GiacoCorsiglia / cu-boulder-thesis-template

A LaTeX template for writing a thesis at CU Boulder

LaTeX Template for CU Boulder Graduate Theses

An improved version of CU Boulder's original LaTeX thesis template. Updated to match the latest graduate school requirements, this template also includes a variety of other small improvements and capabilities as compared with the original. A few notable improvements include:

• The base thesis.tex file now references lots of useful packages.
• Italics are used instead of boldface to emphasize text (i.e., for the \emph{} command). I confirmed with the graduate school that the instructions, which require boldface, are out of date.
• Typesetting of footnotes is improved.
• Added \introductoryPage, \titlePageTitle, and \thesisDirectedBy commands.

See the changelog in thesis.cls for more details.

I submitted my physics PhD dissertation to the graduate school using this template in May 2023.

How To Use This Template

To use this template, clone or download this entire repository. Your starting point for editing is the thesis.tex file. You need to keep thesis.cls around, too, but you don't need to edit that file.

1. Set the title of your thesis and other details in the "PREAMBLE" section of thesis.tex.
2. Each chapter has its own folder and .tex file. To add a new chapter, create chapter-3/chapter.3.tex and add it to the list of included chapters in the "CHAPTERS" section of thesis.tex
3. The same goes for appendices.
4. By default, it's expected that you'll manage your bibliography using BibTeX in the bibliography.bib file. Check out "BIBLIOGRAPHY SETUP" in thesis.tex to customize this or to reference other .bib files.
5. If you organize your figures into folders, you must reference them using their full path relative to the root of the repository. For example, a figure that lives in the chapter-1 folder should be references as chapter-1/fig.pdf, otherwise LaTeX won’t find it.
6. If you have custom LaTeX command definitions to include, throw those in macros.tex.

See the thesis.pdf file for more tips on writing TeX in this template.