The latex template for Stony Brook University Ph.D. and MS Thesis

Motivation

I am shocked by the lack of proper LaTeX templates for the Ph.D. thesis at Stony Brook graduate school page.

This template is modified from the thesis of Avi Srivastava. Thank him.

How to use

Get started

1. Download this repository from GitHub website as a .zip file.
2. Go to Overleaf website and log in.
3. When clicking on New Project button, choose Upload Project.
4. Upload the downloaded .zip file
5. (optional but suggested) Connect this Overleaf document to a new Github repository. See This page

Start to write

• The main.tex file
  • (The line numbers mentioned here are line numbers in the template. They might change once you fill in your content.)
  • Head directly to line 80 and fill in THESIS INFORMATION
  • In TITLE PAGE, you might only want to change line 138, the date.
  • THESIS CONTENT - CHAPTERS at line 280 is the main body
    • NEVER write any content here
    • Write your main body in separated .tex files and \input them here.
  • Appendixes should be \inputed in THESIS CONTENT - APPENDICES at line 297
  • If you need any extra packages, \usepackage them in Your Packages at line 55
  • For any other parts of the main.tex file, you need to modify them at your own risk.
• The Chapters folder
  • All the text parts should be in this folder.
  • You can divide the text by \chapter or \section
    • The rule of thumb is a file should not exceed 500 lines. If so, break it
  • You can also create subfolders for each Chapter for a better organization.
• The Figures folder
  • All the Figure files should be in this folder.
  • If you have figures created by LaTex code (Highly not suggested), put them here as separated .tex files.
• The Tables folder
  • If you have tables, put them here as separated .tex files.
  • If you generated your tables from tablesgenerator.com (Highly suggested), put the source file of the table here as well.
• The Appendices folder
  • If you have appendices, put them here as separated .tex files.
• The main.bib file
  • All citations should be here,

Additional tools

• Bib file merge tool
  • In case you never used any citation management software and you have many .bib files from previous papers, you can use to merge them into one.
• CiatationChecker.py file
  • This Python script locates at the root directory of this repository.
  • It will count how many times you cited each paper by scaning your .tex and .bib files.
    • This will be helpful to identify un-cited papers in the .bib file
  • How to use:
    • You need to download your Overleaf project to local and unzip.
    • You also need to have a python distribution installed
    • By running the script, it will generate a .csv table showing the countings.
• LaTex table generator

Warnings and Tricks (From the most important to the least)

• The ONLY reason that you want to use LaTeX is that there are off-the-shelf templates available such as a conference paper template from the conference website and this thesis template. NEVER, EVER, EVER, start a LaTeX document from scratch!
• It is highly recommended that any LaTeX users head to Overleaf. Avoid using any offline distributions anytime possible.
• Never define your own command if you don't want to confuse your co-author or yourself-years-later.
• Use \begin{align} instead of \begin{equation}. They are basically the same, but align will allow you to add additional lines to existing equations whenever needed with ease.
• When editing equations, put the equations' latex code into multiple lines, with indention.
  • The rule of thumb is to never let the equation auto wrapped to a new line
  • Indention rules are flexible since indention is for easier reading, not a part of the syntax.
    • It is suggested to follow the indention rule of programming languages, such as the {} rules of C++.
• If a paragraph contains many in-line equations, make each equation a new line in the latex code, so that you can relocate them easily by double clicking on the preview.