The faculty of the SEEM department believes too many candidates spend too much time (some never finish) to publish lengthy thesis that few people read and not enough journal or conference publications.

We recommend that the thesis consist mainly of refereed conference and (published or submitted) journal papers. The latter may not yet have been published since typical time from submission to publication in top journals may be as high as 18 months. A significant first section should include a presentation of the problem, a critical bibliography and related discussion. A concluding section would be required.

The committee recognizes that, beyond the benefits of engaging in the deep intellectual exercise of writing a thesis, that much of the information in a conventional thesis could not appear in scholarly publications because of page limitations but needed to be available to the community. Appendices could provide salient and unique experimental/computational details, complete tables of data and computer code. Periodic technical reports could be written by the student to keep the new knowledge well and alive in the research group.