Will Oremus of Slate provides a report on a new site that tracks thesis topics of college students. You’ll laugh and maybe cry when you read some of them.

College Students’ Thesis Topics Are Hilarious, Depressing

Enter lolmythesis.com, a Tumblr started by a Harvard senior procrastinating on her own undergraduate thesis. The blog encourages fellow undergrad and graduate students to distill all their hard-won knowledge into a single sentence—a sort of self-mocking tl;dr of their years-long labor of love/hate. The concept is reminiscent of #overlyhonestmethods, the brilliant hashtag game that swept science-Twitter earlier this year. If lolmythesis is a little less piercingly witty than its forebear, it’s also more accessible to non-academics. And it’s been flooded with submissions: Three weeks after it launched, the blog stands at 54 pages’ worth of academic one-liners.

They range from the silly to the depressing to the stultifying to the actually kind of interesting. A few were intriguing enough that I found myself wanting to click on them like headlines and read the full story. How often can you say that about real thesis titles? But mostly they’re just funny, and a little sad. Here are a few of my favorites:

Rocks that are next to each other in Massachusetts now were also next to each other 400 million years ago.
– Geology, Amherst College

Jellyfish don’t like it when you acidify their tank.
– Marine Biology, St Andrews

Look at this zombie. Isn’t it racist and sexist? Yes, it is.
– English Literature, DePaul University

FML: All my feelings are constructed.
– Religion & Women and Gender Studies, Harvard

People get really bored listening to beeping for an hour, but they’ll do it when professors require experiment credit.
– Psychology, University of Chicago

Once there were some lost lobsters who were maybe a tiny bit different from some other lobsters, so I killed lots of their larvae to find out if they were actually a tiny bit different. Turns out I don’t know, so I have to do it again.
– Earth Systems, Stanford University

Just because there’s a bike lane on your street doesn’t mean your rent will be higher. Or lower. Bikes are statistically insignificant to your rent.
– Economics, Reed College