By Maxim Tamarov, News Staff
Compiling a thesis is grueling labor. Sometimes it’s helpful to just step back, look at the bigger picture and laugh at the apparent insignificance of all of that hard work. That’s what Angela Frankel, a senior human developmental and regenerative biology student at Harvard University, thought when she made a humorous blog of her and her friends’ theses on Tumblr. It is appropriately named “lol my thesis.”
“It’s a user-generated blog where submissions are one-liners that sort of describe years of thesis work,” Frankel said of her website. “They usually turn out pretty hilariously.”
The website began with Frankel and her friends summarizing their theses in an attempt to relieve stress from the process. Frankel’s friends constituted the majority of the first pages of entries.
“I think my favorite [entry] would have to be my friend’s,” Frankel said. “FML: All my feelings are constructed.”
She explained that her friend’s concentration was women and gender studies and religion.
Frankel’s own thesis revolves around her research at the Burns Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). She studied cardiogenesis in zebrafish, looking at particular progenitor cells. On Dec. 4, she posted the first “lol my thesis” quote, “I have killed so many fish.”
Kane Hsieh, a Harvard graduate, helped Frankel with the design of the website. He also suggested to start the Twitter. In January, “lol my thesis” expanded to include a section titled “lol scholars.” This addition was made after Hsieh had a meeting with BuzzFeed president and CEO, Jon Steinberg.
“[Hsieh] does venture capital in New York City,” Frankel said. She explained that Hsieh’s idea for “lol scholars” arose at a meeting with Steinberg. “He was very excited about the project… That’s how he decided to do it in the first place — to distinguish it from the normal submissions.”
So how do months of research become condensed into a pithy sentence?
“That’s actually a really funny question, because I don’t summarize,” Frankel says. As a researcher at MGH, a barista at Café Gato Rojo and a peer sex counselor for Harvard Peer Contraceptive Counselors — Frankel does not have the time. “Some people think that I actually do read them all, and they’ll submit their entire thesis.”
