My thesis from Kansas University

I wanted to write a blog post about my thesis for my master's at KU.  So this happened during the mid 1980s. I went directly from college to grad school (minus the summer break in between).

First let me digress, that was a weird summer because as soon I got back to Kansas after graduating in Iowa, I was helping my parents pack up the house. I could sense the dread from my parents of moving away somewhere comfortable to a new workplace. It was really weird to move even further east in Kansas.  For my Dad at least, the move became the first time he lived in town. We had neighbors just across the driveway. You could walk down to the post office. But I wasn't in the new town for long, less than two months, and then I moved to Lawrence.  One of my three moves in Lawrence the two years I lived there for master's degree study.

KU was a culture shock for me. I went from a college of 400 students to a university of 25,000 student. I had easy, relaxed living before.

An interesting story about my thesis. This was before Microsoft Word and instead was in the early days of word processing software. I was using Leading Edge to type up my thesis. I gave the floppy disk (yes the 3.5 floppy disk of yore) to the departmental secretary in order to print out three copies for binding. Somehow or another, a mistake was made and a period was inserted after every word! I was beyond words.  The college had to send the disk to the company to fix the issue. It came back fixed and all ended well.

Here is the cover to my thesis: Supervision Practices and Opinions of College Student Newspaper Advisers. If you are ever in Lawrence, it can be found in the archive library.

This thesis reviewed the current legal status of the student press on the college level and surveyed their faculty advisers on the advisers' attitudes and practices concerning censorship of student newspapers.  Information was gathered via mail questionnaires and follow-up mail questionnaires. Each mailing including a self-addressed stamped envelope for easy return. The survey covered 92 colleges around the Lawrence region of the country.

I then wrote five hypotheses about what I would find from the calculations of the surveys. The hypotheses were written and approved by my thesis committee before the surveys were mailed out.

I had to learn very quickly Honeywell computer skills and punch-out cards in order to run cross-tabulations of the survey responses to the questions and then to the related hypothesis. I did significance to chi-square and cross-tabulations through SPSS-X statistical analysis program. Yeah, I had to learn that program really quick as well.

I had help of course. There was a young woman in the KU Statistics Lab who helped me tremendously through the program and data input process. My professor from Westmar had decided to move back to Kansas and he lived very close to Lawrence. He helped me develop the survey tool. I also thanked my parents profusely in my acknowledgements because without them, I would have never found an affordable apartment to move into, nor keep me calm when I thought my thesis had been ruined by the period after every word.

Some more pictures below. One is the thesis title page and the other is one of the many tables depicting cross-tabulation and all of the numbers I dealt with for each question on the survey. This was a massive undertaking but I am very proud of this accomplishment even if it was over 30 years ago!