“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.
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]
