stu­dent at Emer­son Col­lege , which direct­ly address­es the intend­ed audi­ence:

“A col­lec­tion of non­fic­tion essays, which means they’re writ­ten about real peo­ple and events, mom. Remem­ber all those times you accused me of not lis­ten­ing to the things you said?”

A pas­sive aggres­sive exam­ple that most of us who’ve been through the process can relate to at some lev­el. Anoth­er one that hits home is this, from a Vas­sar Polit­i­cal Sci­ence major, who dis­cov­ers too late that the argu­ment doesn’t work: “Oops: Turns out self-pub­lished poet­ry didn’t actu­al­ly affect Indi­an pol­i­tics but I’m 60 pages in, so.”

The sub­mis­sions from the sci­ences do not dis­ap­point. For exam­ple, from a Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land stu­dent of Bio­log­i­cal Sci­ences: “We spent thou­sands of gov­ern­ment dol­lars to cre­ate a mouse mod­el for a dis­ease only 32 peo­ple in the world have.” And a Sci­ence Writ­ing stu­dent at M.I.T . gives us this par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive exam­ple of brevi­ty: “Wolves + humans, the ulti­mate fren­e­mies.” Not to be out­done, a Stem Cell Biol­o­gy stu­dent at Har­vard offers a grim­ly terse con­fes­sion­al: “I have killed so many fish.”

The sub­mis­sions are anony­mous, but some good sports have cho­sen to include links to their the­ses, endear­ing­ly hop­ing that some­one besides their advi­sor will actu­al­ly want to read them. Most of the sub­mis­sions, how­ev­er, sim­ply com­bine two qual­i­ties every advanced stu­dent knows all too well: a well-earned feel­ing of futil­i­ty and the mor­dant wit required to keep going any­way.

More wit­ty sum­maries can be found at  lol my the­sis .

Relat­ed Con­tents:

The Illus­trat­ed Guide to a Ph.D.

Grad­u­ate School Bar­bie: A New Gift Idea for The Demor­al­ized Grad Stu­dent in Your Life

The Ph.D. Grind: Philip J. Guo’s Free Mem­oir Offers An Insider’s Look at Doc­tor­al Study

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

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Strange News

Lolmythesis: succinct, sardonic summaries of academic achievement.

What happens when you cross thesis research-induced delirium, a sardonic sense of humor and Tumblr? LOLmythesis, a pithy collection of one-line summaries of academic theses. Angie Frankel, the creator of LOLmythesis, speaks with NPR's Linda Wertheimer about the funny, sometimes depressing submissions.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

• The Inventory

Students describe their theses in a single self-mocking sentence

"Summing up years of work in one sentence." That's the tagline for Lol My Thesis , where PhD candidates (Edit: and undergrads) make fun of their own theses by reducing them to just a sentence or two.

Related Content

Edit: I mistakenly thought these were mostly graduate theses. The about page describes them as "undergraduate (and some post-graduate) theses."

Students in areas from accounting to aerospace engineering come up with absurd, obvious, and sometimes defeated descriptions of their research. Here are a few examples:

Don't be anxious about your decisions driven by anxiety. -Social Neuroscience, Beijing Normal University When people have to pick stuff up with a robotic arm and can only see with onboard cameras, they're worse than infants; please pay me to make them as good as 5 year olds. -Integrated Systems Engineering, Ohio State University We dug a lot of holes and still don't know if measuring beryllium in dirt is useful, but it does cost a lot of money. -Geology, Amherst College Going into space is pretty dangerous, and the government should keep making rules about folks trying it -Aerospace engineering, MIT A mathematical theory of discarding irrelevant crap when making a team decision. -Electrical Engineering, Stanford University Turns out, you can make bacteria have sex! -Chemical Engineering, Rice University So, colonialism. -History, Wesleyan University

If you want to snark on your own thesis, you can submit your one-sentence description to the site.

Photo by Mirko Tobias Schaefer . And yes, that's an actual thesis title .

Lol My Thesis [via Boing Boing ]

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/07/lol-my-thesis-/4354985/ Tue, 01/07/2014 - 19:00 USA Today LOL My Thesis: Harvard student's viral sensation

LOL My Thesis: Harvard student's viral sensation

Angela Frankel is currently working on her senior thesis at Harvard University, exploring zebrafish embryonic cardiogenesis as a way to assess how a particular gene regulates a group of progenitor cells that exist in normal heart development.

Got that? Don't worry. Frankel provides a much simpler progress report online: "I have killed so many fish."

Long term, Frankel's thesis may have implications for better understanding the development of congenital heart disease.

Short term, it has indirectly spawned a viral sensation.

Last month, Frankel launched LOL My Thesis , mainly "as a means of procrastination from my own thesis."

It has spread fast on social media, becoming one of the most notable online student creations of winter break.

The Tumblr attempts to spotlight what Frankel describes as "the lighter side of thesis writing and academia in general."

Specifically, the site features a growing collection of snarky and lighthearted one-liners submitted by college students and alumni worldwide poking fun at their current or past theses.

Some touch on concerns about whether projects really matter. As a human geography major writes , "My thesis is about elections in the Republic of Georgia. Does anyone in the world care about the elections in the Republic of Georgia? Huh, no one. Ever."

Others make fun of how obvious their project focuses tend to be, such as a computer science major's conclusion "you have no privacy anymore" and a political science major's finding that "democracy would work a whole lot better if we weren't so, you know, human."

Still others reveal the ssshhh-don't-tell reality of what they feel is a rather worthless endeavor.

As an English major summarizes their thesis work, "Here's how an unrelated internship I barely managed to get applies to four years of studying literature I barely managed to pass."

Another crop hint at the true reasons they decided to tackle a project.

One example , from a media, society and the arts major: "I wanted to lay in bed and watch Netflix instead of writing, so here are the ways Orange is the New Black is awesome."

"I think one thing that people really like about the blog is that it's kind of reassuring," said Frankel, 21, a native of Cornwall on Hudson, N.Y.

"The thesis writing process can be extremely isolating and produce a lot of self-doubt along the way. You work on one project for so long and oftentimes people speak with their advisers fairly infrequently. You may feel you're behind or that your project is not living up to others. On the blog, you see other people are experiencing similar challenges or having similar doubts."

A mix of LOL My Thesis entries presented on the site this past weekend: "Harry Potter is Jesus. Boom." (submitted by a religion and literature student); "Genomes suck." (from a bioinformatics student); "Never trust strangers on boats." (a history student); "Money can buy happiness, sorry." (a psychology student); and "There is no right way to play Mozart, just a million wrong ways!" (a musicology student).

Frankel said she has started other Tumblr blogs in the past — including one featuring portraits of people who stop by a café on Harvard's campus where she works — but they have not gained many followers.

LOL My Thesis quickly entered the collegiate zeitgeist.

She knew it had left what she calls "the Harvard bubble" a few nights after its launch. A Duke University student sent a friend of Frankel's a link to the blog during a Gmail chat and asked if she knew about it. Her friend's reply: "Oh, I'm sitting next to the creator."

"That was my first realization that it had propagated throughout the Internet," said Frankel, whose academic concentration at Harvard is stem cell and regenerative biology. "The following day I woke up and there had been 300 to 400 new submissions. That's when I knew it had blown up — and that it was going to be a lot of work."

LOL My Thesis now receives more than 500 submissions a day -- from which Frankel typically selects and posts several dozen.

This past Sunday, she said the blog boasted roughly 14,000 hits. And a complementary Twitter account has garnered more than than 5,000 followers in less than a month.

There are even a few employees, informally.

Recent Harvard graduate Kane Hsieh, a friend, provides tech support and Frankel's sister Elisa, a Ph.D. candidate in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also occasionally pitches in.

With spring semester lurking, Frankel plans to continue LOL My Thesis , while remaining mindful of competing responsibilities such as her zebrafish embryonic cardiogenesis research.

"I have to keep in mind this is a side-blog to my actual thesis, which I have to make sure is the main priority," she said. "I'm still surprised. I started it as a means of procrastination, and it's become much more than I've anticipated."

Dan Reimold writes the Campus Beat column for USA TODAY College and maintains the student journalism industry blog College Media Matters .

'LOL My Thesis' Blog Discovers The Basic Truths Of The World With Some Snark

Senior Editor/Reporter, The Huffington Post

If you have no idea what a research paper titled " Authority and the production of knowledge in archaeology " is about, then maybe this alternate take will be easier to understand: " Fake science sounds an awful lot like real science, except it’s fake ."

That's the genius behind a blog called " LOL My Thesis ," started by Harvard University senior Angela Frankel. The Tumblr-based blog allows for submissions about thesis projects that are either completed or in the works, with notes or quick takeaways about what students' research discovered.

Frankel started it off with her own post on Dec. 9 : "I have killed so many fish." It was a progress report on her own senior thesis she's working on, which USA Today describes as "exploring zebrafish embryonic cardiogenesis as a way to assess how a particular gene regulates a group of progenitor cells that exist in normal heart development."

The blog is now generating around 500 new submissions every day, Frankel told Mashable, and she tries to add 30 to 40 daily.

Although it's the creation of a student in the Ivy League, it's attracting submissions from all sorts of lesser-known public colleges and schools overseas. It even attracted a submission from Jon Steinberg, president and chief operating officer of BuzzFeed. Frankel explained on her blog that "LOL My Thesis" was initially intended as procrastination of her own project, yet it has now "documented some of the stress, hilarity, and chaos associated with undergraduate (and some post-graduate) theses."

Frankel further told USA Today she believes the blog caught on because it provides reassurance.

"The thesis writing process can be extremely isolating and produce a lot of self-doubt along the way," Frankel said . "You work on one project for so long and oftentimes people speak with their advisers fairly infrequently. You may feel you're behind or that your project is not living up to others. On the blog, you see other people are experiencing similar challenges or having similar doubts."

HuffPost went through the blog and picked some of our favorites, and with Frankel's permission, posted them below. But this only scratches the surface, so feel free to head over to " LOL My Thesis " and find the ones you like the best.

Turns out you can’t cure cancer in a physics lab. Not even a little. -- Physics, University of Innsbruck

Monkeys don’t like eagles -- Anthropology, Durham University UK

Turns out, people don’t like it when you sleep with their girlfriend. -- Psychology, Duke University

Harry Potter is Jesus. Boom. -- Religion and Literature, Claremont Graduate University

It is hard to eliminate evidence of your porn viewing from your computer. -- Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin

Oscar Wilde was gay. So was his boyfriend. -- English, Washington University - St Louis

Poop is poop, even if it is diluted to 1:100 -- Molecular Protozoology, University of the Philippines

Insects will die for love. Or sex, anyway. -- Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota.

I have no job, but you spelled “you’re” wrong, so I mock you. -- English, Northeastern University

Drugs are bad, but look pretty under a microscope. -- Forensic Science, London South Bank University

Humans have lots of ways of talking about making other humans do stuff. -- PhD Linguistics, UC Berkeley

No matter what you post, trolls be trollin’. -- Communications and Media Science, Kodolányi János University College

If you come from far away, people will be surprised at the way you speak. -- Linguistics, University of Freiburg

People like spaceships and sex -- screenwriting and film, University of Southern California

Similarity between people and rats: Sleep deprivation makes them angry. -- Neuroscience, Washington State University

Wolves + humans, the ultimate frenemies. -- Science Writing, M.I.T.

It turns out, an only child never fights with its siblings. -- Sociology, University of Vienna

I procrastinated for two years then wrote this in a week, please give me a C -- Social Studies, Harvard

Oops: Turns out self-published poetry didn’t actually affect Indian politics but I’m 60 pages in, so. -- Political Science, Vassar College

Two molecules, one molecular cup -- Organic Chemistry, North Dakota State University

Blogs are almost definitely gonna be a thing. -- Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University.

Minimalism: still a thing. -- Music Composition, College of the Holy Cross

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College Students’ Thesis Topics Are Hilarious, Depressing

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Even the most ardent academic must concede that there’s something darkly funny about devoting years of one’s life to a thesis question so abstruse that no one else had ever cared enough to ask it—and then answering it at such great length that few will ever care to read it.

Enter lolmythesis.com , a Tumblr started by a Harvard senior procrastinating on her own undergraduate thesis. The blog encourages fellow undergrad and graduate students to distill all their hard-won knowledge into a single sentence—a sort of self-mocking tl;dr of their years-long labor of love/hate. The concept is reminiscent of #overlyhonestmethods , the brilliant hashtag game that swept science-Twitter earlier this year. If lolmythesis is a little less piercingly witty than its forebear, it’s also more accessible to non-academics. And it’s been flooded with submissions: Three weeks after it launched, the blog stands at 54 pages’ worth of academic one-liners.

They range from the silly to the depressing to the stultifying to the actually kind of interesting. A few were intriguing enough that I found myself wanting to click on them like headlines and read the full story. How often can you say that about real thesis titles? But mostly they’re just funny, and a little sad. Here are a few of my favorites:

Rocks that are next to each other in Massachusetts now were also next to each other 400 million years ago. -          Geology, Amherst College

Jellyfish don’t like it when you acidify their tank. -          Marine Biology, St Andrews

Look at this zombie. Isn’t it racist and sexist? Yes, it is. -          English Literature, DePaul University

FML: All my feelings are constructed. -          Religion & Women and Gender Studies, Harvard

People get really bored listening to beeping for an hour, but they’ll do it when professors require experiment credit. -          Psychology, University of Chicago

Once there were some lost lobsters who were maybe a tiny bit different from some other lobsters, so I killed lots of their larvae to find out if they were actually a tiny bit different. Turns out I don’t know, so I have to do it again. -          Earth Systems, Stanford University

Just because there’s a bike lane on your street doesn’t mean your rent will be higher. Or lower. Bikes are statistically insignificant to your rent. -          Economics, Reed College

Online ads that claim you are the 100000th visitor are surprisingly effective. -          Computer Science, Harvard

I wanted to see if I could make a really really small circuit. I concluded that, yes, I can make a really really small circuit. -          Physics, Northwestern University

Mark Rothko was a huge asshole. -          Theatre, Dickinson College.

There was this Hittite king who might or might not have had a son, but definitely moved his seat of government from one place to another, and then his brother moved it back, and all 8 people who care are like “Why’d he do that? Tevs.” -          Cuneiform Studies, University of Chicago

I am going to write my thesis about how dicking around on the internet is important for art and intimacy and stuff, just as soon as I get off this tumblr. -          English and Gender Studies, University of Chicago

The full blog is here .

Update, Thursday, Jan. 2, 2013: The blog’s creator is Angie Frankel, and her own website is here . Via email, Frankel told me the Tumblr has grown bigger than she had imagined, and it’s now starting to draw more submissions from Ph.D. students in addition to undergrads. It has also led to a little more procrastination on her own thesis than she initially bargained for.

“I’m currently prepping for the MCAT and working on my thesis, and now moderating an unexpectedly popular blog,” she said. “It certainly succeeded as a distraction, but I’m enjoying it every day, and the blog reminds me to laugh and keep everything in perspective.”

Previously in Slate:

An Idiot’s Guide to the Reddit Thread, “What’s the Most Intellectual Joke You Know?”

Team February 12, 2020

lol My Thesis: IISD Experimental Lakes Area edition

By Sumeep Bath , Communications Manager

lol  informal (also LOL) UK  /lɒl/ US  /lɑːl/ abbreviation for laughing out loud: used, for example on social media and in text messages, when you think something is funny or you intend it as a joke.

While those three controversial little letters may have earned their place in the corridors of linguistic hell,  lol my thesis  proves to be a perennial source of humorous respite for academics around the world.

The concept? Simple. Anyone who has written a thesis submits their original title, and then comes up with a pithy, accurate and funny new title that better describes what they did and what they found.

The result? Academic research that is much more accessible to non-specialists and more honest about the work that we do.

Here at the world’s freshwater laboratory, we always like to bring you the latest (and most humorous) forms of  science communication , so we set about asking our researchers, scientists, and collaborators to “lol” their theses (many of which were based on research conducted at IISD Experimental Lakes Area)—all to predictably comical effect.

Hang on to your funny bones folks, it’s going to be a wild ride…

Geoffrey Gunn

• The original title:  Polynya Formation in Hudson Bay During the Winter Period  (MSc. Environment and Geography, 2015, University of Manitoba)
• The  lol my thesis  title:  Some Arctic Ice Moves Back and Forth, Back and Forth
• Geoff recently took to the  Toronto Star  to explain why we need high tech data to stop sewage overflows.  Read that opinion piece here.

Richard Grosshans

• The original title:  Cattail ( Typha spp. ) Biomass Harvesting for Nutrient Capture and Sustainable Bioenergy for Integrated  Watershed Management   (PhD Department of Biosystems Engineering, 2014, University of Manitoba)
• The  lol my thesis  title:  You Can Cut Down and Burn Stuff to Save the Planet! Who Knew?
• Want to learn more about our work on cattail and how it can help keep fresh water clean?  Click here.

Pauline Gerrard

• The original title:  The Effects of Experimental Reservoir Creation on the Bioaccumulation of Methylmercury and Reproductive Success of Tree Swallows ( Tachycineta bicolor )  (MSc. Department of Biological Sciences, 2000, University of Alberta)
• The  lol my thesis  title:  How I Learned I Would Rather Fly Like a Tree Swallow Than Soar Like an Eagle
• Want to learn more about how Pauline has helped transform the face of IISD-ELA?  Click here.

Scott Higgins

• The original title: Nitrogen Fixation in the Rocky Littoral Zone of Lake Malawi (MSc. Biology, University of Waterloo, 2001)
• The  lol my thesis  title:  Mo Nitrogen Mo Green 
• Scott recently broke down what calcium does to fresh water, and what happens when there isn’t enough.  Read more here.

Cyndy Desjardins

• The original title:  The Impacts of Petrochemical Activity and Climate Change on Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon (PAH) Deposition to Lake Sediments of Northwestern Canada  (MSc. Biology, Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology, University of Ottawa, 2015)
• The  lol my thesis  title:  Open-Pit Oil Sands Mining Might Not Be Great for the Environment
• Want to learn all about Cyndy?  Read more here.

Paul Fafard

• The original title:  Nutrient Deposition on Arctic Fox Dens Creates Atypical Tundra Plant Assemblages at the Edge of the Arctic  (BSc. Ecology and Environmental Biology, 2015, University of Manitoba )
• The  lol my thesis  title:  Different Plants Grow Where Arctic Foxes Poop a Lot, Compared to Where They Don’t Poop Much
• Paul recently penned an awesome explanation of why lakes stratify and turn over. Want to read it? Sure you do.  Here’s the link.

Ken Sandilands

• The original title: The Effects of Nutrients, Fathead Minnows, and Submersed Macrophytes on the Invertebrate Community and Habitat Quality of Delta Marsh. (MSc. Ecology and Environmental Biology, 2000, University of Manitoba)
• The  lol my thesis  title:  Any Project That Involves Fish and Enclosures Is Doomed: Good Thing Underwater Plants Don’t Swim Away !
• Ken recently took part in some exciting oceanic sampling out on the coast of British Columbia.  Join him on his journey.

Sonya Havens

• The original title:  Assessing the Occurrence of Steroid Hormones and Hormone Metabolites From Cattle and Dairy Animal Feeding Operations  (PhD Environmental Chemistry and Technology, 2011, University of Wisconsin – Madison)
• The  lol my thesis  title:  Four Crappy Years of Ruminating on Cow Crap
• Want to learn more about what Sonya does in the chemistry laboratory?  Learn more.

Lauren Timlick

• The original title: Effects of Model Freshwater Diluted Bitumen Spills on Wild Small-Bodied Fish (MSc. Environmental Science, 2020, University of Manitoba)
• The  lol my thesis  title:  Oil Might Have Been Bad for My Fish But They Kept Dying of Stress First (And Quite Frankly, Same)
• Lauren just spoke to PBS’s Great Lakes Now show, explaining our research on oil spills.  Watch the segment here.

Lauren Hayhurst

• The original title: Bioenergetic Evaluation of a Whole-Lake Nanosilver Addition on Yellow Perch ( Perca flavescens ) (MSc. Biology, 2018, Lakehead University)
• The  lol my thesis  title:  Adding Bacteria-Killing Silver Particles to a Lake Makes Fish Lethargic (They Eat Less Because They Move Less Or They Move Less Because They Eat Less?), But The Bacteria Were Fine
• Wondering what all this silver talk is about? Lauren explains all in  her most recent blog post.

José Luis Rodríguez Gil

• The original title: Fate and Effects of an Alkylamine Ethoxylate Surfactant Mixture in Aquatic Systems: Pulsed Exposures, Recovery Capacity and the Importance of Sediment (PhD Environmental Biology and Toxicology, 2015, University of Guelph)
• The  lol my thesis  title:  Some Toxic Things Are Not That Toxic When There Is Dirt Involved

Sumeep Bath

• The original title: Social Dissidents as the Kristevan Abject in Luis Puenzo’s  La Historia Oficial  (MA Latin American Studies, 2007, University of Cambridge)
• The  lol my thesis  title:  SPOILER ALERT: 1970s Argentine Military Dictators Totally Weren’t Into Socialists

You know that ground-breaking freshwater research you  just  read about? Well, that’s actually down to  you.

It’s only thanks to our generous donors that the world’s freshwater laboratory—an independent not-for-profit—can continue to do what we do. And that means everything from explore what happens when cannabis flushes and oil spills into a lake, to how we can reduce mercury in fish and algal blooms in fresh water—all to keep our water clean around the world for generations to come.

We know that these are difficult times, but the knowledge to act on scientific evidence has never been more important. Neither has your support.

If you believe in whole ecosystem science and using it to bring about real change to fresh water around the globe,  please support us  in any way you are able to.

Lol My Thesis is the TL;DR of college essays

Sadly, there's no extra credit for honesty..

Internet Culture

Posted on Jan 1, 2014   Updated on May 31, 2021, 10:31 pm CDT

Tumblr  has long hosted a lively academic subculture, with pupils and professors around the world using the platform to share ideas and, more often, commiserate about the myriad pains of devoting one’s life to a particular field of study. There’s  #WhatShouldWeCallGradSchool , which compiles appropriate GIF reactions to such indignities.  Shit My Students Write  is a place for decontextualized (and hilariously misguided) attempts at intellectual insight.

Nothing, however, could prepare us for the elegant, almost frightening simplicity of  Lol My Thesis , a submission-based blog that compresses years of research and higher education into sentences even a layman would find a tad reductive. Because college theses do often hinge on some niche, technical matter overlooked by other scholars, or demonstrate a fact we usually take for granted, this has the effect of making projects sound trivial, boring, or beside the point.

Each entry describes what we might consider the work’s statement of purpose in a world where inflated word count and syntactic flourishes are not essential to college essay-writing, along with a line specifying one’s major and institution. A young lady of the history and gender studies departments at Smith, for example, delivered hard proof of this claim: “Basically, Beyoncé can do anything.” A cognitive scientist at Boston University, meanwhile, discovered that people “don’t like electrodes stuck to their head while you flash epilepsy-inducing lights at them.”

As banal and depressing as these synopses seem, there are also plenty of profound statements to mull over. An student of English at the University of Victoria summed up an immersive literary experience in a fairly incredulous tone: “You can write a 120 page thesis on a 119 page book.” A Whitman College philosopher made the intriguing argument that it’s “not selfish to be selfish.” Even the tautological claim that mammoths “stopped eating things after they went extinct” has the ring of hard-won wisdom to it, if not the sparkle of a Nobel-worthy theory. 

Thankfully, for the doggedly curious among us, some posts now include a link to the actual thesis. We just wish that were the case for one brave individual’s  treatise on dinosaur poop .

Photo by  Canadian Pacific /Flickr

Miles Klee is a novelist and web culture reporter. The former editor of the Daily Dot’s Unclick section, Klee’s essays, satire, and fiction have appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, Vanity Fair, 3:AM, Salon, the Awl, the New York Observer, the Millions,  and the Village Voice. He's the author of two odd books of fiction, 'Ivyland' and 'True False.'

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lol my thesis

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You know those AskReddit threads that are about the worst thing to happen at a wedding/funeral? That, but Shakespeare.

English Literature, University of East Anglia, Norwich England

This Looks Not Like A Nuptial: Genre and Disruptions of Ceremony in “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Hamlet”

Brain areas talk to each other.

Neuroscience, University of Heidelberg, Germany

“Oscillatory Long-Range Synchronization Across Brain Areas in Freely Moving and Head-Restrained Mice”

To illustrate what everybody knows in an ever-complicated way

Linguistic-Beijing Foreign Studies University

Comparative analysis on Chinese-English Translation

Re-membering Women’s Bodies: The Problems of Voice and Representation in Two Partition Narratives

English, University of Manitoba

Defoe was all up in China

Literature, Rice University

Daniel Defoe, China and the British Empire

People who believe they are in control of their lives like capitalism

Cognitive Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

The complementary contribution of ideology and personality to lay views of capitalism

Star Trek fanfiction is really cool and changed the way we create and think about community and contribution and here’s why you should care about it

Religious Studies, University of Denver

To Boldly Go and Keep Going: Star Trek, Globalization, and Fanfiction

These people think they know how they will respond to ecological collapse. They are all wrong.

Creative Writing, University of Rochester

Sometimes, researchers have to do paperwork, and they will complain about it a lot. Some of the complaints will be valid

Anthropology, The University of Western Ontario

Taking Ethics Seriously: Navigating the Ethics Approval Process at a Canadian University

Cricketers should stop drinking ungodly amounts of coffee

Sport and Exercise, University of Auckland

The influence of caffeine on mucosal immunity and performance in males during intermittent exercise in the heat

This 10 paragraph description of feet represents cultural colonialism but also the author being horny on main

Japanese, Tufts University.

Fetishes and Philanderers: A Translation of Two of Tanizaki’s Early Works.

Surprise, children with a diagnosis that constitutes depression with irritability and temper outbursts actually aren’t more depressed than children with a diagnosis that constitutes only irritability and temper outbursts.

PsyD Clinical Psychology, University of Hartford

Distinguishing Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder from Oppositional Defiant Disorder: The Nuance of Depression and Irritability

Getting rid of dead bodies in water isn’t a great idea.

Criminology (Forensic Anthropology), Simon Fraser University

Experimental lacustrine taphonomy: Decompositional changes in freshwater lake submerged Ovis aries skeletal remains within the Pacific Coastal Western Hemlock Zone

Odysseus could be a space lesbian if he lived in a video game.

M.Litt in Classics, University of Glasgow

Mass Effect 2: A Queer Subversion of the Classical Epic

Looking at pictures of puppies doesn’t help you learn faces better, sadly.

Psychology, Durham University

The Effect of Positive Affect on Face Learning

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