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“Lol My Thesis” Showcases Painfully Hilarious Attempts to Sum up Years of Academic Work in One Sentence

in Comedy , Education | January 9th, 2014 1 Comment

Image from Ph.D. Comics

A true fact about the the­sis stage of an advanced degree: What­ev­er the aca­d­e­m­ic field, whether writ­ing a fifty page bachelor’s or master’s the­sis or 250 plus page doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion, at some point, you will need to win­now your argu­ment down to an abstract sum­ma­ry of a cou­ple suc­cinct para­graphs. Then, one inevitably finds—when rid­ing ele­va­tors with col­leagues and men­tors, talk­ing to rel­a­tives over hol­i­day din­ners, jus­ti­fy­ing one’s exis­tence to friends and acquaintances—that the whole damned thing needs to some­how reduce to one intel­li­gi­ble sen­tence or two. It’s all any­one has the patience for, hon­est­ly, and it saves you the trou­ble of try­ing to recon­struct com­plex argu­ments for peo­ple who won’t under­stand or care about them and who gen­er­al­ly only asked out of polite­ness any­way.

But how, how , to cram years of research, agony, tur­moil, crush­ing fail­ure and soar­ing epiphany into bite-sized con­ver­sa­tion­al nuggets with­out gross over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion to the point of tau­to­log­i­cal absur­di­ty? Can it even be done?! The blog “ lol my the­sis ,” start­ed last year by a Har­vard senior study­ing Human Devel­op­men­tal and Regen­er­a­tive Biol­o­gy, sug­gests that it can, but not with­out hilar­i­ous results. Part of an explod­ing genre of aca­d­e­m­ic par­o­dy (and pro­cras­ti­na­tion) sites, lol my the­sis proud­ly ven­tures forth in its mis­sion of “sum­ming up years of work in one sen­tence” with open sub­mis­sions from cur­rent stu­dents. Many of the sub­mis­sions are from the sci­ences, and many from under­grad­u­ate the­ses, but a fair num­ber also come from human­i­ties and post-grad­u­ate stud­ies. Take, for exam­ple, the fol­low­ing sub­mis­sion from an MFA Cre­ative Non­fic­tion stu­dent at Emer­son Col­lege , which direct­ly address­es the intend­ed audi­ence:

“A col­lec­tion of non­fic­tion essays, which means they’re writ­ten about real peo­ple and events, mom. Remem­ber all those times you accused me of not lis­ten­ing to the things you said?”

A pas­sive aggres­sive exam­ple that most of us who’ve been through the process can relate to at some lev­el. Anoth­er one that hits home is this, from a Vas­sar Polit­i­cal Sci­ence major, who dis­cov­ers too late that the argu­ment doesn’t work: “Oops: Turns out self-pub­lished poet­ry didn’t actu­al­ly affect Indi­an pol­i­tics but I’m 60 pages in, so.”

The sub­mis­sions from the sci­ences do not dis­ap­point. For exam­ple, from a Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land stu­dent of Bio­log­i­cal Sci­ences: “We spent thou­sands of gov­ern­ment dol­lars to cre­ate a mouse mod­el for a dis­ease only 32 peo­ple in the world have.” And a Sci­ence Writ­ing stu­dent at M.I.T . gives us this par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive exam­ple of brevi­ty: “Wolves + humans, the ulti­mate fren­e­mies.” Not to be out­done, a Stem Cell Biol­o­gy stu­dent at Har­vard offers a grim­ly terse con­fes­sion­al: “I have killed so many fish.”

The sub­mis­sions are anony­mous, but some good sports have cho­sen to include links to their the­ses, endear­ing­ly hop­ing that some­one besides their advi­sor will actu­al­ly want to read them. Most of the sub­mis­sions, how­ev­er, sim­ply com­bine two qual­i­ties every advanced stu­dent knows all too well: a well-earned feel­ing of futil­i­ty and the mor­dant wit required to keep going any­way.

More wit­ty sum­maries can be found at  lol my the­sis .

Relat­ed Con­tents:

The Illus­trat­ed Guide to a Ph.D.

Grad­u­ate School Bar­bie: A New Gift Idea for The Demor­al­ized Grad Stu­dent in Your Life

The Ph.D. Grind: Philip J. Guo’s Free Mem­oir Offers An Insider’s Look at Doc­tor­al Study

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

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College Students’ Thesis Topics Are Hilarious, Depressing

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Even the most ardent academic must concede that there’s something darkly funny about devoting years of one’s life to a thesis question so abstruse that no one else had ever cared enough to ask it—and then answering it at such great length that few will ever care to read it.

Enter lolmythesis.com , a Tumblr started by a Harvard senior procrastinating on her own undergraduate thesis. The blog encourages fellow undergrad and graduate students to distill all their hard-won knowledge into a single sentence—a sort of self-mocking tl;dr of their years-long labor of love/hate. The concept is reminiscent of #overlyhonestmethods , the brilliant hashtag game that swept science-Twitter earlier this year. If lolmythesis is a little less piercingly witty than its forebear, it’s also more accessible to non-academics. And it’s been flooded with submissions: Three weeks after it launched, the blog stands at 54 pages’ worth of academic one-liners.

They range from the silly to the depressing to the stultifying to the actually kind of interesting. A few were intriguing enough that I found myself wanting to click on them like headlines and read the full story. How often can you say that about real thesis titles? But mostly they’re just funny, and a little sad. Here are a few of my favorites:

Rocks that are next to each other in Massachusetts now were also next to each other 400 million years ago. -          Geology, Amherst College

Jellyfish don’t like it when you acidify their tank. -          Marine Biology, St Andrews

Look at this zombie. Isn’t it racist and sexist? Yes, it is. -          English Literature, DePaul University

FML: All my feelings are constructed. -          Religion & Women and Gender Studies, Harvard

People get really bored listening to beeping for an hour, but they’ll do it when professors require experiment credit. -          Psychology, University of Chicago

Once there were some lost lobsters who were maybe a tiny bit different from some other lobsters, so I killed lots of their larvae to find out if they were actually a tiny bit different. Turns out I don’t know, so I have to do it again. -          Earth Systems, Stanford University

Just because there’s a bike lane on your street doesn’t mean your rent will be higher. Or lower. Bikes are statistically insignificant to your rent. -          Economics, Reed College

Online ads that claim you are the 100000th visitor are surprisingly effective. -          Computer Science, Harvard

I wanted to see if I could make a really really small circuit. I concluded that, yes, I can make a really really small circuit. -          Physics, Northwestern University

Mark Rothko was a huge asshole. -          Theatre, Dickinson College.

There was this Hittite king who might or might not have had a son, but definitely moved his seat of government from one place to another, and then his brother moved it back, and all 8 people who care are like “Why’d he do that? Tevs.” -          Cuneiform Studies, University of Chicago

I am going to write my thesis about how dicking around on the internet is important for art and intimacy and stuff, just as soon as I get off this tumblr. -          English and Gender Studies, University of Chicago

The full blog is here .

Update, Thursday, Jan. 2, 2013: The blog’s creator is Angie Frankel, and her own website is here . Via email, Frankel told me the Tumblr has grown bigger than she had imagined, and it’s now starting to draw more submissions from Ph.D. students in addition to undergrads. It has also led to a little more procrastination on her own thesis than she initially bargained for.

“I’m currently prepping for the MCAT and working on my thesis, and now moderating an unexpectedly popular blog,” she said. “It certainly succeeded as a distraction, but I’m enjoying it every day, and the blog reminds me to laugh and keep everything in perspective.”

Previously in Slate:

An Idiot’s Guide to the Reddit Thread, “What’s the Most Intellectual Joke You Know?”

LOL My Thesis: Harvard student's viral sensation

Angela Frankel is currently working on her senior thesis at Harvard University, exploring zebrafish embryonic cardiogenesis as a way to assess how a particular gene regulates a group of progenitor cells that exist in normal heart development.

Got that? Don't worry. Frankel provides a much simpler progress report online: "I have killed so many fish."

Long term, Frankel's thesis may have implications for better understanding the development of congenital heart disease.

Short term, it has indirectly spawned a viral sensation.

Last month, Frankel launched LOL My Thesis , mainly "as a means of procrastination from my own thesis."

It has spread fast on social media, becoming one of the most notable online student creations of winter break.

The Tumblr attempts to spotlight what Frankel describes as "the lighter side of thesis writing and academia in general."

Specifically, the site features a growing collection of snarky and lighthearted one-liners submitted by college students and alumni worldwide poking fun at their current or past theses.

Some touch on concerns about whether projects really matter. As a human geography major writes , "My thesis is about elections in the Republic of Georgia. Does anyone in the world care about the elections in the Republic of Georgia? Huh, no one. Ever."

Others make fun of how obvious their project focuses tend to be, such as a computer science major's conclusion "you have no privacy anymore" and a political science major's <a href="http://lolmythesis.com/post/71540906250/democracy-would-work-a-whole-lot-better-if-we-werent">finding</a> that "democracy would work a whole lot better if we weren't so, you know, human."

Still others reveal the ssshhh-don't-tell reality of what they feel is a rather worthless endeavor.

As an English major summarizes their thesis work, "Here's how an unrelated internship I barely managed to get applies to four years of studying literature I barely managed to pass."

Another crop hint at the true reasons they decided to tackle a project.

One example , from a media, society and the arts major: "I wanted to lay in bed and watch Netflix instead of writing, so here are the ways Orange is the New Black is awesome."

"I think one thing that people really like about the blog is that it's kind of reassuring," said Frankel, 21, a native of Cornwall on Hudson, N.Y.

"The thesis writing process can be extremely isolating and produce a lot of self-doubt along the way. You work on one project for so long and oftentimes people speak with their advisers fairly infrequently. You may feel you're behind or that your project is not living up to others. On the blog, you see other people are experiencing similar challenges or having similar doubts."

A mix of LOL My Thesis entries presented on the site this past weekend: "Harry Potter is Jesus. Boom." (submitted by a religion and literature student); "Genomes suck." (from a bioinformatics student); "Never trust strangers on boats." (a history student); "Money can buy happiness, sorry." (a psychology student); and "There is no right way to play Mozart, just a million wrong ways!" (a musicology student).

Frankel said she has started other Tumblr blogs in the past — including one featuring portraits of people who stop by a café on Harvard's campus where she works — but they have not gained many followers.

LOL My Thesis quickly entered the collegiate zeitgeist.

She knew it had left what she calls "the Harvard bubble" a few nights after its launch. A Duke University student sent a friend of Frankel's a link to the blog during a Gmail chat and asked if she knew about it. Her friend's reply: "Oh, I'm sitting next to the creator."

"That was my first realization that it had propagated throughout the Internet," said Frankel, whose academic concentration at Harvard is stem cell and regenerative biology. "The following day I woke up and there had been 300 to 400 new submissions. That's when I knew it had blown up — and that it was going to be a lot of work."

LOL My Thesis now receives more than 500 submissions a day -- from which Frankel typically selects and posts several dozen.

This past Sunday, she said the blog boasted roughly 14,000 hits. And a complementary Twitter account has garnered more than than 5,000 followers in less than a month.

There are even a few employees, informally.

Recent Harvard graduate Kane Hsieh, a friend, provides tech support and Frankel's sister Elisa, a Ph.D. candidate in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also occasionally pitches in.

With spring semester lurking, Frankel plans to continue LOL My Thesis , while remaining mindful of competing responsibilities such as her zebrafish embryonic cardiogenesis research.

"I have to keep in mind this is a side-blog to my actual thesis, which I have to make sure is the main priority," she said. "I'm still surprised. I started it as a means of procrastination, and it's become much more than I've anticipated."

Dan Reimold writes the Campus Beat column for USA TODAY College and maintains the student journalism industry blog College Media Matters .

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Strange News

Lolmythesis: succinct, sardonic summaries of academic achievement.

What happens when you cross thesis research-induced delirium, a sardonic sense of humor and Tumblr? LOLmythesis, a pithy collection of one-line summaries of academic theses. Angie Frankel, the creator of LOLmythesis, speaks with NPR's Linda Wertheimer about the funny, sometimes depressing submissions.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Trending Now

Tumblr Asks Students to Sum Up Their Theses in One Sentence and The Results Are Hilarious

"Basically, Beyoncé can do anything."—History/Study of Women and Gender, Smith College

A Tumblr that crowdsources one-sentence summaries of undergraduate and graduate theses is going viral because misery loves company.  Angela Frankel , a senior at Harvard College studying Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology, started “LOL My Thesis” in Dec. 2013 “as a means of procrastination from my own thesis” (as you can probably tell).

Our favorites so far:

• “If you want to lose your faith in God, study religion.”— Theology, Boston College
• “I spent 372 pages describing what Kafka meant by everything he didn’t write.” —Humanities, University of Louisville
• “I made a movie and a cat was in the movie and the cat wouldn’t look at the camera so I yelled at the cat.” —Film, Northwestern University
• “Your final is to fix this failing business. Normally they would pay you, but we’ve volunteered your services. If you fail, they lose everything; no pressure.” — Marketing, Arizona State University
• “I killed a bunch of zebrafish embryos and shot lasers at them to figure out where a protein was. It’s everywhere.” —Biology, Virginia Commonwealth University
• “My invasive fruit flies won’t have sex for me.” —Botany/Entomology, New College of Florida
• “Crack was indeed whack.” — History, Columbia University
• “Numbers either exist, or they don’t. Depends on how you look at it.” —Philosophy, Reed College
• “Basically, Beyoncé can do anything.”— History/Study of Women and Gender, Smith College 

The 14 Most Hilarious Posts on lol my thesis

Any student who attempts to write a thesis knows the incredible amount of time, research, writing and revision that goes into such an endeavor. However, all that toil can usually be distilled down to just one or two lame sentences. Disillusioning? Yes. But also—as the new Tumblr page lol my thesis demonstrates—hilarious. Here are some of the best one-to-two-sentence thesis summaries we’ve seen on the page.

1. “I have a lot of feelings about female saints’ lives and feminism. Also dragons.” — History, University of Virginia

2. “The results of this investigation were not statistically significant.” — Statistics, Harvard University

3. “Sometimes, politicians put their penises in things that they should not.” — American Studies, Kalamazoo College

4. “Art on the internet is often hard to define, as are the concepts of ‘art’ and ‘internet’.” — Art History, Princeton

5. “It turns out that Amish romance novels are neither Amish nor romantic.” – English, College of Wooster

6. “If you write sonnets, you may or may not be in love.” – English, Harvard

7. “Money can buy happiness, sorry.” – Psychology, Middle East Technical University

8. “Stories are good, life is hard, let’s dance about it.” – Humanities, New College of Florida

9. “Hashtags are so hot right now #thesis #relevant #withthetimes” – Linguistics, Pomona College

10. “Emily Dickinson wrote about the clitoris a lot, and maybe S&M; people fail to pick up on this because she mostly narrates it through birds.” – English, Fordham

11. “We found out that fish that look different are different species.” – Marine Biology, Boston University

12. “My code doesn’t work. I have no idea why… My code works. I have no idea why.” – Computer Science, McGill University

13. “There’s no method in Hamlet’s madness. He’s just a b*tch.” – Program of Liberal Studies, University of Notre Dame

14. “Harry Potter is Jesus. Boom.” – Religion and Literature, Claremont Graduate University

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Lol my thesis: the facetious tumblr blog offering anonymous online sympathy to college students.

If you had to sum up your college research in one sentence , what would you say?

That is precisely the question asked by Lol My Thesis , a minimalistic online blog that posts one-sentence synopses of academic accomplishments as submitted by anonymous college students from across the U.S. (and beyond). And in good faith of all that is the internet, these scholarly one-liners are anything but self-patronizing .

Fringe Thesis Topics In Layman’s Terms

The curt, often self-deprecating summaries of academic achievement found on the site provide an intriguingly accurate reflection of the times we now live in; a time in which Millennial college grads find themselves with massive student loan debt , over-educated yet peculiarly under-employed – or more probably, not employed at all.

Launched in December 2013 by Angela Frankel, a senior at Harvard College , the LMT blog has grown tremendously in less than a year. Frankel, who studies Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology, says she initially started the simple project “as a means of procrastination” from her own thesis, in which she researches the “regulation of second heart field progenitor cells in zebrafish.”

Or, as she posted on Lol My Thesis, “I have killed so many fish.”

The project’s been jokingly referred to as the TL;DR of college theses, and earlier this year, Frankel encountered an onslaught of media coverage after the blog went viral among undergraduates, and eventually, graduate and PhD students as well. As of today, a total of 2,640 submissions have been published, from as far away as Poland and Pakistan.

Here’s a quick sampling of the intellectual delights:

No one has any idea what the hell is going on, but it may or may not be motivated by religion. Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

This one part of some protein sometimes does a thing nobody thought it did, but only at -80 C and under high vacuum. Biological applications questionable. Chemistry, Brown University

LSD makes people feel weird. Maybe for these reasons. Experimental Psychology, Oxford

If an orchestra wants to make money, it has to play the Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber stuff of the classical music. Unless you are rich and important like BSO, SFO or NYP, then you can experiment with weird s**t and people still buy your tickets – well, usually old people anyways. Economics, Williams College

Why did the samurai disembowel himself? To show that he had guts! But seriously, that pun has great symbolic meaning in Japanese. East Asian Studies / Philosophy, Columbia University

Oh God Kill Me Now Why Did I Ever Choose to Linguistically Analyze Argentinean Cowboy Epic Poetry from the 1870s Spanish, Truman State University

I wanted to write about hipsters, but my major was in Medieval Studies, so instead I wrote 60 pages about beat poets. Interdisciplinary Studies, Gettysburg College

With a sarcastic, jaded bite that perhaps runs prevalent among internet-age netizens, LMT can get admittedly depressing the longer you click the ‘ random ‘ button.

“The thesis writing process can be extremely isolating and produce a lot of self-doubt along the way,” Frankel told USA Today . “You work on one project for so long and oftentimes people speak with their advisers fairly infrequently. You may feel you’re behind or that your project is not living up to others. On the blog, you see other people are experiencing similar challenges or having similar doubts.”

Although, perhaps “doubts” is an understatement .

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“Lol My Thesis” Illuminates Academic Achievement

Lauren o'neal.

• January 2, 2014

If you had to sum up your undergraduate thesis in one sentence, what would you say?

That’s the question posed by the Tumblr Lol My Thesis , and the answers are…pretty amazing.

Recent examples include “Italian has 23 mutually unintelligible dialects, not including hand gestures” (Romance linguistics, University of Washington), “Computers will do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do” (mechanical engineering, Yale), and “Crack was indeed whack” (history, Columbia University).

Lauren O'Neal is an MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared in publications like Slate , The New Inquiry , and The Hairpin. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal .

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/07/lol-my-thesis-/4354985/ Tue, 01/07/2014 - 19:00 USA Today

'LOL My Thesis' Blog Discovers The Basic Truths Of The World With Some Snark

Senior Editor/Reporter, The Huffington Post

If you have no idea what a research paper titled " Authority and the production of knowledge in archaeology " is about, then maybe this alternate take will be easier to understand: " Fake science sounds an awful lot like real science, except it’s fake ."

That's the genius behind a blog called " LOL My Thesis ," started by Harvard University senior Angela Frankel. The Tumblr-based blog allows for submissions about thesis projects that are either completed or in the works, with notes or quick takeaways about what students' research discovered.

Frankel started it off with her own post on Dec. 9 : "I have killed so many fish." It was a progress report on her own senior thesis she's working on, which USA Today describes as "exploring zebrafish embryonic cardiogenesis as a way to assess how a particular gene regulates a group of progenitor cells that exist in normal heart development."

The blog is now generating around 500 new submissions every day, Frankel told Mashable, and she tries to add 30 to 40 daily.

Although it's the creation of a student in the Ivy League, it's attracting submissions from all sorts of lesser-known public colleges and schools overseas. It even attracted a submission from Jon Steinberg, president and chief operating officer of BuzzFeed. Frankel explained on her blog that "LOL My Thesis" was initially intended as procrastination of her own project, yet it has now "documented some of the stress, hilarity, and chaos associated with undergraduate (and some post-graduate) theses."

Frankel further told USA Today she believes the blog caught on because it provides reassurance.

"The thesis writing process can be extremely isolating and produce a lot of self-doubt along the way," Frankel said . "You work on one project for so long and oftentimes people speak with their advisers fairly infrequently. You may feel you're behind or that your project is not living up to others. On the blog, you see other people are experiencing similar challenges or having similar doubts."

HuffPost went through the blog and picked some of our favorites, and with Frankel's permission, posted them below. But this only scratches the surface, so feel free to head over to " LOL My Thesis " and find the ones you like the best.

Turns out you can’t cure cancer in a physics lab. Not even a little. -- Physics, University of Innsbruck

Monkeys don’t like eagles -- Anthropology, Durham University UK

Turns out, people don’t like it when you sleep with their girlfriend. -- Psychology, Duke University

Harry Potter is Jesus. Boom. -- Religion and Literature, Claremont Graduate University

It is hard to eliminate evidence of your porn viewing from your computer. -- Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin

Oscar Wilde was gay. So was his boyfriend. -- English, Washington University - St Louis

Poop is poop, even if it is diluted to 1:100 -- Molecular Protozoology, University of the Philippines

Insects will die for love. Or sex, anyway. -- Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota.

I have no job, but you spelled “you’re” wrong, so I mock you. -- English, Northeastern University

Drugs are bad, but look pretty under a microscope. -- Forensic Science, London South Bank University

Humans have lots of ways of talking about making other humans do stuff. -- PhD Linguistics, UC Berkeley

No matter what you post, trolls be trollin’. -- Communications and Media Science, Kodolányi János University College

If you come from far away, people will be surprised at the way you speak. -- Linguistics, University of Freiburg

People like spaceships and sex -- screenwriting and film, University of Southern California

Similarity between people and rats: Sleep deprivation makes them angry. -- Neuroscience, Washington State University

Wolves + humans, the ultimate frenemies. -- Science Writing, M.I.T.

It turns out, an only child never fights with its siblings. -- Sociology, University of Vienna

I procrastinated for two years then wrote this in a week, please give me a C -- Social Studies, Harvard

Oops: Turns out self-published poetry didn’t actually affect Indian politics but I’m 60 pages in, so. -- Political Science, Vassar College

Two molecules, one molecular cup -- Organic Chemistry, North Dakota State University

Blogs are almost definitely gonna be a thing. -- Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University.

Minimalism: still a thing. -- Music Composition, College of the Holy Cross

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Dr. G's Teaching with Technology Portfolio

Technology for teaching and learning in the earth science classroom.

Lol My Thesis

After seeing “ lolmythesis.com ” come through my Twitter feed twice in one day, I knew this was a site I had to check out.  The website is very simple, “summing up years of work in one sentence.”  The About page states that the site was started by an undergraduate student looking for a way to distract herself from her own thesis.  The site contains a collection of one-sentence summaries from undergraduate and graduate-level theses – and some are pretty good!  Take, for example, this contribution (below) and other posts that list the discipline as geology :

The site reminds me of the Up-Goer Five text editor on which I did a past blog post.  Using non-jargon terms to communicate the purpose of research is another fun way to “boil down” the essence of your work and to keep it simple.  But although students and professionals have fun with these sites, there is still nothing like a well-written title and abstract to communicate one’s work (in my opinion!).

And yet, I can’t help myself…. I will now go to Lol My Thesis and submit a one-sentence summary of my dissertation!

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