I'm gonna go ahead and start. I'll say a few things that I'm also gonna say
at the end as well so for people who join in later they'll catch it as well at the end. I'm
gonna start by saying that this is the graduate school review of ETDs session, what we look for
when we review your thesis or dissertation. This is the presentation but we also offer to students
more personal review services so even though in-person walk-ins to the graduate school
have been suspended at this time due to the coronavirus concerns we're still happy to
work with students on a one by one basis when it comes to their theses and dissertations.
If you want to email we can answer questions by
email if you want to call us up we can answer questions by phone
and if you even want to share your ETD with us along the way later on we can do an
informal review or a sort of pre-review before you actually submit it formally likely at this time
what that will mean is you send us a google dropbox link or something similar like that
and we'll get it by email we'll open the document from the google dropbox and we
can review it and then send you any formatting changes or edits that we're going to suggest
so again this is the graduate school review of ETDs presentation and I'll walk you through the
essentials of what we look for when we do the formatting review of your thesis or dissertation
this is generally the very last step for students towards getting their degree it's generally the
very last step at the end at this point you've already defended your thesis or dissertation
you've passed your defense you may have more changes and edits that the committee will ask you
to do but you've made those to their satisfaction you've submitted your thesis or dissertation to
the graduate school and then there's this last step which is that we do check it for formatting
and we may email you with formatting changes that you'll need to make
before we finally approve it and at that point your degree is awarded
the way that you'll schedule your defense as well as the way that you'll submit
your thesis and dissertation are that you will use our electronic signature system
this is true for almost all students if you're one of the exceptions we'll work with you
individually but this is true for almost all students that you'll use this online website
um you can get there through our website through the Virginia Tech graduate schools website
you can go to request to admit candidate to final exam that will allow you to schedule
your defense online and that's also the website where you're going to submit
your thesis of dissertation afterwards the direct link is ess.graduateschool.vt.edu.
You'll schedule your defense here at least two weeks before you have the defense
then after the defense is over your committee members will enter their votes
on how you did for the defense and then you'll be able to upload the thesis or dissertation
This is just a login screen to show you what you're going to see
when you're ready to schedule your defense and also when you're ready to go back in and
upload the thesis or dissertation after you've passed the defense
ETD stands for electronic thesis or dissertation if you're wondering what that acronym means or
what's going on with it this acronym or sorry the the ETD is something that masters students
who are thesis option and PhDs all PhDs will their dissertations it's a step you'll you'll
take after you've passed the defense you'll see the little button on the right it says ETD
i just want to point out this button because a lot of students miss it
you won't see it until you've had your defense and you've passed it and your committee members
have voted that you passed so before that happens you won't see a little ETD button
on the right of the screen but after you it happens you'll see that little ETD button
on the right there and so you'll be able to click that and upload your thesis or dissertation
once you see that button and you click it you're gonna see a screen that looks like this
it's going to have a number of blanks to fill in and a spot to actually upload the file
so first it's going to ask you for your title it's going to ask you to paste in your abstract
um so you will want to copy and paste that in right up there um the scholarly abstract
it's going to ask for some keywords and it's going to ask for a proquest category the proquest
category is a drop down menu so you have to choose from their options if you don't see your major
there just choose the major that best fits or just choose the option that best fits your major
then next you'll see the space where you're gonna upload the actual dissertation or thesis
file itself you'll see that we want it to be a PDF file okay so please don't upload a word document
there's also a spot to upload your authenticate report i'll talk more about authenticate towards
the end of the presentation but do know that an authenticate report is required
and then there's a spot for a copyright release which is
not optional or necessary for all students um but it is there and then if you look down to the to
the right the bottom right of that box you'll see add file you can upload additional files as well
some students have a permissions document to upload i'll talk more about that later
but that for instance you might want to click add file and add a file there
then you'll select an access status and i'll talk about that in a minute and you'll have to agree
with some statements and then you can upload once you've submitted the committee needs to
approve the dissertation or thesis document now do understand this is a separate step
from them passing you on your defense so you may have defended and your committee all thought you
did very well and they all voted that you passed but they also have to vote on the document itself
and in many cases um they may have passed you on your defense but they might say for example
that they want you to make changes to chapter 3 or they want you to to add a small section here
or there and they want to see that done before they approve the document these are two separate
steps so the committee will have to approve your thesis or dissertation document as well
then the committee will
excuse me then the graduate school gets notified once they've approved that it's our term
and someone at the graduate school will review your thesis of dissertation at that time
do know that we uh have many of these documents to work through each semester um we have hundreds
of students that graduate each semester who are phds or who are masters thesis option students
so we get a lot of these that we need to look at and review um so it can take some time for
us to review them for formatting but we do try to get to them as soon as possible um to the
best of our ability we do try to review them in the order in which the committee
has excuse me in the order in which they've been submitted and the committee has approved them okay
for many students they will defend during a certain semester then they'll upload their
thesis or dissertation and it will be reviewed after the semester is over that's not true for
every single student but it's probably true of most that your thesis or dissertation will end
up being reviewed after the semester's over after each semester there's about a six or
seven week period in which we work through all the theses and dissertations and we send you emails
letting you know if there's a formatting change that needs to be made or if they're approved
so the first part of your uh etd is of course the title page and then the abstracts follow
for the title page we do have a highly standardized format that we do want students
to follow we want these to look basically the same with a lot of information on them that can
quickly at a glance tell readers uh the relevant information about this thesis or this dissertation
um so we do have a pretty standard format there we are asking for the title at the top centered
then your your full name centered in fact all the text on the title page is centered excuse me
um and we do want you to use the virginia polytechnic institute and state university
rather than just virginia tech as the sort of formal name that's used when we do grant degrees
we do want you to include specifically your degree and your major on the title page
and um we do want you to include the names of your committee members of course
um we we do ask that you don't include titles for the committee members for example
uh dr um is the most you know typical one that we'll see but some people have other titles
other credentials that they've earned um but we do ask that you not include any of those um
simply stating the name is fine um you'll want to include your date of defense rather than the date
you're submitting the thesis or dissertation um the location where you had the defense
for many people that'll be blacksburg virginia but of course that won't be the case for everyone
and some keywords um and then like i said the abstract pages follow
um important note is that and i'll talk about page numbers as we go but important note is that
there are no visible page numbers on the title page or the abstracts page they begin later
so this is what your title page is going to look like and again we do want this to be very
standardized and look basically exactly like this with your relevant information plugged in
so that again anybody can quickly at a glance see the relevant information
about this particular thesis or dissertation in terms of how it relates to you earning a degree
there are some uh some departments and some majors where the students want to
do something that's a little bit more aesthetic or eye-catching um or artistic uh with the first page
of their theses or dissertation some of the majors that are um related to visual arts for example
um and you can include a uh cover sheet um as well that might have artwork on it or something
like that um but then we also want this title page to appear to um you know if you choose
and if you want to do a cover that's stylized um and you're in the visual arts or you're studying
something related to the visual arts then you can include a cover sheet that looks the way you want
but then we'd also want a title page that's formal formally standardized like this
after the title page like i said come the abstracts and you're gonna have two the first one
the scholarly abstract um pretty simple um the title at the top centered your name centered
the word abstract and then the abstract there um we don't have a word limit on the abstract
um i believe there's uh was some language out there that we used to maybe but we don't have a
specific word limit on the abstract and then the second abstract uh the general audience abstract
and you'll format it the same way except it'll say general audience abstract instead of just abstract
um the general audience abstract was introduced uh within the last um six years um maybe less
than that um so it hasn't been around forever but it's been in place for a few different
years and it is a requirement for all students um i understand that some students get all the
way to this point where they're finally submitting their etd and then they learn oh i need to do this
um as well and it may mean that you suddenly or it may mean that you have to think about your thesis
or your dissertation from a from a totally new perspective hopefully it's not too new
but it may mean that you're thinking about it from a somewhat new perspective or at least
you have to think about it in a way that maybe you haven't been that much for the past months
or years um but what you want to do is what you want to write a kind of a summary or a general um
something that gives a general snapshot of your thesis or dissertation research or efforts that's
not written for people in your field certainly your professors or your committee is not the
intended audience for this one um you want to write it for laypersons for uh people who um
don't work in your field never have haven't studied in your field but that you might encounter
on the street or in an elevator or something like that um you want to briefly describe your topic
your findings maybe why your research is important perhaps what uses it might have
that somebody who doesn't work in your field might understand
and we do want you to be careful to try to excise all jargon or technical language from the general
audience abstract anything that you really couldn't expect some random person to know
um so uh you'll want to read it over and see if you are using language like that
if you are and it's unavoidable then you can try to define the term um try to define what
it is you're talking about using language again that's that's more lay person friendly
you don't have to go into super super detailed uh lengths here um you don't have to get too
too much in the weeds um it's okay to to avoid uh certain things that are simply just not going to
be easy to quickly communicate to a lay person um you may instead want to focus on you know here are
the potential applications of what i'm studying or why you might care about what i'm doing right
so something that i've uh sometimes said to students is imagine that you need to go to
uh government or politicians and make the case that your research should be funded
um that might be some a way to think about it and a way to think about how to put it into words
you don't want to bore them you don't want it to sail right over their heads
you want to be able to communicate them here's why you should care okay
um all of the stuff that comes at the beginning of your thesis or dissertation we refer to as the
front matter um so that's going to be the title page and the two abstracts and some other stuff
as well you can see here an order in which your front matter might appear somebody might have
the title page the abstract the general audience abstract the dedication the acknowledgements
the table of contents a list of figures a list of tables and a list of abbreviations
a lot of these are optional you know you don't necessarily need to have them at all
um or they may not apply but um if you do have them we would like them to be in this order
we would like to be uh ordered such as order like this excuse me in the front matter
you'll want to do the page numbers in a certain way and we do require this for all
etds no visible page numbers on the title page or the abstract pages um and the page numbers
become visible starting after that and you'll you're going to use lowercase roman numerals
um so what that means is uh your title page would have no number on it at all the abstract
would have no number on it at all the general audience abstract also would not have a number
but then your dedication page might have a lowercase iv which is the roman numeral 4 on it
that's the first page where the page numbers become visible and then they would continue
on through the front matter when you get to the body of the dissertation or thesis
at that point the page numbers switch to arabic numerals starting with number one
um and it'll continue from there
the page numbers do tend to be the most difficult part most difficult part of formatting your thesis
or dissertation um we certainly know that's true and we hear from many students that that's true
so you can probably expect that that's going to be the toughest formatting task
we do have templates that you can use on our website um i've given the link here
you'll want to use the library's etd guide um the link here is to the library's etd guide
guides.lib.bt.edu um there's a ms word template and there is also a latex template too
um you'll want to double check that the latex template that you use has the general audience
abstract um i've uh my understanding is that it does but just double check that i think
sometimes students also may use a template that a friend has or that they get from someone else
who's already gone through this process so just be careful about that um to make sure that you're
using an up-to-date template if you decide to use a template um but the templates are set
up with the page numbers already formatted um uh also if you're just having uh endless
uh frustration with doing the page numbers you can reach out to us to me um and we can try
to help you as well um this does tend to be the sticking point when it comes to formatting the etd
moving on after the front matter comes the body of the thesis or dissertation this is the
this is the meat of it this is the actual uh text you'll have that you'll have your various chapters
your references or works cited or bibliography your possibly your appendices as well
there's some things to look out for here um
here's just a few things that we do check um that we do look for when we do the formatting review
um do double check if in the table of contents you say that chapter 3 begins on page 44
does it actually begin on page 44. good idea to double check those things especially if you go
back in and make edits because your chair told you oh i want you to change chapter 2 uh chapter two i
want you to add something to it or something like that um go back and make sure uh certainly that
the table of contents uh that the page numbers given there do actually match where chapters start
um we don't have very specific rules about for instance fonts or the formatting of headings or
chapter titles um but we do ask that you be consistent there and that you not switch halfway
through the thesis or dissertation to a different system um just be careful that you don't have uh
stuff that would be confusing um you know you don't want to have two two figure threes in
your thesis or something like that um for figures and tables um the captions that that go with the
figures and tables do do check to make sure that you use a consistent formatting style for them
and that you don't again switch halfway through in the thesis or dissertation to a different style
this is something that can sometimes happen is students make other changes in the body of their
thesis or dissertation and they don't go back and change the table of contents so maybe you changed
that what chapter three is called but then you didn't change it back in the table of contents
so you'll want to double check those kinds of things i'll actually go ahead and mention i've
definitely seen theses and dissertations where the student actually changed the title of the thesis
itself but didn't go and change it throughout their document wherever they used it so on the
abstract pages they still had the old version of the title so you'll want to make sure that if you
make a change like that change it throughout the document um our pictures uh or diagrams
used from another source are permissions included i'm going to talk about permissions more later um
actually it has its own slide um but just uh you'll want to be thinking about that
this one um is just uh just a formatting rule that we have um it's just this is
the this is the style um our appendices lettered rather than numbered appendix a
b c etc i i don't have a great answer as to why this is just the convention um that we use um for
appendices uh that they should be lettered rather than numbered and we do want you to list them in
the table of contents um we do want those to be there because people may want to find it quickly
so uh two for two formats for the body of your thesis or dissertation um that are both fine to
use um we're okay with either of these and some one may work much better for you depending on
the nature of your thesis or dislocation um i'll talk about each one they're both okay
uh there's standard format and there's manuscript format
standard format focuses essentially on one thing focuses on one problem one experiment
um it's basically focused on the same thing from beginning to end your uh structure here might
look something like this you have an introduction you have a review of the literature review of the
stuff that's already been written about the topic you have your experiment you have a discussion of
the results um or you have the results you have a discussion of the meaning of the results uh and
then further conclusions suggestions for further study and then probably a bibliography at the end
that's pretty simple and intuitive um so this is this is tends to be the format for most theses
since a lot of master's students don't have something longer than this but for phds
um in particular um many for many a manuscript format uh might be more appropriate
this in this is a dissertation or a thesis that's composed of multiple articles or chapters
that might stand alone in some cases it might consist of chapters that have actually been
separately published as articles already so in example like this you might have an
overall introduction you might have an overall review of the literature out there
but then you might have chapter three might be the first quote unquote manuscript
and it's kind of a self-contained thing in itself so you might have another abstract
that's just for this one chapter and an introduction just for this one chapter
and a discussion of the experiment a discussion of the results um and a reference references section
just for this one chapter because it's a sort of a self-contained thing um and then uh after that's
all over you might have chapter four and you might do that all again so again chapter four might be
its own sort of self-contained mini thesis uh or at least its own self-contained article um you
know and there might be two of these there might be four or five of these and then you might have
some kind of overarching uh conclusion chapter um that does kind of connect them all to each
other as well as a sort of overarching or general bibliography maybe as well as possible um this
format's also okay um this is more appropriate for some students some phds who've worked on a few
different uh topics um and it's okay to use this this format too if that's better suited to you
so uh now i am going to talk a little bit more about permissions that some students might need um
so if if you have a manuscript that's previously published um let's say that
you published an article but you want to use it as chapter 4 in your dissertation um
on the first page of that chapter it's appropriate to include a full citation of where it's already
been published and to list the co-authors if there were any if that's appropriate
and another thing is that if something has already been published elsewhere we do want you to submit
or include permissions um something that shows you have the right to republish the idea here is that
when you submit your thesis or dissertation and it's approved it goes into the library's archives
and people can go and view it there and read it there people can go to the virginia tech library
website and access it and the library does not want to have stuff up there that um some other
publication or corporation owns the rights to um with academic publishing um there's even been
some controversy in political controversy about availability of uh uh academic um
articles um and the library just essentially doesn't want to have stuff up there for anybody
to look at um if they they don't actually have the right to do that because somebody already
owns the rights um so you'll wanna uh in these cases obtain some kind of permissions
so that might be a contract that you signed or a letter from the journals editor or an email even
that that states you have the right to republish
some students have published on an open access website or in an open access journal where it's
open access already um and that's your permissions is that it it's a the website itself has language
um or the journal itself has language stating that it's open access but something to show that you
do have permissions and again this is if you've already published the article um somewhere else
in some cases if you've already published stuff and you had co-authors it may be appropriate to
include an attribution page back in the front matter right before the table of contents
in which you talk about those co-authors who co-authored parts of your thesis or dissertation
um certainly not everybody or even most students will have something like this but some will
uh this is just a sample attribution page um to kind of show what it would look like pretty simple
um you would just introduce um introduce the people briefly a couple sentences one or two
sentences about who they are um just appropriate thing to do if you've had co-authors on parts of
your etd um i mentioned earlier that permissions are also appropriate if you're including
images in your thesis or dissertation that are coming from previously published sources
in those cases it's also appropriate to get permissions if you're going to put
them into your thesis or dissertation as well so for instance uh photographs
there certainly are photos out there stock photos out there um but if you're including
an artist's photographs uh it's appropriate to get permissions to include that in your
published work that's going to be then available online um we would expect to see permissions there
here's a few other things that we also do check for when we review the thesis or dissertation
we do want it to be just one pdf file as i mentioned before you can upload supporting
files as well but we don't want you to upload your thesis by uploading one pdf that's chapter one and
then a separate pdf that's chapter two et cetera et cetera we do want it to be one pdf document
just a note it does need to be text searchable so the pdf needs to be text searchable so you can
hit ctrl f and find a word in the document there's language out there i believe um
that i think is a remnant of a prior requirement maybe that says it has to be a pdf 1a or 1b file
or something like that the idea is just that it has to be text searchable as far as i can tell all
the pdfs that we're getting these days are text searchable so i'm not really worried about it
um so if you've created it you've made it a pdf i you know it generally doesn't have to
be a specific kind of pdf file just has to be a pdf but just make sure it's text searchable um
this may go without saying but it needs to not be locked or have any kind of permissions on it
we need to be able to open it so we can review it um do ask that you not include a resume
or a cv as any part of this uh as any part of the etd the reason for that is because
if you do we found that if students do so then they want to go back and update it because as
soon as that etd is approved it starts going out of date and so students will might want to
oh well i want to add this or i want to add that so we just don't want you to include it at all
we do have a convention for how to name the pdf file
you'll name the pdf file itself your last name underscore first and middle initial underscore a t
or d for thesis or dissertation underscore and the year of your defense dot pdf um that way somebody
who's looking at the pdf file um can quickly at a glance see okay this is x person's pdf
uh so it helps us a lot we can see some information about that uh pdf file very quickly
um and you can any additional files you upload can be named the same way and then you can just add uh
underscore permissions or underscore authenticate or whatever it is that's perfectly fine
if you'd like to add a creative commons lice license to your uh thesis or dissertation you
can do so it's optional creativecommons.org has uh six types of licenses that you can just add
it doesn't cost anything to do this
you just you can just include it as a separate supporting file you can look at their website
choose which one works for you and add it um it's basically just you making a statement
that works with already existing copyright law it's just you making a statement as
what you want to allow in terms of your uh thesis or dissertation um so there's four kinds um
they range in uh from very very permissive to less permissive um so the first one for example
the first creative commons license says that you can sorry excuse me it says that anyone else can
copy distribute display perform and remix the work as long as they attribute or credit the author
as requested um so it's very very permissive and it goes uh it gets a little bit more restrictive
through the last one um which says uh the last one says this license is says that users can copy
distribute display and perform verbatim unchanged copies of the work for non-commercial purposes
only if they attribute or credit the author um so if you want to attach one of these creative to
commons license as you can um i do want to mention as well we allow students to upload their own
copyright statement if they want to um that's okay some students want to do that uh there's
even a spot for it so if you want to do that you can upload your own uh copyright statement
um now this is uh going back to that screen that i showed you quite a while back
about um when you're ready to upload when you're ready to submit your thesis or dissertation
there was a section about well you know what do you want to allow in terms of access
you can choose to make your etd available immediately
if you release it for immediate worldwide access that means somebody can go to the virginia tech
library website and search and pull it up and can view it um so that's one of your options
a little bit more restrictive option is you can release it to the virginia tech community only
for one year that means that somebody would have to have a virginia tech pid and password to view
it so somebody who's not affiliated with virginia tech would not be able to see it
and then you can secure or embargo it for one year that means that nobody can see it for one year
um of course your committee can see it when you upload and people at the graduate school
can see it so that we can do the formatting review but once we approve it and it's sent
to the library's archives no one can see it for one year it's embargoed or secured
um now for the options where there's some kind of restriction for one year after a year they will
become publicly available unless you choose to contact the graduate school and say you want to
extend it for an additional year if you do if you don't do that they automatically become publicly
available after one year um and then people would be able to search them and find them
some people do choose to secure or embargo their thesis or dissertation
the most common reason i hear is because they do want to either submit or try to publish part of it
as an article in a journal or otherwise try to publish um and so they don't want it available
on the virginia tech website for anybody to see um that's the most common reason i hear
for people choosing to do that or they may have already um submitted it but it hasn't come out yet
uh now i'm gonna talk about authenticate which is a part of this whole process
um and it's relatively new um it's about two years old now
um authenticate has become a mandatory part of the etd process you will find
that even just to schedule your defense you have to upload an authenticate report
um that means that even just to schedule a defense at least two weeks ahead of your defense you're
already going to have to run your thesis or dissertation through the authenticate website
and generate a report that you upload a very common questions related to this
are um well what if i'm still working on it or what if i haven't completely finished it
um now when you schedule a defense we do expect that you've already shown your thesis
or dissertation to the committee and that they've given you the go ahead to defend we understand
that changes will most likely still happen um that revisions will be made your committee members may
ask you to change x y or z um we do understand that uh but the expectation is that you have a
working draft um the expectation is that you have a substantive document uh when you're ready to
schedule the defense and so we do want you to run that through authenticate and generate a report
authenticate is a online tool that's intended to pick up potentially unnatural attributed or
potentially plagiarized material anything that it can find elsewhere um so what it's going to do is
when you upload your thesis or dissertation it's going to uh quote unquote read the text of it and
then it's going to crawl the web and look for the same text somewhere on the web this can take some
time so so do realize that when you run your etd through authenticate you might have to sit
and wait a while for it to run through i mean i've had students tell me that they've had to
wait more than an hour um so they've had to you know maybe go do something else for a while until
it's uh until it's done working um and it's gonna then give you a report about what it found
um now the concern of course is um wanting to avoid any unattributed material um if stuff is
cited if you have the appropriate permissions that's okay um the fact that it finds the same
language elsewhere may be perfectly understandable and normal and there may be no problem at all um
for the vast majority of students in fact that's what we'd expect um but um the idea is you'll want
to see what it picks up and certainly double check and make sure that you have appropriately cited
um any language if you are quoting someone or you're quoting something um that you've given
the appropriate acknowledgement um the tool uh actually can't tell it's not smart enough to tell
if you have cited appropriately or not so it's gonna pick up everything so um don't be alarmed
if it says you know wow there's a massive match between your etd and um this online article if
you've appropriately cited uh the language and given credit to where you're where you've gotten
it from uh ultimately you and your committee are responsible for making sure stuff is appropriately
cited authenticate's not smart enough to tell that it's just looking for similarities
when it gives you the report you'll want to save it as a pdf like i said you need to generate one
of these just to schedule your defense but then you do have to generate and submit a second one
when you're submitting the final version of your thesis or dissertation so you do have to do it
twice you have to do it once just to schedule and then you do have to do it again when you
have a final etd you've made your committees requested changes etc and you're ready to upload
you can access authenticate and login via the links on the virginia tech graduate schools
website um virginia tech purchases a sort of license from authenticate so that our
students can use it without having to pay so you should be able to log in using your virginia tech
credentials and not have to pay to use authenticate
um if you're finding that you cannot get in this way contact the graduate school
but active graduate students should be able to get in by logging in with your vtp id
um once you've generated the authenticate report um uh we'll want you to look at the report
you can change the format of the report it gives you you can change it to summary report which i
think is one of the easier more uh intuitive ones to look at um and you're going to want
to look at what it's picked up we're particularly concerned if um it's picking up more than 15 total
uh match between your thesis and dissertation and other websites or if there's more than a
there's a five percent or more match between any one particular website in your etd those are the
ones we're particularly concerned about and we want you to look at those um make sure that if
you're seeing numbers that high make sure that you have the appropriate uh citations in place and if
and you might need the appropriate permissions um some students might get really high percentages
percentages excuse me because they're one of those people who actually published chapter four as an
article already or maybe chapters three and five of their dissertation have already been published
as articles um so they might get a really high percentage and if the student has the appropriate
appropriate permissions to include those already published articles in their dissertation
then that's okay we just want you to look at what's going on if you get high numbers
um once you've made sure that you either have cited appropriately and or that um you have
the appropriate permissions then you can go ahead and change the asset the settings in authenticate
to exclude those sources as appropriate um and drop your percentages down below fifteen and five
percent we want you to see what you're getting and then um uh if you're getting high numbers uh we
want you to take take action as appropriate um or maybe just make sure that you've already covered
cover yourself with the appropriate citations and then you can you can remove those
now i want to go back to talk again about what i said at the beginning of the presentation
which is that um although this is a sort of overall general presentation directed at
everybody um we offer uh more um one-on-one or uh specific to your circumstances advising as well
i've got my information here and you certainly can contact me with any questions you have about
your etd but you can also contact just the graduate school as a whole
you certainly can call the graduate school you can email us at gradsvt.edu
we can answer questions that you might have that aren't addressed here or you can have us if you
want to do some kind of pre-review of your etd if that's something that you're interested in
generally speaking this probably means that maybe you set up a google dropbox link
and then you send us uh that and we can then access your pdf that way
um the pdf of your dissertation or thesis um or if you're already at the stage where you're
uploading it to the website we certainly can get it there get to it there as well
um walk-in in-person et reviews uh have traditionally been something that we offered to
where you could walk into the graduate school and have an epd review at this time they are suspended
because of the coronavirus concerns we're not doing walk-in in-person advising at this time
but again we do want to mention that certainly if you want to ask us questions that's fine and
if you would like to have us do a pre-review of an etd we certainly can find other ways of
doing that um again maybe through a google dropbox link where we can access your pdf
um i'm now gonna open it up to um any questions that people might have um i think janice has been
answering them via chat as we go but um
i'll also be available to to answer some questions if you'd like
you
i think i'm gonna answer questions uh verbally um rather than through the chat and janice probably
will keep uh keep answering them through the chat um i wanna answer the question um
for permissions how do you determine if something falls under fair use or if copyright information
needs to be included there's actually a fair use tool on the virginia tech library website
um i encourage you to use that if you want the fair use tool on the virginia tech libraries
website basically has you answer a bunch of generic questions and it's all in the form
of yes or no so you just click check boxes uh it asks a question and asks you to or it
poses a question asks you to check yes or no and after you answer a bunch of them it'll uh
simply say um uh yes under fair use law you know you should have the right to use this in your etd
or no under fair use law you would not have the right to use this on your etd
um if people want to go to the virginia tech library's website and use the fair use tool
if you get a yes fair use answer from the fair use tool that's fine um that would work
so i would encourage that you could also talk to someone here at the graduate school and we can
answer it or just try to look into it for you and get you an answer
so for fair use on probably the easiest is try the fair use tool on the library's website
um
um i think i saw a question as well um where is that do we need to upload our
dissertation when we schedule the defense no you actually don't you do have to upload the
authenticate report but you don't have to upload the actual dissertation or thesis
matthew i have a quick question um on average how many times is the thesis
or etd sent back for acceptance
i don't know that i have a great answer for you um in terms of uh on average for everybody i can tell
you that typically i uh find that i usually send students one email with formatting corrections
they get made and that's that typically um so it's not common for me that an etd gets submitted
and there are zero formatting corrections to be made i generally don't find that to be the case
there are some cases where that's true but that's usually not the case there's usually one email
it has some formatting corrections those get made it's re-uploaded and that's that it's pretty
rare um it does happen but it's pretty rare that there's multiple times that it gets sent back um
so uh tip i guess typically i would say for me it's one time um but i don't know if that's
that's always the case for everybody i'm not the only person who reviews epds here i i
think based on other people and talking to other people here at the graduate school as well as
um uh sometimes seeing what they've how they've corresponded with their students i think that's
typical for everybody though i think for for all for all students generally when they submit their
etds um it's often the case that there's there's some formatting changes to be made
but not a lot and then um they're made and so it's just one email
okay so it sounds to me it's up to the committee to really check the material and etv is more about
getting the formatting right oh yeah we don't we don't vet it for content at all
not at all only for formatting um we will have no uh content changes whatsoever for you
um well i actually i take that back we may have content changes for you for the general audience
abstract because that's the one that's kind of for us um because we're not engineers at
least i don't think any of us are um and uh most of us are not you know phd level
chemists or biologists or whatever you may happen to be so we're not going to have content changes
from you except maybe for the general audience abstract and it may just be we don't understand
okay thank you very much that was very helpful you're welcome
you
okay thanks everybody i am gonna hang around uh for a few more minutes
and i'll answer questions uh via the chat but um i do want to thank
everybody and that'll be the end of the visual part of this thank you very much
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