This repo contains my MIT PhD thesis.
Author: Claire Duvallet - (homepage)
Defense date: January 11, 2019
The final submitted version of my thesis is duvallet_thesis_final.pdf.
A pdf of my defense slides is presentation/2019-01-11.defense.pdf.
I forked this from Scott W Olesen's MIT Thesis Template repo.
Note: this repo is not the actual forked one, because GitHub Large File Storage does not allow you to push LFS objects to a public fork unless you have write access to the root directory, which I don't (because it's Scott's) I deleted the original forked repo to prevent any confusion (for me).
You should check out Scott's README for more information on this template.
He got this template from here, modified some of the files, removing comments and rewriting the readme. I made a few additional modifications, separating the acknowledgments into their own file and adding a few additional commands to the Makefile (e.g. to make the document without appendices, and to make just the intro and conclusion text).
Unlike Scott, I did not include any pdf files wholesale (because all of my papers were amenable to being included directly as .tex files).
Check out Scott's repo for examples on how to include .pdf files wholesale.
This is where the template really shines. It's confusing how to typeset all those pages.
- The abstract of the thesis, in plain text, goes into
abstract.tex. contents.texsays how the Table of Contents should be typeset. If you want a list of figures or something like that, it will also go in here.cover.texcontains a lot of information: the title of the thesis, your name, etc.main.texis where you include packages, change the formatting of the thesis, and specify what files (i.e., the chapters, see below) will go into the document.
If your chapters contain packages that aren't already in main.tex, you'll need to put them in here.
The main body of the thesis goes in the .tex files. I put each chapter
into its own file:
- Chapter 1 in
chap1.tex - Chapter 2 in
chap_aspiration.tex - Appendix A in
app_aspiration.tex
and so forth.
These main chapter .tex files are included in main.tex (with \include{} commands).
These .tex files only contain the basic info about the chapter, like title and author, and any other text that shows up on the first page of each chapter.
The majority of each chapter's content is stored in separate folders corresponding to each (e.g. aspiration, meta-analysis, etc.).
These contain the .tex files I previously prepared for submitting these papers, and each folder has its own sub-folder containing all the figures.
Each of these also has its own .bib file with references.
The main chapter .tex files (the ones that start with chap_) specify the graphicspath to use.
The content of the chapter is incorporated into the chapter with the \input{} function.
I didn't do this, but Scott did in his thesis.
The pdfs I included were mostly the manuscript files from submitting the papers, which means that the figures were kept separate. I therefore put the figures and their captions directly into the LaTeX chapter files. Those figures are mostly in the subfolders mentioned above.
The bibliography information is in main.bib, which is a
BibTex file.
All the citations that you will reference in the TeX files go in there.
The file biblio.tex contains the information about how to typeset
the bibliography. It is the last "chapter" in the thesis.
The style files lgrind.sty and mitthesis.cls help make the magic of the template happen.
I didn't mess with these.
- Figure out what your chapters are going to be. Write them in LaTeX, including pdfs as you need.
- Redo the front matter stuff in
contents.tex,cover.tex, andmain.tex. - Change any packages or formatting in
main.tex. - Actually make the document using the
Makefile, which requires latexmk. Runningmakewill make the document,make viewshould open it with a viewer, andmake cleanshould clean up anything made from the source files. - Consider putting it under version control, e.g., with git.
You can email thesis@mit.edu. (Note that this email goes to Scott and not me).