I printed my thesis twice

On Wednesday, July 30, 2025, I walked into the doctoral office with three copies of my dissertation, A Methodological Framework for Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis. Each copy had about 220 pages, and they were dark blue with silver lettering, as recommended by the university’s style guide. I was still fully unaware that on Thursday, July 31, 2025, I would do it again.

The admin person started leafing through my thesis, and I could see something was not right. They looked at my title page, frowned, and told me they couldn’t accept it.

The Promotionsordnung — the regulations governing doctoral procedures — includes a template for the title page. The template is straightforward enough: You add the faculty, doctoral degree, title, name, year and your city of birth. However, if your dissertation is not written in German, you need to look past the template and into the actual text of the document. I had spent the last months in a blur of editing sprints, conference talks and a new research project, I missed the sentence requiring a German title. It is sentence two in point four of paragraph eleven in the 23-page regulations, which are not to be confused with the additional 11-page regulations. If you are about to submit several years’ worth of work, do make sure to read the rules again. In particular, don’t trust any “short checklists” even if they were compiled by the same institution. You could be fine. Or not.

The admin person was very nice, but there was nothing they could do beyond offering to let me come back the next day. This was already more than would usually have been possible: the office was only officially open Monday to Wednesday, and was about to close for two weeks due to a move. After a few hours at the office, which I mostly spent checking that the edits now REALLY matched the regulations, I went back to the copy shop.

The vendor at the copy shop recognised me immediately. I had been there a few hours before, printing and binding three copies of a PhD dissertation. She was clearly familiar enough with some version of this to know that THIS kind of returning customer is not great news. At this point, I was familiar with every letter of this title page. I had left one meeting early, was in the midst of missing another, and sentence two in point four of paragraph eleven and myself had not become friends. The good news, however, was that they didn’t have to reprint the whole thing — just remove the covers, swap in a corrected title page, and rebind. Ein methodologisches Framework für die korpusbasierte Diskursanalyse now sat underneath the English title where it belonged.

I collected the copies on Thursday, and handed them in for the second time. I then spent the better part of Thursday up until Friday lunchtime refreshing the online overview until it was finally updated to “submitted” (they do not confirm via email and only send a physical letter months later. This is Germany, after all).

A few things I learned from this process. The title page comes from the Promotionsordnung. The cover page, however, which carries the university’s design, and which did not require a German title, obviously, comes from the university’s brand office. You find it on the intranet, on a site called brand.fau.de. If you are not familiar with German, Brand means fire. The cover template lives on a website called fire.fau.de, between the greeting cards and the stickers. I have never felt more like the guy from The IT Crowd.

When I tell this story, people feel sorry for me. But honestly, it was probably the best €80 I’ve ever spent. “I submitted my thesis” is a sentence most people say once, everyone nods politely, says congratulations and moves on.

“I printed my thesis twice,” on the other hand, is a story. While I don’t recommend the overall experience, it has been remarkably effective at removing any nervousness about the usual aspects.