The Weirdest Theses: Nuggets of Gold from the Archives

You thought coming up with a topic for your 10 page expos paper was hard? Try coming up with a topic for an entire thesis. For all you poor souls out there who are scrambling for thesis ideas, we dug through the archives to remind you that not everyone comes up with the most “serious” thesis titles — and apparently, that’s okay. Because these examples literally won prizes.

Give Me Burning.

No context. Is “Burning” a thing, a person, or a place? Can you give someone the action of burning? Titles are supposed to preface the topic of the whole thesis, but we have so many questions and so few answers.

Clickbait.

Ah, clickbait. We love it. We hate it. YouTubers can’t live without it. This thesis has no further explanation in the title; it’s just titled “Clickbait.” If that’s not the literal definition of thesis clickbait, then we don’t know what is.

Can You Just Not.

Can we not? We’re not sure what this thesis is even about, but we had to put it in here just to show how much you can get away with when writing your thesis. Title it whatever your heart desires. Or you can just not.

Vanitas: The Harvard Indifference Epidemic and the Mysterious Med. Fac. Society, 1818-1905.

We love a play on veritas. We think it’s veri-clever. But Harvard students? Vain and indifferent? We could never, but apparently someone spent an entire year writing about the epidemic of Harvard students’ indifference. Whatever.

Drop Out Like It's Hot: Analyzing the Impact of State-Level Legislation on School Completion Rates

We can tell this was written recently. Puns are definitely the best way to title a thesis that only a handful of people will end up reading. Might as well make it funny.

According to these incredible thesis titles, nothing is off-limits when it comes to writing and titling a senior thesis. You don’t even have to give context. Have fun seniors, and if you don’t, remember you can always drop out like it’s hot ;)