Template: Masters Thesis

This is a LaTeX template for a master's thesis, converted from a Word Document provided by the professor of this course.

Useful Links:

• LaTeX Document Structure

Included Files & Documents

IEEE Guidelines

Included are some documents that outline the IEEE guidelines.

File: masters_thesis.tex

This is the primary document.

Edit these lines to customize parts of the template with your own information:

% Set "My Thesis Title" to your paper title.
\newcommand{\paperTitle}{My Thesis Title}

% Set "Alison Major" to your own name.
\newcommand{\paperAuthor}{Alison Major}

% Set "Software Engineering" to your own concentration.
\newcommand{\authorConcentration}{Software Engineering}

File: masters_thesis_slides.tex

This is the secondary document. It is a template for creating a PDF of slides to be used to present your thesis ideas.

We are using Beamer to format the document. Beamer is a powerful and flexible LaTeX class to create great looking presentations.

Edit these lines to customize parts of the template with your own information:

% The title of the paper.
\newcommand{\paperTitle}{My Thesis Title}

% The name of the author.
\newcommand{\paperAuthor}{Alison Major}

% The name of the author.
\newcommand{\authorInstitute}{Lewis University}

You can edit the theme used in these lines:

\usetheme{Madrid}
\usecolortheme{beaver}

There are a number of galleries available to review theme options. Here is the gallery hosted by Overleaf.

As with the main document, we also set the image location:

% Set graphics location
\graphicspath{ {Images/} }

The current year will be automatically populated.

Folder: Images/

Place any images for your document here. This is where the graphics plugin will look for images. This directory is set in the masters_thesis.tex file:

% Set the path to keep images
\graphicspath{ {Images/} }

File: abstract.tex

This is for your paper's abstract.

File: bibliography.bib

This is where you will add your sources.

See Bibliography management with bibtex for formatting.

Folder: Ancillary Pages

You do not need to edit these pages.

This folder contains pages that are templated and then populated with the info that you customized in masters_thesis.tex (paper title, author name, author concentration).

• _title_page.tex
• _signature_page.tex

File: IEEEtran.cls

Do not edit this file.

This is used for styling to IEEE standards.

---

Recommendations

I prefer using the editor VS Code.

On my Mac, I installed MacTex without the GUI. Then you need to update the packages.

# macOS MacTex Install
brew cask install mactex-no-gui

# Updating the packages
sudo tlmgr update --self && sudo tlmgr update --all

Then install the LaTeX Workshop plugin from the Visual Studio Code Marketplace.

# In the VS Code command pallete:
ext install latex-workshop

For more information on setup, please check out Writing LaTeX Documents In Visual Studio Code With LaTeX Workshop.