The Dissertation Guide lists the various rules for building and submitting a thesis, so start there. Formal rules are laid out in the Graduate Handbook. The filing timeline is also very handy.

When you advance to candidacy after your qual you can drop one of your qual committee members (you only need 3 for your dissertation), but you can't drop your outside member, or your adviser (who is your dissertation chair). Check the grad student handbook (above link) for details on who can and can't serve on your committee.

They tell you that you can't change your thesis title once you write it on the form (“chiseled in stone” I was told), but it's not true. It's a lie they tell at the Graduate Division to simplify their paperwork. Still, you don't want to piss them off, so try to keep it the same if you can. (Dexter confirmed this “officially” as of May '06, going so far as to say “they don't care if you change the title, it's between you and your committee and there are no forms to fill out.”)

If you have published papers, you can probably put together a “stapler dissertation”. The papers don't have to be on the same topic and you don't have to re-work them into a coherent whole. Just write a several-page introduction giving the appropriate background and references to demonstrate your understanding of how your papers fit into larger fields and then change the “title” of each paper into a “chapter”. OK, that's a bit oversimplified, but really, you don't need a single, over-arching “thesis” with a big conclusion at the end. Published papers are prima facie evidence of doctoral-level competence, and if you have enough of them to make a thesis, you're done. It also doesn't matter what you said you'd do at your qual; your committee won't care, or remember.

“Filing Fee Status” is a special kind of university registration which lets you file your thesis sometime during a semester - but leaves you effectively unregistered in all other ways. Notably, you lose many regular student privileges such as Class Pass, use of the gym, and health insurance (but note that your spring SHIP insurance and Class Pass are good through the summer, even if you go on filing fee, so this isn't such a big deal if you file before September). Then why would someone ever want to do filing fee? It's cheap ($185 as of 2007), far cheaper than registering regularly.

One case in which Filing Fee might be a good idea is if you already have a sweet postdoc lined up somewhere, but don't quite manage to get your thesis done in time, so that you need to file in the first week of September, or early January or something like that. Rather than registering for an entire semester just so you can file your thesis and then leave, you can pay filing fee, file your thesis, immediately head off to postdoc-land.

When on filing fee status you can't be paid as a GSR, you need to get a special appointment like “junior specialist”. Once you actually file you will then have to change your appointment (a hassle) to get paid as a postdoc, if you're sticking around for a while. You also have to start paying off any undergrad student loans you've deferred.

As of summer 2007, university regulations have apparently been changed to require students to actually register for 3 units in the summer if they want to file their degrees in the summer. The web seems to indicate that you can't use Filing Fee to file in the summer, but that's actually actually not true: when you go on filing fee it's technically for the fall, but it retroactively applies to the previous summer.

Health insurance may be the last thing you want to worry about when trying to finish your thesis. Luckily, you probably don't have to: Spring semester health insurance extends through August 14, regardless of when you file, so you're covered after you graduate. Fall term insurance extends through January 14. See this page at UHS.

If you want to buy SHIP insurance while on filing fee after SHIP expires, you can, but it's $1500 (as of 2006).

You'll need the following files in your latex directory (on a Mac, it's often ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/misc/ – if that directory doesn't exist, you can make it):

• ucthesis.cls
• tweak_ucthesis.sty
• bibsetup.sty
• aasmacros.tex
• the uct1x.clo and uct1x.sty files, where x={0,1,2}.

You'll have to chop off the ”.txt” at the ends of these filenames. Then, start a thesis.tex file like this one which uses the UC Thesis environment and grab this frontmatter file which will make you up appropriate preliminary pages. (Add \abstractsignature to the end of your abstract.) These files should have enough stuff to make typesetting your thesis possible without having to learn too much of the guts of latex.

Some formatting notes for the frontmatter: B.A. and M.A. need to have periods after the letters, and no months should be included (only years) in the degree dates.

The word is that they'll reject your thesis if it doesn't have the right margins. The limits are 1 in. all around, except for the left margin which must be 1.5 in. and the page number, which must be no closer than 3/4 in. from the edge (and consistently placed and on every single page, even chapter pages). These are minimums, so you can't go wrong if you give yourself some buffer room. The most important margin to obey is the left hand margin – that's where the thesis will be bound.

The margins you specify in ucthesis.cls and what you acutally see on the printed page are not the same — the difference depends on how you convert the dvi file to pdf or ps, which printer you use, and which OS you're using. This means you may need to tweak your margins to make them right. There's a command in ucthesis.cls, for instance, which reads “\topmargin xxxxin” where xxxx is some number of inches for the top column – change that until you have at least 1 in on the actual printed page.

The most common problems with margins come from formulae, tables, and figures. Tables and Figures are discussed below. Check all of your formulae (especially in-line formulae!) and make sure they conform! You may need to re-format some of them, or shrink the font.

If you use deluxetable because you have a huge table than runs over many pages, it won't play nice with the ucthesis class file. The biggest problem is that it creates a new table on each page, so the list of tables after the table of contents will list the table multiple times. It also has a habit of putting the last page of the table a page late, leaving text interrupting the table. To fix this, use longtable, a package included with latex. The linked website has all of the details.

If your tables run wide (which happens a lot with these fat margins) there are a few tricks you can try to get them to fit. The first is to make your columns closer together with this command:

\setlength{\tabcolsep}{0.05in}

Adjust to taste. If that's not enough, you can use the lscape package and invoke the landscape environment to make your tables landscaped (don't use the \rotate command; it's flaky). Here's how a table might begin:

\begin{landscape}
\tiny
\begin{center}
\begin{longtable}{l@{ }rccccccccccr}

It's all on the longtable website.

For figures, make sure your figures aren't too big. If you've played with axes and such you might find the figures are pushing your captions out beyound the margins. If this happens, open up the actual eps file in a text editor and play with the line that reads “BoundingBox:” and play with the numbers there. These numbers tell LaTeX where the edges of the figure are, so by tweaking them you can trick LaTeX into making the figure take up less room.

The captions of your tables and figures will appear in the lists of figures and tables after the table of contents. If you'd like shorter table and figure (or even chapter!) names, use the optional argument in the caption (or chapter!) command:

\caption[x vs. y]{x, corrected for nonlinear charge 
dispersion as a function of redshift and partial 
ionization vs. y sinh (gamma) (uncorrected for GR 
effects past 4th order)}

If you're going the stapler route, one of your tasks will be to convert the latex files for your manuscripts into individual chapters of your dissertation. One potential pitfall is you are likely to have latex labels multiply defined in each of your documents, e.g. having “\section{Introduction}\label{sec:intro}” in more than one chapter. These multiple definitions can cause the references to be confused when processing your master latex file. To avoid this problem, Mike Fitzgerald wrote a Python script (convert_chap.py) to add a prefix to the labels and references in a chapter (e.g. “\label{sec:intro}” → “\label{vega_sec:intro}”).

Theses must now be filed electronically, thus “saving of approximately half a million pages of paper per year, make Berkeley doctoral dissertations more widely accessible, and spare doctoral candidates the cost of purchasing archival-quality paper.” w00t

The university requires single-sided copies on acid-free paper. Buy your paper from the campus store, then wait for a time when you can monopolize the printer for an hour or two. Stick your thesis paper in one of the trays; leave the other tray slightly ajar so the printer doesn't automatically and perversely pick the wrong one. All the machines on the astronomy network are configured to print duplex-only. In order to print single-sided, you can most easily print from a Mac using Samba. If you really need to print from a Linux or Solaris box, the only one that works (as of September 2006) is astro. Kelley says “You ssh into astro and lp -o sides=one-sided filename.” Then print away! Remember, you need one copy on fancy paper, and one copy on regular paper, plus some extra copies of your abstract and title page.

Each copy of the thesis needs to be turned in inside an 8×13 manila envelope with clasp, with a copy of the title page taped to the front of the envelope. The version that's on fancy paper needs to have “Library Copy” written on the front of the envelope, and the version on normal paper needs to have “ProQuest Copy” written on the front of the envelope.

If your thesis contains previously published material, you will need to obtain a signed letter from every co-author stating that it is ok for you to reproduce this material in your thesis. This letter needs to be the original version (no faxed, scanned, or photocopied letters). Alternatively, an email from each co-author stating the same thing can be forwarded to Graduate Services. You may have to talk to somebody before doing this, but for reference the email addresses are sbeattie@berkeley.edu (if you last name starts with H-O) and laurier@berkeley.edu (for P-Z). Do not print emails and bring them down; these will not be accepted. Alternatively, in one known case, a letter from the advisor (stating that all of the co-authors could not be reached and that he spoke for all of them in approving the use of this material in the thesis) was sufficient for the thesis to be accepted.