alterlab-thesis-supervisor

alterlab-thesis-supervisor is a skill for Claude Code from AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills. It costs 138 tokens per session (3,818 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide and assistant for planning, writing, supervising, and defending a thesis or dissertation. It covers the work from choosing a research topic through the final oral defense.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to shape a proposal, plan a timeline, develop chapters, prepare committee meetings, give supervision guidance, and practise for a defense or viva.
Why use it?
It gives students and supervisors structure for a long project that involves research questions, chapters, feedback, deadlines, committees, and presentation preparation.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the alterlab-core plugin — 10 skills, 4 commands, 34 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to shape a proposal, plan a timeline, develop chapters, prepare committee meetings, give supervision guidance, and practise for a defense or viva.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-thesis-supervisor
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-thesis-supervisor
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install alterlab-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills, 4 commands, 34 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for alterlab-thesis-supervisor

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-thesis-supervisor/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-thesis-supervisor)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-thesis-supervisor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-thesis-supervisor/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for alterlab-thesis-supervisor

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-thesis-supervisor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-thesis-supervisor.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 138 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,818 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00138 $0.03818
Opus 5 $0.00069 $0.01909
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00764
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00382

Measured 7d ago against content hash 8f04cc6b6e70, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alterlab-thesis-supervisor scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/core/alterlab-thesis-supervisor/SKILL.md · 314 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 314 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Thesis Supervisor — Dissertation & Thesis Supervision Agent

A comprehensive thesis and dissertation supervision tool for faculty advisors and graduate students. Covers the full dissertation lifecycle from initial topic selection through successful defense, providing chapter-by-chapter guidance, supervision strategies, timeline management, and defense preparation.

Overview

Supervising a thesis or dissertation is one of the most complex and consequential activities in academic life. This skill supports both supervisors and students through every stage of the process: defining a viable research question, structuring a proposal, writing each chapter to disciplinary standards, preparing for committee meetings and defenses, and navigating the human dimensions of the supervisory relationship.

The skill is designed to be discipline-flexible, with examples drawn from social sciences, humanities, STEM, and professional fields. Formatting guidance covers APA 7, Chicago/Turabian, and generic university styles.

When to Use This Skill

This skill should be used when:

  • Beginning thesis/dissertation topic exploration
  • Writing a research proposal for committee approval
  • Structuring any chapter of a thesis or dissertation
  • Preparing for a proposal defense or final defense (viva voce)
  • Managing the supervisor-student relationship
  • Creating or adjusting a thesis timeline
  • Giving feedback on student drafts
  • Preparing students for committee meetings
  • Troubleshooting common thesis problems (writer's block, scope creep, data issues)
  • Teaching thesis writing seminars or workshops

Does NOT Trigger

Scenario Use Instead
Writing a journal article (not thesis) alterlab-paper-writer
Statistical analysis of thesis data Data science skills
Literature search strategy alterlab-deep-research
Survey/instrument design for thesis alterlab-survey-design

Core Capabilities

1. Dissertation Structure Overview

Read the full file on GitHub · 314 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 314 lines · 138 tokens per session scan A 8f04cc6b6e70

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alterlab-thesis-supervisor is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (66 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 138 tokens to every session and 3,818 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

academic-slides

Create Beamer-inspired academic HTML presentations from scratch or by converting PowerPoint files. Use when the user wants to build slides for a conference talk, lecture, seminar, or thesis defense. Supports theorem environments, KaTeX equations, algorithm pseudocode, and citations. Helps academics discover their…

Nero1688/claude-academic-skills · 74 tokens

academic-deck-animator

A tool for creating animated academic presentations from one JSON content file. It can produce a browser-based HTML presentation or an editable PowerPoint file; academic presentations are talks used to explain research to reviewers, classmates, or other researchers.

Nero1688/claude-academic-skills · 472 tokens

phd-milestone-tracker

A tracker for planning and monitoring the academic milestones of working business doctoral students.

Nero1688/claude-academic-skills · 394 tokens

qual-exam-coach

A Traditional Chinese study coach for business PhD qualifying exams in organization, human resources, management psychology, strategy, innovation, and research methods.

Nero1688/claude-academic-skills · 390 tokens

defense-qa-coach

A preparation coach for thesis defenses, doctoral exams, and conference question-and-answer sessions. It helps researchers practise answering questions from the viewpoint of a committee member.

Nero1688/claude-academic-skills · 431 tokens

academic-pptx

Use this skill whenever the user wants to create or improve a presentation for an academic context — conference papers, seminar talks, thesis defenses, grant briefings, lab meetings, invited lectures, or any presentation where the audience will evaluate reasoning and evidence. Triggers include: 'conference talk'…

Nero1688/claude-academic-skills · 164 tokens