Submit the Application to Graduate online in your graduation semester by the second Friday of your graduation semester to allow time for approvals. The deadline is the third Friday of the graduation semester.
Non-thesis or oral defense (if doing a thesis) results need posted by your faculty committee by the exam deadline. The faculty will probably need your work about 2 weeks before the deadline to have time to evaluate it. Your advisor will guide the process, format, and difficulty. Consult with that person early and often.
Everything to do with the thesis needs to be done by the document deadline See Final Semester Procedures
You can click on the History tab of the results form (s) to see if your committee has posted their evaluation: Gradforms.
Students are eligible to use an extension called end of semester (EOS). If this is chosen, the degree is posted on the transcript and the diploma is conferred at the commencement of the following semester. You will not need to enroll again. You can request a Certification Letter form the Graduate School, Graduation Services (grad-schoolgraduationservices@osu.edu) as proof that your degree requirements are complete while you wait on the diploma/degree to post to the transcript.
Getting started with writing…
A good source is Dr. Lisa Fiorentini’s graduation non-thesis project checklist which can be used even if you are not her student.
The following is adapted from Kevin Passino’s post “Style/Conventions/Recommendations for Technical Writing”
- Before you write, construct a detailed outline (often it is best to do it down to the paragraph level). Often, getting the logical organization established is half the battle of writing a clear document
- Think very carefully about how to produce a concise (and short) document
- It is often good to print out your first draft, get away from it for a little while, then return to the paper copy and edit it with a pencil and put the resulting changes in. Practically speaking it is probably not good to use only electronic editing
- Use a spell-checker regularly
- Captions of figures go on the bottom of the figure, and captions for tables go on the top
- Figures and tables should be placed near the point they are first referenced. You should use an automatic referencing scheme so that if you later add more figures, it automatically numbers them, and refers to them properly
- You can use auto-numbering for equations, and refer to them via that number also
- Do not use contractions in technical writing (e.g., don’t)
- Try not to use “first person” (never say “I”, not good to say “we” although many people do)
- When using quotes, a period or comma goes within (not after) the second quote