As a student of the University of Memphis I was always bothered by the fact that the graduate school does not give any latex template. Not only that, they always assume everybody will use Microsoft Word. All the instructions in the thesis/dissertation preparation and submission process are written with the assumption of Word usage. It looks very pathetic to me.
So I decided to write my Masters thesis is latex and in the process I wanted to make a latex template according to the University of Memphis requirements. After many grueling hours of handling the core of latex, finally I have completed my thesis which is now accepted by the graduate school. So, I assume a workable basic of latex class and template has been successfully created. I am uploading these files and hope that future students of the University of Memphis will find it useful.
If you improve the template and wish to share among others, I’ll be very happy to get a link of your updated files. You can use the commenting feature below to let us (me and other users) know about your modification. Please upload it somewhere in your disk-space (Dropbox, maybe) because I don’t have much space. Also, please mention what improvements have you made so that everybody gets clear about what they are downloading.
Thanks so very much for creating and sharing the template! I am going to try to use it for my dissertation, though I’m only at the prospectus stage right now. So far so good.
You are welcome. I’ll be very happy if somebody gets it useful.
For people who use this template, I have to point out some of the differences from the requirement by the University Thesis Style Guide (available here: http://www.memphis.edu/gradschool/current_students/tdguide_preparation.php)
1. The university requires you to track changes during your corrections. In addition to using the template, you may want to download trackchanges.sty and save it in the same directory as your TeX project. Following the instructions on http://trackchanges.sourceforge.net/ to take every change you made during corrections as well as suggestions given by your committee member.
2. The university requires that numbering of tables and figures must be consecutive throughout the document (Table 1, Figure 1, etc.) instead of starting from 1.1, 2.1… within each chapter. You may want to add the following codes before begin{document} in the template:
usepackage{chngcntr}
counterwithout{figure}{chapter}
counterwithout{table}{chapter}
…and I believe you can also do it by modifying memphisthesis.cls
3. The university requires that chapter, section, subsection… names must NOT be numbered. This means you cannot have numbers before any chapter or section name. For example, instead of having 0. Introduction 1. Methods… You should just use Introduction, Methods… However, thus far I have no idea how to modify this template.
The submission could be rejected if you do not satisfy these requirements.