How do I schedule and prepare for my Thesis Defense?

If you are following Plan A or B, you are required to meet with your Supervisory Committee to defend your thesis or papers. An appointment for the defense must be made with the Grad School, using a form signed by your Supervisory Committee members, at least ten working days before the requested defense date. Pick up this form from Dr. Evelyn Funda or download it here. (The lead time gives the Grad School time to prepare and distribute the paperwork for the defense.)

The defense meeting should be an opportunity for you and your committee members to celebrate the successful completion of an engaging project with a lively discussion of the work and its implications for your future scholarship. The meeting is traditionally called a “defense” because a fundamental activity of scholarship is to test the strength and validity of ideas and knowledge through argument and the give-and-take of healthy debate. In that sense, you may be expected to explain or “defend” the ideas in your thesis or papers in face of reasonable challenges or alternative ideas or questions raised by your committee members. You can think of your defense as a kind of graduate seminar meeting on the subject of your thesis.

Just as you need to be prepared for a seminar meeting, you need to be prepared for your defense. The defense should not be a workshop on a first draft of your thesis, and it should not be the occasion when committee members feel obliged, for the sake of their own integrity as scholars, to raise fundamental objections to any aspect of your work. Those kinds of challenge should be addressed long before the defense. For this reason, the first draft of your work should be turned in to your committee far enough in advance to allow at least one cycle of revision before the defense.

Here are the latest allowable deadlines for preparing the defense:

4 weeks before defense: Last day to submit first complete draft to committee members

3 weeks before defense: Draft returned to you from committee with comments

2 weeks before defense: Last day to schedule defense date with Grad School

10 days before defense: Last day to return revised draft to committee before the defense

These are bare-minimum deadlines. Aim to stay as far ahead of them as possible, giving your committee plenty of time to alert you to any substantive problems they may find in your work. That will give you time to address those problems before the defense. Negotiate with your committee to develop an acceptable timetable for submitting drafts and receiving responses. At the defense, the committee may approve the thesis as is, or they may approve it contingent on specified minor revisions, or they may reject it and call for another defense following significant revisions.

To avoid wasting the time of English Department faculty and Graduate School employees by requiring them to flag errors, be sure that your Plan A thesis or Plan B work follows an acceptable style guide to the letter and proofread it carefully. Download the USU Publication Guide(a .pdf file) or buy a copy at the USU Bookstore. Attend one of the free Graduate School workshops on thesis preparation.