Jessica Graustein - How to Write an Exceptional Thesis or Dissertation: A Step-By-Step Guide from Proposal to Successful Defense

A few years back we lost our beloved pet dog Bear, who was not only our best and dearest friend but also the Vice President of Sunshine here at Atlantic Publishing. He did not receive a salary but worked tirelessly 24 hours a day to please his parents.

Bear was a rescue dog who turned around and showered myself, my wife, Sherri, his grandparents Jean, Bob, and Nancy, and every person and animal he met (well, maybe not rabbits) with friendship and love. He made a lot of people smile every day.

We wanted you to know a portion of the profits of this book will be donated in Bears memory to local animal shelters, parks, conservation organizations, and other individuals and nonprofit organizations in need of assistance.

Douglas and Sherri Brown

PS: We have since adopted two more rescue dogs: first Scout, and the following year, Ginger. They were both mixed golden retrievers who needed a home.

Want to help animals and the world? Here are a dozen easy suggestions you and your family can implement today:

• Adopt and rescue a pet from a local shelter.
• Support local and no-kill animal shelters.
• Plant a tree to honor someone you love.
• Be a developer put up some birdhouses.
• Buy live, potted Christmas trees and replant them.
• Make sure you spend time with your animals each day.
• Save natural resources by recycling and buying recycled products.
• Drink tap water, or filter your own water at home.
• Whenever possible, limit your use of or do not use pesticides.
• If you eat seafood, make sustainable choices.
• Support your local farmers market.
• Get outside. Visit a park, volunteer, walk your dog, or ride your bike.

Five years ago, Atlantic Publishing signed the Green Press Initiative. These guidelines promote environmentally friendly practices, such as using recycled stock and vegetable-based inks, avoiding waste, choosing energy-efficient resources, and promoting a no-pulping policy. We now use 100-percent recycled stock on all our books. The results: in one year, switching to post-consumer recycled stock saved 24 mature trees, 5,000 gallons of water, the equivalent of the total energy used for one home in a year, and the equivalent of the greenhouse gases from one car driven for a year.

Acknowledgements:

I would never have started writing this book if it were not for my experience as a graduate student of the Department of Biological Sciences at Northern Illinois University. I sincerely thank all the faculty and graduate students from 1992 to 1995 for teaching me how to think and learn, especially the crew that showed me the recuperative power of pool at the Box Office and music by Howard and the White Boys. I would also like to thank the undergraduate students from the same time period, those who assisted me with data-collection and those who allowed me to experiment on them while I learned how to teach. To my adviser, Dr. Carl N. von Ende and my teaching model, Dr. Bethia King, I give special thanks for encouraging me to develop the communicative, organizational, and interpersonal skills that were the eventual basis of my ability to finish writing this book.

Dedication:

To Kurt, for giving me a chair, and Mel, for keeping me in it.

Introduction

Presumably, you picked up this book because you have finished the majority of your graduate coursework and are ready to begin working on your thesis or dissertation, but you are not sure how to go about it. You might also be looking for a way to avoid being another unfinished statistic.

You are certainly not alone. According to the National Center for Education, 625,023 students earned a masters degree during the 2007 to 2008 academic year. In the same year, 63,712 students earned their doctoral degree. It is easy for students to not finish their graduate work because of the amount of work involved. But, with the right approach, finishing a graduate degree will become less complicated.