A deadline quietly slipped beneath the notice of most campus residents last week.

While undergraduates were busy with the latest weekly assignment, midterm or essay, many graduate students – myself included – were facing one of the biggest days of their careers: their thesis defense.

Imagine every term paper and final you have ever written smashed together into a book-length monster of a project, complete with claws, fangs and a ravenous desire to consume all your spare time — that is the thesis in a nutshell. Even after writing a thesis, one must still defend it. A typical defense consists of a half-hour lecture by the thesis writer before a committee of experts, after which the committee asks questions of the speaker.

I suspect that many graduate students – myself included, again – wonder why we must go through this academic ritual.

The graduate thesis has its purpose: much like a term paper or final, it demonstrates a specific desired ability. A master’s thesis often synthesizes and amalgamates research done by others, and so demonstrates its writer’s advanced knowledge and scholarship. A doctoral thesis often contains original research, and so demonstrates its writer’s ability to contribute to the body of knowledge.

But these abilities can be demonstrated in other ways. In some fields, graduate students do research and publish results well in advance of writing a doctoral thesis. Then, when the time comes, they collect three or four such results, staple them together, add a unifying introduction and conclusion, and – voila! – obtain a thesis.

Why go through the additional work to collect the results together for a doctoral thesis? If a student has the capability for research, that will still be evident with or without collecting the work into a thesis.

One could argue that a thesis, unlike a classroom essay, is meant to be a public work. 

An essay is graded and discarded soon after that, but a thesis is frequently archived so that it can be of use to researchers and scholars in the future. Thus it is the duty of a student to carefully prepare his work for future generations.

That sentiment might earn a laugh from graduate students and professors alike. According to one frequently shared joke, you’ll be lucky if a handful of people ever read your thesis; and you’ll be extra lucky if some of those people are actually on your defense committee.

Yes, a thesis is meant to be a public work, but it very often goes unused or underused. I have found the occasional master’s thesis to be helpful in my own research (since master’s theses amalgamate research from many sources, they can be great references), but the operative word here is occasional.

In fact, many graduate students are encouraged to undercut the usefulness of their thesis: they are told to publish the results of their thesis in a journal as soon as possible after writing them. For all the importance that we place onto the thesis, we still consider a simple journal publication to be a more official place to share our work.

In short, the process of writing and defending a thesis can be an immense amount of unnecessary work.

Note: “can be,” not “is.”

The thesis makes a very clear destination for a graduate student. It is the goal, the target, the finish line: complete it and earn your degree (plus some fancy letters to go next to your name). Students can and do schedule months or years around having enough time to research, write and defend their thesis. For many students, the thesis is useful and rewarding, both personally and occupationally.

And not all students have the sort of side projects that could be used as a stand-in for a thesis.

But for those that have, why not make alternate completion methods available? Ever since the recession hit years ago, departments have been trying to streamline the graduation process. Just look at the mathematics department’s recent decision to end its language requirement for graduate students.

The thesis may be the last thing that people want to change; it is an institution unto itself. Forget convincing graduate students one way or another, the University itself takes an immense pride in the quality theses produced here. And we students take no small amount of pride in our accomplishment either.

But for all the pride I feel at having completed my thesis, part of me is still whispering in the back of my mind: why wasn’t I spending my time discovering something new, instead of just repackaging my old work?

Joseph is a graduate student. He can be reached at [email protected].