Completing your Degree

Permission to Write

Once students have completed all course work, passed their comprehensive exams (in the case of PhD thesis), and collected all their thesis data, with approval of their supervisory committee they may be awarded permission to write. This is not a necessary requirement of the program, but provides the student with a formal document of approval from the committee that no additional data are needed to write the dissertation.

• Permission to Write form for Master's students
• Permission to Write form for PhD students

Planning your Defense

The Master’s defense is organized within the department and requires two forms which should be printed and brought to the defense:

• Master's defense SGS form
• Master's defense PNB form

Instructions for both Masters and PhD thesis and defense preparation is provided on the School of Graduate Studies website in a set of tabs and documents:

• Guide to completing your degree

For example, you will find details such as the formatting required for a "sandwich" thesis at McMaster, the timeline for scheduling your thesis submission and defense, and the appropriate formatting required to successfully submit your thesis for upload by McMaster University Libraries to MacSPHERE. MacSPHERE allows your work to be available internationally and offers you statistics on how often your thesis is accessed.

The School of Graduate Studies also offers a link to Lehmann Bindery where you can submit an electronic copy, should you wish hard copies to be bound for your own use.

Have you completed all the program requirements?

Ideally, you will have completed all your requirements before your last term. What happens if you haven't done this? Occasionally, a student will be registered in a required course in the same term that they are initiating their PhD defense. As long as the student is enrolled in the course, missing a grade would not prevent the student from initiating a PhD defense. As long as the student is enrolled in the term in which they initiate, they can initiate. However, when it comes time to clear the student to graduate they won’t be cleared if the grade is still missing.