ProQuest Deposit
With the exception of MFA students, who have the option of submitting their thesis in hard copy form, all students will submit their thesis via ProQuest. Your deposit, whether submitted electronically or in hard copy, must be submitted no later than 5:00 p.m. central time on the established deadline date for a given semester. Please do not wait to submit your thesis until the deadline day. This will give the Graduate College time to review the thesis to determine if it is complete, and to notify you if there are missing materials that will need to be submitted before the deadline. Failure to submit the thesis by the deadline date established by the Graduate College will result in the postponement of graduation to a future session.
At deposit, your thesis must be complete and in final form. Your thesis must include all edits or changes your thesis committee requested as a result of your defense. It must also include all required manuscript elements, including properly formatted preliminary pages, and meet our formatting requirements. To help, we've provided properly formatted preliminary pages. Find more information about manuscript elements, formatting requirements, and preliminary pages under Preparing the Thesis.
Electronic submissions (ProQuest): You will submit your thesis to the Graduate College via ProQuest. More information about the process—and information about copyright, fees, and submitting your public abstract—can be found here. Once you submit, you will receive an email receipt of submission from ProQuest. If you don’t, please call 319.335.3599 to make sure we have received you submission. Remember, you must meet the deposit deadline.
In fall 2019, the Graduate College shifted to electronic committee verification of all theses and dissertations submitted via ProQuest. This means you no longer need to collect committee member signatures on the Report of Thesis Approval before you submit your thesis to the Graduate College. Instead, committee members now receive an email with a link to a copy of the thesis, which must be verified. Committee verification follows the Graduate College format review.
Committee review of the thesis should not change. In chronological order: students will defend, work closely with their committee to finalize the thesis, and then submit the thesis to the Graduate College for format review. What has changed is that there is no longer a hard-copy form approving the manuscript which must be submitted with the thesis. As noted, committee verification is collected electronically after Graduate College format review is complete.
After deposit, all students will receive format corrections from our office. You are required to make these corrections. ProQuest users will submit their corrected theses via ProQuest, using the same account they initially created. Note that you will not receive an email confirmation of your resubmission from ProQuest. If you are unsure whether the Graduate College has received your submission, please call 319.335.3599.
The deposit may be submitted no later than the end of the semester (summers excluded) following the sessions in which the final examination is passed (See Graduate College Manual of Rules and Regulations, Section XII.M.).