Students describe their theses in a single self-mocking sentence

"Summing up years of work in one sentence." That's the tagline for Lol My Thesis, where PhD candidates (Edit: and undergrads) make fun of their own theses by reducing them to just a sentence or two.

Edit: I mistakenly thought these were mostly graduate theses. The about page describes them as "undergraduate (and some post-graduate) theses."

Students in areas from accounting to aerospace engineering come up with absurd, obvious, and sometimes defeated descriptions of their research. Here are a few examples:

• Don't be anxious about your decisions driven by anxiety. -Social Neuroscience, Beijing Normal University
• When people have to pick stuff up with a robotic arm and can only see with on board cameras, they're worse than infants; please pay me to make them as good as 5 year old. -Integrated Systems Engineering, Ohio State University
• We dug a lot of holes and still don't know if measuring beryllium in dirt is useful, but it does cost a lot of money. -Geology, Amherst College
• Going into space is pretty dangerous, and the government should keep making rules about folks trying it -Aerospace engineering, MIT
• A mathematical theory of discarding irrelevant crap when making a team decision. -Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
• Turns out, you can make bacteria have sex! -Chemical Engineering, Rice University
• So, colonialism. -History, Wesleyan University

If you want to snark on your own thesis, you can submit your one-sentence description to the site.

Photo by Mirko Tobias Schaefer. And yes, that's an actual thesis title.

• Mine would be (and I'm still writing it): "I try to teach writing in a progressive manner, but people in Engineering are sure this approach is full of shit.

• My undergraduate thesis was "Jews and Christians have opinions on whether embryonic stem cell research is theologically permissive." 

• My economics thesis was about the procurement of the SAAB Gripen fighter for the Royal Swedish Air Force. It could be summed up like this:
  "Economics has little to do with military aircraft procurement. Duh.

• "Please let me graduate" MS Electrical Engineering 

• College students like to binge drink, unless they are busy.

  Sociology, University of Wyoming

• Mine would be: Quebec and the US have nothing in common, but they both became full of paranoid jerks in the 60s. What gives? 

• Well originally you should know how to work as an academic at the point of your master's graduation.

  A PhD is a special brand grad that shows you have significantly contributed to science and knowledge on this planet.
  Of course at this point, we have lots and tons more of people wanting a PhD than there are actual scientific breakthroughs available (realistically, concerning time, money and progress). And there will always be subjects an individual not interested in that specific subject will deem uninteresting and useless (literature studies, anyone?)
  So because of the splintering of academic subjects and the large numbers of people who want to acquire a PhD we face a devaluation of the PhD itself and the scientifical "breakthroughs" become smaller and smaller, more detailed, more specialized but in the end more meaningless.
  That doesn't mean that a study on the evolutionary traits of the red-footed rainbow toad is meaningless. It may actually contribute a large chunk to biology, a big progress to toxicology and a huge new potential to medicine as the researcher may find out the toxin of RFRT can be used to make you immune to athlete's foot.
  I still hope my thesis will one day help calculating propagandist behavior to adequately plan political further steps in international action.
  However, by the sheer mass of new theses even the significant "breakthroughs" drown and thereby become meaningless. You can really advance science a lot and receive your summa cum laude and yet nobody will know what you did or even USE this astonishing new knowledge because there are just too many.
  And there are disciplines like medicine where you get your doctorate for shit that's basically a bachelor thesis if you're lucky just because you have to have a doctorates degree. Today 4:59am
  
   

•  During a masters program you learn to communicate your thoughts in a manner appropriate to your field (I am a biologist so in scientific paper format, which is only telling a story in a prescribed way) both in written and oral forms. And you learn to read papers in a critical manner, answer and ask questions and engage in academic discourse much more fully than in a bachelor's program. You also learn everything there is to know about a small area of study and how your work fits into the big picture. But learning how to WRITE and how to lecture on a complex topic is a major part of any study and that can't be tested, per say. Writing your own is the best way to demonstrate your proficiency.
  A phd builds upon that with more practice and also generally some practice teaching. Critical engagement with a subject matter and peers and mentors is not a skill people are born with - it must be developed and practiced and a phd in theory also teaches you to teach it to others.
  People who get phds and go into research or a combination of research/teaching do these things over and over again: ask new questions and write new papers. So the upper level programs are practice for the process they will literally do again and again.
  I don't have a phd, just a masters, but I did get my thesis (which was less than 30 pages, btw) developed into a scientific paper, printed in a scientific journal, so I contributed to the body of work on my topic. It also looks great on a resume - its proof that I can communicate complex topics in a well written and accepted manner.
  Meanwhile, I work in government environmental policy, and my masters taught be to more critically engage with technical subject matter, which I do every day as a reviewer, making sure the documents are solid with no glaring holes. I also sometimes write documents, and having practiced with my thesis and other smaller projects I am better at conveying complex topics in a straightforward well written manner. Today 5:38am

• Mine (English lit): "Scifi prisons are like real prisons!"
  
  (BTW, reading science fiction scholarship has made me cringe every time I hear the term scifi!) 

• Mine diploma thesis: "Goethe was mostly under influence. Sometimes by Kant."
  But really, I pitched it to my mentor even shorter - Kant's influence on Goethe.

• Mine was "You CAN totally mind control people if you built a nice statue, some buildings painted in various colors and call it 'ancient.'"

• oh and the undergrad:
  "Chinese people don't mind being oppressed as long as they can do what they always did, but if you oppress them too much (especially with (pseudo-)religious shit) they will form strong, unkillable, secret societies that may or may not be religious. Also, beware milleniarism." 

• "I Couldn't Get Into Med School So I Spent Five Years Studying Lung Biology Instead. Here's Some Graphs." - Toxicology, me...Five years from now... 

• Undergrad: You can tell awesome literary narratives in comics in ways you can't do in film or text, and I'm going to go on and on and on about it ad nauseum.
  Masters: Make those metaphors move, or how those wise-guys Joyce and Beckett make texts that seem to read themselves (thank you Phaedrus).
  PhD: There probably isn't a way to break a narrative down into an algorithm, but let's creatively fail to prove it.

• I don't know I love this one personally,
  This is a weird star cluster and we absolutely have no idea how it formed - sorry.
  Astrophysics, Whitman College

• Mine would have been:
  Authors on WWI agree; war is stupid.
  (My actual thesis was "Didacticism of Young Adult Literature with Regards to WWI: Activism vs. Pacifism" - it was an analysis of how the motivations for war are portrayed in YA/children's literature)

• "Light-reactive antibiotics are all very interesting, but I got to fire lasers at bacteria every day, so the original message might have been lost."
  I spent four years on that! :D

• "If there are such things as plumbers, college students, and Thanksgiving, then there are such things as human races." — philosophy Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University 

• Mine would be: "Finding where you go and what u do and how u do it from your GPS data" - Geoimformatics (just submitted)

• "Could this possibly make a trip to mars feasible without us dying of excruciating radiation sickness?" Biomedical physics -Me 

• Mine will be, "Supernatural: So, how about that slash?" - Comm. Major (focusing on human behavior and technology) 

• My new thesis proposal would be, "No one has a better sense of humor than PhD students" - io9 lurker, hoping for a non greyed status one of these days.