Remember that one time you spent, like, nine million hours laboring over your brilliant college thesis? But then, when you tried to explain your brilliant idea to your friends, the whole thing sounded kind of … stupid. Yeah, we’ve been there. Enter LOLMyThesis.com, the Tumblr account that lets you summarize your super-important thesis with one hilariously unimportant sentence.
Case in point: the Tumblr’s creator Angie Frankel. Frankel is a senior at Harvard concentrating on human developmental and regenerative biology. For her senior thesis, she’s using zebrafish as test subjects to research whether a particular gene regulates a group of progenitor cells that exist in the heart. She’s hoping to find out if the gene plays a role in the development of congenital heart diseases. Or at least, that’s one of looking at it. Then, there’s her LOLMyThesis explanation: “I have killed so many fish.”
Other LOL-worthy theses featured on site include:
“Sex is a pretty big no-no at religious schools, because norms and stuff,” a sociology student at Whitman College submitted.
“If you tie years of work to a balloon and fly it around Antarctica, don’t act surprised when it falls in a crevasse and you never see it again,” a physics student from the University of Toronto warned.
Frankel acknowledges that while the one-liners poke fun, there’s true hard work being done by the writers.
“Obviously, the person has spent a lot of time [on his or her work] and the research is much more in depth,” Frankel says of her site’s contributors. “But when it’s so boiled down, it’s hilarious.”
Before she created the website, Frankel and her fellow thesis-writing friends would update each other on the status of their projects with witty one-liners as a way to keep in touch. After deciding that the quips needed to be written down somewhere, Frankel launched the Tumblr page LOLMyThesis.com in early December. She later created a Twitter account for the site, @LOLMyThesis.
All of the site’s early posts came from Frankel’s friends at Harvard. But once those friends began sharing links to the site on Facebook and Twitter, submissions began to come in from all over the country, proving that no matter who you are or where you live, writing a thesis sometimes (OK, a lot of times) sucks. In this way, the site offers followers a kind of camaraderie. It’s also a great way to avoid actually working on your thesis.
“It’s one of those [websites] where you get sucked in after one page, and when you look up [at the clock] again, it’s like two hours later,” Frankel says.
Frankel receives about 500 submissions for the site every day of which she selects around 30 to 40 for posting. “The ones that are really obvious like, ‘Moby Dick is the hero of ‘Moby Dick,’’ I think those are kind of hilarious,” Frankel says. “I also like the ones where the punch line is almost the major or area of study.” For instance, a structural engineering student once submitted, “This probably won’t fall down and kill everyone inside.” She also has a soft spot for submissions from students at Harvard and Mount Holyoke, her sister’s alma mater.
So, stop stressing about your thesis and waste time exploring LOLMyThesis.com. Just don’t expect to get any work done for the rest of the day.
