'LOL My Thesis' Creator Was a Procrastinating Harvard Senior Just Looking to Blow Off Steam
ByAbout one month ago, Harvard College senior Angela Frankel created a blog to put off working on her thesis, and now, LOL My Thesis has about 500 submissions a day.
According to USA Today, Frankel is currently working on a paper "exploring zebrafish embryonic cardiogenesis as a way to assess how a particular gene regulates a group of progenitor cells that exist in normal heart development."
Frankel, studying human developmental and regenerative biology, started her blog by summing up her thesis, simply stating, "I have killed so many fish."
Thus the premise for LOL My Thesis, a website where students can post a satirical one-liner about their thesis paper to display "some of the stress, hilarity, and chaos associated with undergraduate (and some post-graduate) theses," according to the website.
"I do try to screen for posts that will make the reader laugh, that are relatable, and that come from many different disciplines," Frankel told Mashable. "There are some submissions that immediately crack me up and I just post those right away, while with others, I try to gauge reactions from my family members to see how they might go over."
Of the hundreds of submissions she sees, about 30-40 make the website per day. Despite "very limited coding expertise," she said she is altering the website constantly.
"The thesis writing process can be extremely isolating and produce a lot of self-doubt along the way," Frankel, a 21-year-old Cornwall on Hudson, N.Y. native. "You work on one project for so long and oftentimes people speak with their advisers fairly infrequently. You may feel you're behind or that your project is not living up to others. On the blog, you see other people are experiencing similar challenges or having similar doubts."
LOL My Thesis also has a section for their "scholars," but there is currently only one: BuzzFeed's president and COO Jon Steinberg. The section is meant to display submissions from people who have published their work succeeded in their field.