Frequently Asked Questions

Please refer carefully to the Graduation Calendar. It is your responsibility to know these dates and meet the deadlines in the term you wish to deposit and graduate. Take note of special dates for eligibility for the tuition waiver. It is recommended to deposit your dissertation within 2 weeks after a successful final defense.

Graduate students apply for graduation at https://srfs.upenn.edu/student-records/GradApp. 

After your application is received, you will receive a Calend.ly link to schedule an appointment to have your final, approved dissertation reviewed. Before your appointment, you will meet all degree requirements, complete all paperwork, and upload your final, properly formatted dissertation to ProQuest ETD Administrator.

There are multiple resources to help you format your dissertation or thesis:

• PhD Dissertation Formatting Guide
• Master’s Thesis Style Guide
• PhD Dissertation Formatting Checklist
• Templates (including a PhD Dissertation Template in LaTeX)

Please visit the Commencement website for information about the main University commencement activities at Franklin Field.  

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Invitations and tickets for the ceremonies within the various schools will be communicated directly by your home school.

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Cap and gown arrangements are made at the University Bookstore.

This is best handled at the Office of Student Registration and Financial Services. The Degree Coordinator cannot change your billing record.

If you have technical difficulties accessing the PhD Exit Survey, please contact surveys@pobox.upenn.edu

Diplomas will be mailed 8-10 weeks after the conferral date. Diplomas can only be obtained through the Office of the University Secretary. Please visit their website if you need a diploma translation, to report a missing diploma, or to obtain general diploma information.  

The Degree Coordinator in the Office of the Provost can supply a letter stating that you have fulfilled all degree requirements. Please provide 7 business days’ notice and the following information in your request to grad-degree@provost.upenn.edu: 

• Full name at the time you were enrolled at Penn
• Penn ID number, if known
• Your email address
• Email address of the recipient/institution where you would like the document to be sent
• School and program attended
• Approximate dates of enrollment

Per federal reporting mandates, schools have up to 4 weeks after the Official Conferral Date to verify that all degree requirements have been met and enter degree information for all graduates into the Student Records System, which means that your degree information may not be printed on your student record and transcript until then. We recommend verifying that your degree has been posted in Path before ordering official transcripts.

For further assistance with graduation or degree questions, email the Degree Coordinator in the Office of the Provost at grad-degree@provost.upenn.edu.

Yes. According to US Copyright law, you have copyright immediately and automatically over any of your new, original works in a “fixed, tangible form” (i.e., written down, recorded, etc.). You do not need to register or to include a copyright symbol © or any other formal marks to secure your copyright, though there are some benefits to doing so. See the Copyright Guide for more information or email copyright@upenn.libanswers.com for further support.

It depends on what you want to do with your dissertation. There are some benefits to registering the copyright in your dissertation depending on your future goals. However, keep in mind that you automatically have copyright over your dissertation without formally registering. To learn more about formally registering the copyright in your dissertation, see the Copyright Guide or schedule a consultation.  

Note that you already have copyright over your dissertation, but if you would like to formally register your copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office, you can pay ProQuest to do it for you (you will have the option in ETD Administrator). For less cost, you can register it yourself on the copyright.gov web page. Information on registering your copyright is available in the Copyright Guide. Please keep in mind that if portions of your dissertation are comprised of previously published co-authored material, you cannot register your copyright through ProQuest. 

A copyright license grants permission for someone else to use your copyrighted work.  A Creative Commons license is one type of copyright license. It works hand in hand with your copyright. It is not an independent type of copyright. By using a Creative Commons license you are telling the world under what circumstances they are able to use your work without asking your permission each and every time.  You can only add a Creative Commons license to your work if you are the copyright holder, and have not transferred your rights to someone else (like a publisher).

You may choose to apply a Creative Commons license to your dissertation by adding it to the copyright notice page; see the PhD Dissertation Formatting Guide for an example. Visit the Creative Commons website to review all the licenses in full detail and select one that fits your needs. 

Refer to the Services for Authors Guide or schedule a consultation to learn more about using a Creative Commons license on your dissertation.

It depends. If the materials you wish to incorporate into your dissertation are copyrighted, you will need to do a fair use analysis for each item you use to determine if you can proceed without getting permission. If you do not feel that you can make a good “fair use” case, you will need to request permission from the copyright holder and provide all permission letters as Administrative Documents in ETD Administrator. Just because you are using the work for educational purposes does not automatically mean that your work is “fair use” or that you have permission to use the work. Request a consultation to learn more about fair use and other copyright considerations.

It depends. If the materials you may wish to incorporate into your dissertation are published in a journal or other publication, you may need to seek permission from the journal, publisher, or any co-authors. These permission letters must be uploaded as supplementary material in ETD Administrator before the deposit date. Please refer to your publication agreement for further information.

Additionally, using previously published materials as part of your dissertation requires approval of the dissertation committee and Graduate Group Chairperson.

The Penn Libraries offers a range of workshops and presentations on these topics (and other digital skills-related topics) throughout the year. Groups can request a number of these workshops for classes or other group settings. For personal discussions about copyright, fair use, Creative Commons, scholarly publishing, and other related topics, please contact your subject librarian for support and further referrals. For more general information about these and related topics, review the Penn Libraries’ guides by keyword or subject.

Students should discuss their embargo options with their dissertation supervisor or may reach out to a subject librarian who is familiar with their discipline for guidance. Your choice to embargo may depend on your discipline (it is more common in some fields than others especially if there are patent rights at issue) as well as your publishing goals.

Yes. If you choose to delay the release of your work, access to the full text of your work will be delayed for the period of time that you specify. The citation and abstract of your work will be available through ProQuest and may be available through your institutional repository.

When you upload your dissertation in ProQuest ETD Administrator, please select the option to delay release in the PQ publishing options menu. You can select a 6 month, 1 year, or 2 year delay.

At the same time, you may request a delay of publication through Penn’s Institutional Repository (ScholarlyCommons) in ProQuest ETD Administrator’s IR publishing options menu. The IR embargo is a only available in a 3-year term.

If you wish to release your dissertation for publication before the end of your embargo term, please contact disspub@proquest.com to withdraw your embargo in ProQuest and contact grad-degree@provost.upenn.edu to end your embargo in ScholarlyCommons, Penn’s institutional repository.

No; separate requests must be made for each embargo, and requests may not be made until the previous embargo is nearing its end (1-3 months before the embargo ends).  

For instance, if you graduate in May 2021 with a three-year ScholarlyCommons embargo, in April 2024 you may request an additional three years to extend the ScholarlyCommons embargo to 2027 with approval from the Graduate Group Chair using the Embargo Extension Request Form. In March 2027, you may petition for an additional three-year embargo with approval from the Graduate Group Chair and the Graduate Dean. The dissertation will become publicly available once the embargo period has passed.  

No, you may choose to embargo in either ProQuest and/or ScholarlyCommons, and the period of the embargos will differ.

You may ask to retroactively have your dissertation embargoed in ScholarlyCommons with the Embargo Extension Request Form, but it may only be embargoed until the date it would have originally ended. So, for example, if you graduated in May 2022, your dissertation could only be embargoed until May 2025, regardless of when you request the embargo to be added. Further embargo periods would follow the procedures outlined above and are subject to the maximum allowed embargo period.

To retroactively embargo a dissertation in ProQuest, contact ProQuest directly online.

Note that choosing to embargo your dissertation after it has already been made openly available cannot ensure that your dissertation is not circulated or read; it just ensures that others are no longer able to access your dissertation.

One on one dissertation formatting support is available for students who have formatting questions, need technical support in Word, or just for peace of mind before a deposit appointment. Students can book a virtual appointment on Calend.ly with our Graduate Fellow or can attend drop in hours at the Graduate Student Center.

There are multiple resources to help you format your dissertation or thesis:

• PhD Dissertation Formatting Guide
• Master’s Thesis Style Guide
• PhD Dissertation Formatting Checklist
• Templates (including a PhD Dissertation Template in LaTeX)

Dissertations must be formatted properly in order to be approved for publication. Please review the Dissertation Formatting Guide and Dissertation Formatting Template or Master’s Thesis Style Guide early and often as you write your dissertation or thesis. If your deposited dissertation is rejected more than once, it may delay your graduation term. 

All revisions must be completed by the Last Day to Deposit, per the Graduation Calendar. This deadline is firm and will not be extended. 

You may use the Penn Directory to find the rank and division to enter on your committee member’s title line on the Title Page. If your committee member is external to Penn, please include their affiliation after rank and department. If you are still unsure of your committee member’s full name and title, please consult your graduate group coordinator for help.

Remember that all committees must comply with the rules for dissertation committee composition.

You can find contact information for your graduate group coordinator on your graduate group’s website. 

The exact official graduate group name must be used on the Title Page of the dissertation. Consult the list of formal PhD graduate group names.

Students in Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies or the Graduate Group in Managerial Science and Applied Economics (Wharton Doctoral) must also include their field of specialization above the graduate group name. These students should refer to the special Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies or Wharton Title Page Samples.

No, signatures on the Title Page are now optional. However, if you do decide to collect signatures, BOTH the Supervisor AND Graduate Group Chair must sign. Partial signatures will not be accepted.

Absolutely nothing can be in the margin space. No text, no page numbers, no footnotes, no headers, no graphs, no charts, nor illustrations may encroach on the blank margin space.

The Title page (required) and Copyright page (optional) do not have page numbers on them. The Title page is understood to be page “i” for counting purposes, but no page number should be visible on the Title page. The Copyright page is page “ii” for counting purposes, but no number should be visible on the page.

The first numbered page will start after the Title page and Copyright page. All other pages in the dissertation must be numbered.

Landscape pages are allowed, but they must be formatted as they would be in a book: i.e., they are rotated counterclockwise 90 degrees and bound along the top. A landscape page will have a 1.5 inch margin on the top (instead of the left) and 1 inch margins on the right, bottom, and left. The page number will be on the left side of the page (instead of the bottom), and the number will be horizontal. 

View a sample of a properly formatted landscape page.

All supplemental materials and images in your dissertation must be legible.