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Departmental Requirements for Depositing a Thesis

The Graduate College has a "Handbook for Graduate Students Preparing to Deposit" which is available in the department office, the grad college or online at http://www.grad.uiuc.edu/thesis/thesisGC.html. These are the guidelines to follow except for the following departmental requirements. If you use a template from another department or person, please incorporate the requirements listed below. Your thesis must be ready to deposit before the department will check it.

1. An abstract is required for Ph.D. students with the title of ABSTRACT as a heading.
2. Please use all capitals for major headings, e.g. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, TABLE OF CONTENTS, CHAPTER HEADINGS, etc. Subheadings should be in upper and lower case. All chapters must say CHAPTER 1; a single blank line and then the next line should be the title of the chapter, single space all multiple line headings. Center all chapter headings; multiple line headings need to be single spaced. Use bold for headings and subheadings, for subheadings you may use italics. These need to be easily seen on the page.
3. The title "TABLE OF CONTENTS" should be in bold print, but no other bold lines should appear on the table of contents page. If italics are used in the text for subheadings, be sure to put the subheading in italics on the table of contents. If there are two lines to a heading, single space and line up the second line of text with the first word of the heading; make sure the first line does not overlap the page numbers, (displaced from 2.1 as shown below) i.e.
   
   2.1
   
   Heading
   heading second line......................3
4. Margins must be 1.5 inch for the left side and 1 inch for the top, bottom, and right sides of the page.
5. Page numbers should be centered at the bottom of the page.
6. Reference notations within the text must be in brackets [1,2] and the same size as the rest of the text. DO NOT USE SUPERSCRIPTS. If you plan on listing them at the end of each chapter, the reference list needs a subheading as all other subsections and should start immediately following the last paragraph. DO NOT START ON A NEW PAGE. The references should be lined up if there is a second line of text so that the number stands alone.
   
   1.
   
   Reference
   reference second line
7. If you plan on putting your figures at the end of each chapter, the figures must have a subheading (1.2 Figures) and be the very last pages of the chapter appearing after the references. If two figures will fit comfortably on one page, please group them, otherwise center the figure on a single page. If the caption for the figure is more than one line, be sure to single space and line up the text, (displaced from the figure as shown below) i.e.
   
   Figure 1.
   
   Figure caption
   figure caption
8. Tables should be handled the same as figures or they can be grouped with the figures and have a subheading (1.2 Tables and Figures) or as their own section (1.2 Tables) appearing before the figures. Table captions should be in the same style as figure captions.

NOTE: Please do not have any pages professionally printed with page numbers on them until you have your thesis checked by the department.

This page will be updated if or when changes occur.