A Thesis Template
31 August 2007
A major milestone for a Ph.D. student is the point when he or she begins writing (or is given permission to begin writing) the dissertation. At this point, a good part of the work is complete (and hopefully published) and the task is to take this work and put it together into one document. As I began to compile my publications and organize them into a dissertation, I looked around for thesis templates that conformed to Dartmouth's specifications. I don't think I found anything, which is why I am posting this template.
The graduate office at Dartmouth publishes a pdf with instructions for preparing theses and dissertations. It specifies the parts of the document, the margins, page numbering, and other miscellaneous details. The template posted below conforms to these specifications except for the line spacing - I find double spacing to be somewhat ugly and chose to use one-half spacing instead. The style of the dissertation is about as simple as possible, with no fancy headers or footers, but these can be easily added.