rbalebako/epp-cmu-thesis

A non-official template for a PhD thesis at Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

EPP-CMU-Thesis

A non-official template for a PhD thesis at Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

Instructions

1. Download the zip file to a convenient folder. Uncompress it.

2. Edit the files referenced below in "Important files" to suit your needs.

3. Open a terminal, go to the folder where you uncompressed the zip file, and type 'make'. If everything goes fine, you should see soon the file 'thesis.pdf'. To clean up the folder, type 'make clean'.

Important files

1. content/frontmatter.tex: This is where most of the details go: the title of your thesis, your own name, your degrees (which should go in your cover page), the date of your graduation, copyright permission, keywords of your thesis, your abstract, dedication, and acknowledgements.

2. content/macros.tex: This is where you put all the special LaTeX packages that you need, and all those definitions that repeat all over your work, but that nonetheless may change often.

3. content/references.bib: This is where your bibliographic references go (BibTeX format).

Draft functions

I included a few commands to add editing capabilities to your thesis file. When you're editing your thesis, it's useful to have a mechanism to make comments, and introduce some stuff that may or may not end up in the thesis. Maybe your advisor wants to read the LaTeX file and make comments right there!

When writing and compiling your thesis, you can use two modes: normal and draft. The way to make it a draft is passing the option 'draft' to the documentclass command, like this:

\documentclass[11pt,draft]{cmuthesis}

To return to normal mode, simply take out the option 'draft'. All the following commands have different behavior depending on the mode you are:

\comment{text}:
In dratf mode: 'text' is displayed in red font, between square brackets, and preceded by the word 'Comment'.
In normal mode: 'text' is not displayed.

\edadd{text}: ('EDitor ADD')
In draft mode: 'text' is displayed in red font.
In normal mode: 'text' is displayed in regular font.

\eddelete{text}: ('EDitor DELETE')
In draft mode: 'text' is displayed in red font and crossed out.
In normal mode: 'text' is not displayed

\edreplace{text}{replacement}:
In draft mode: 'text' is displayed in red font and crossed out. 'replacement' is displayed in red font.
In normal mode: only 'replacement' is displayed in regular font.

History

During 2013 I spent quite a while trying to understand the multiple requirements to put together my PhD thesis for Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Besides having many tables, list of questions coming from surveys, graphics, statistical data, and a lot of code to put in, I also had to deal with a lot of editorial requirements (e.g., "this is how your cover page should look like"). Since there are no official templates for a phd thesis (which makes no sense to me since it's something we all PhD students have to go through), here's my attempt to save you the pain to do it.

This template has a lot of filler texts just to give you an idea of how it looks.

While this template was created with EPP in mind (and every department has its own requirements), you may tweak it to your own purposes.

Official sources of information

You should always consult with the administrator of your department. As of May 2014, the official source of information for thesis guidelines in Carnegie Mellon University is: http://www.cit.cmu.edu/current_students/graduates/thesis_dissertation_policies.html. For EPP guidelines, you should go to: https://www.epp.cmu.edu/graduate/thesis_format_guide.html.

Dependencies

This template was compiled with pdfTeX 3.1415926-2.5-1.40.14. It was composed with TexStudio 2.6.2 in a laptop with Ubuntu 13.10. In theory, you may be able to use it in any TeX-capable distribution, although it has not been tested extensively in any other platform than Ubuntu 13.10.

License

The non-official EPP-CMU Thesis Template by Cristian Bravo-Lillo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To see a human-readable version of the license, please go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.