Thesis and Dissertation Support

The student and their committee are jointly responsible for seeing that the thesis or dissertation follows a correct form of scholarly style and usage. The student may follow any style specified by their committee or department as long as the style is consistent throughout the paper.

The School of Graduate Studies has a number of preliminary pages that are required of students regardless of the style used throughout the manuscript. These pages must follow a consistent format.

Resources:

• Thesis & Dissertation Manual 
• Format Checklist 
• Formatters & Editors - contact the School of Graduate Studies (UND.gradschool@UND.edu) for a list

Submit as a PDF

The manuscript of your thesis or dissertation must be submitted to ProQuest/UMI Dissertation Publishing in Adobe PDF format. When preparing the PDF, the following must be done:

• Embed all fonts (information on how to embed fonts can be found on the ProQuest website.)
• Make sure there is no password protection on the PDF.
• Ensure that security settings allow printing.

View Proper Formatting

ProQuest/UMI Dissertation Publishing makes no changes to the formatting and content of submitted manuscripts. Therefore, the burden of how the manuscript looks when it is accessed or printed is entirely the responsibility of the author. ProQuest strongly recommends that individual authors take responsibility for reformatting the document into Adobe PDF, for checking the reformatted document for accuracy, and for submitting the PDF document to the graduate school via the ProQuest ETD Administrator Site for publication.

As part of our commitment to making graduate research and creative works more accessible, the School of Graduate Studies requires that all theses and dissertations must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA web accessibility requirements to comply with nondiscrimination provisions outlined in Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

As the author, you are responsible for ensuring that your manuscript content is navigable and readable by screen readers or other assistive technology.  

Beginning with May 2027 graduation and moving forward, submissions that do not meet these requirements will not be approved.

• Thesis & Dissertation Manual
• TTaDA Digital Accessibility 

Templates

• Word
• LaTeX - coming soon!

After you make the required changes or corrections, you will electronically upload the final version of your manuscript in PDF format to the ProQuest ETD Administrator site at UMI/ProQuest.

Steps for Thesis/Dissertation Electronic Submission

When you submit your final PDF to ProQuest/UMI Publishing, it will be logged, indexed, and published. ProQuest/UMI is a private company that has served for many years as the publisher and distributor for most theses and dissertations written in the United States. Please keep in mind that ProQuest acts as a publisher and does not own the copyright to your manuscript. As the author, you retain control of your work’s intellectual content.

Your document will be available in the ProQuest/UMI database after approximately 8 weeks, unless you restricted it. The Chester Fritz Library will receive your bound copy that will be available in the Library periodicals as well as an electronic copy that will be available in the UND Scholarly Commons.

The draft of your manuscript should be submitted to the Faculty Advisory Committee sufficiently in advance of the Preliminary Approval deadline so that a thorough evaluation may be completed by each committee member. The Committee must be able to read the draft prior to the preliminary defense. The Committee must be able to read the draft and suggest edits, and the stduent must be able to make corrections prior to the Preliminary Approval & Notice of Defense Form deadline. 

• The committee approval will be submitted on the Preliminary Approval and Notice of Defense form and filed in the School of Graduate Studies by the deadline. The signed approval is a commitment that the members of the committee will require no major changes of the content, organization, or style after the final copy has been prepared.
• The Preliminary Approval and Notice of Defense form must be submitted to the School of Graduate Studies two weeks prior to the scheduled oral examination date and on or before the Preliminary Approval deadline.

Please note that it is expected there will be content revisions needed after receiving feedback from you committee. However, it is also expected that the document is ready to defend, meaning that your document is in its final stage of completion.

The candidate and committee members must be physically present at the defense unless the program has developed clear guidelines and instructions by which the candidate or committee members may participate at a distance using real-time synchronous technology. Any technology used to facilitate distance participation by the candidate or committee members must be supported by UND, capable of real-time audio and video, compatible with “presentation” software, such as PowerPoint, and must be open and accessible to the candidate, committee, and public.

The Final Report on Candidate form and Approval page will both be initiated and signed after your successful defense. Both of these forms are available in DocuSign and can be found on the forms page.

Students may hold their defense in-person, virtually, or hybrid. Technology adds an extra layer to a virtual or hybrid defense and we want you to be successful.

The School of Graduate Studies has approved Master’s and Doctoral defenses to be done virtually via Zoom.

Scheduling Your Zoom Defense

Zoom links can be included on the Preliminary Approval and Notice of Defense form.

Advisors and student should work with department chairs and graduate program directors to ensure that all parties involved in the defense have access to the technology necessary to conduct defenses in real-time synchronous fashion.

Zoom Defense Tips

• Assign someone on the committee – not the student defending – to setup, manage, and moderate the Zoom call so that the student doesn’t have to manage that extra potential stress. Make sure that the committee provides for extra time and backups in case things go wrong. Set up the connection early (15+ minutes) and ask the committee to show up early to check everything is working. Have one or more backups including something as simple as a phone-based conference call.
• If the defense incorporates a presentation, ask all committee/audience participants to mute themselves at the start or have the committee member managing the call mute them all centrally. It’s easy to forget you aren’t muted and unintentionally interrupt the candidate.
• A Zoom defense will be new territory for many; as such, having committee and audience members using video is especially important – barring bandwidth issues – so that the candidate, to the degree possible, can see audience reactions. This will be especially important during the private portion of the defense, with just the committee members. Audience and committee members should consider exaggerating your positive responses; clear head nods, thumbs up, big smiles, can all help mimic the normal positive audience cues and non-verbal feedback of an in-person defense. Giving a presentation without clear audience response can be really difficult. Of course, if there are bandwidth issues, the committee member managing the call should alert everyone and ask for audience members to stop their video until the issue is resolved. And in the event that the candidate prefers not to see the audience, that can also be accommodated.
• As technology access allows, a candidate can use a 2 monitor setup that will let them see those attending the talk plus their slides and notes. You can show a whole screen of faces – using gallery view – on the second monitor. During Q&A, the ‘hand raise’ function can help prevent voice collisions. The committee moderator can help manage this as well.
• When it comes time for the student to “step out of the room” while committee members deliberate, one option is to have the committee member managing the zoom conversation put the student “on hold”. Committee members might also move into a break out room.
• Final revision feedback should clearly distinguish between:
  • Recommendations for changes required prior to submitting final paperwork (e.g. final report)
  • Recommendations for changes required for the thesis or dissertation prior to ProQuest submission
  • Recommendations for further development of the thesis/dissertation post-graduation