MSU Graduate School Dean Karen Klomparens said tweeting theses can force graduate students to think about making their work accessible to the general public.

“It can be a very useful exercise to be able to take your thesis and shorten it up and take out all the jargon and turn it into something that everybody might understand,” she said.

Graduate student Srikanth Muralidharan said although he has not started working on his thesis, he would consider publishing a working thesis on a social networking site.

“I think putting it online and seeing what impact it has on people would be something that would encourage me to put it online,” he said.

But Klomparens said it is risky to publish work on the Internet without checking with scholarly publications, especially if a student hopes to get his or her work published. Many scholarly publications will not publish work if it already has been published online, she said.

“You don’t want to give away the research you’re doing before you’ve completed it, and you especially don’t want to give away the work before you publish it,” Klomparens said.

Packaging sophomore Shelby Curlew said she currently is not working on any research projects, but if she were, she would not find it necessary to tweet her thesis.

“I would probably go to another resource and ask for help cutting my thesis down,” Curlew said.

Curlew, who is fairly new to the site, said she mostly uses it to follow her friends and groups on campus.

“Usually, Twitter is used to tell where group meetings are and what time,” Curlew said. “Everyone finds out using Twitter.”

Journalism professor Karl Gude said Twitter has the power to unite MSU if the university were to use it more frequently.

Gude said he also uses Twitter in his classroom to communicate with his students.

“They can only ask me a 140-character question, and I can only give them a 140-character answer,” Gude said.

Gude said Twitter allows students to participate in class, even if the class might consist of 150 people.

“When you have a class of 150 people, you get the same type-A person raising their hand,” Gude said.

“Other kids might know the answer but just feel uncomfortable answering.”

Twitter also serves as a good way for students working on group projects or similar research to connect by searching for hashtags, similar to #Tweetyourthesis, he said.

If more people across the university were connected on the site, collaboration for research grants also might be made easier, he said.

“I think everybody should be embracing this,” Gude said.