College Students' Thesis Topics Are Hilarious, Depressing

Will Oremus:

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.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 4, 2014 12:26 AM
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