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A leading growth agency that helps brands scale..

Our team is organized as a modern growth team, combining expertise in paid channels, creative, design, and engineering. We operate as an intrinsic partner to deliver bottom line growth.

We take partnership seriously, working to build close, long-lasting client relationships. We function much more like an extension of your internal marketing team than an outside agency, fully immersing ourselves in your business.

Industries We Serve

DTC — Lead Generation — eCommerce — Challenger Brands — Non-Profits

Proprietary platform

Self-serve optimization tools are great, but limited in their capacity to experiment at scale.

We built the Thesis platform to solve for optimization at scale.

Our proprietary testing platform enables robust, custom landing page and on-site experimentation at any level. Personalization is kind of our thing, so we’ll work closely with you to identify which optimization strategies will yield the highest growth, and then execute on them.

Proprietary measurement pixel

Our unique measurement pixel (we call it the ‘Thixel’) enables us to measure the results of our algorithmic experimentation without any development support from our clients.

The Thixel script is hosted directly on our clients’ subdomain, allowing us to bypass the growing privacy restrictions that most third party tools face (thanks, iOS14). So, we can still track user behavior on your site, giving you the insights you need to drastically improve conversion rates.

Obsessed with incrementality

We believe hold-out testing is crucial to understanding the impact of your marginal dollar investment.

Our Solutions

Managed growth.

We manage growth campaigns that maintain a balance between unbiased measurement, creative testing, conversion rate optimization, and media buying optimizations. Media buying is becoming more automated. With that in mind, we generally follow the traffic sources best practices in terms of machine learning. We believe that the remaining, primary points of leverage in these channels are offer, copy, creative, and conversion rate optimization.

Paid Social

We identify ideal combinations of audiences, creatives, and website user experience to increase conversions on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest. We believe strong social advertising is the key to prospecting new customers and scaling your brand.

Paid Search

We conduct an in-depth audit of your paid search account to gauge account health and identify keyword and campaign expansion opportunities.

Data-Driven Design

Our design team bridges the gap between functional design and solid strategy to deliver impactful audience interactions that drive revenue. We work closely with your team to understand your business goals, then use that knowledge to refine your website and identify optimization opportunities.

Creative Development

We create scroll-proof ads that capture attention and spark action. We see ad creative as the single biggest driver of performance. Our creative team produces a huge volume of impactful content designed to engage a variety of audiences, testing and iterating as we go.

Conversion Rate Optimization

We offer everything from a la carte landing page testing to fully managed, customizable experimentation programs. Our conversion rate optimization services provide the necessary data to make macro-level decisions that drive business growth.

Landing Page Optimization

Our platform can take any key parameters, UTM or custom, and update the page content to reflect incoming values. We use this logic to create personalized product recommendations or customized landing pages for specific search terms, influencers, affiliates, or any other meaningful variable.

On-Site Personalization

We test and build new website features to optimize customer experience at every step. Our multi-armed bandit algorithm automatically directs traffic to top-performing variants, passively improving performance over time. As more data is collected, the algorithm learns and improves the page’s performance.

Strategic Consulting Services

We understand that every business has its own unique needs. If our above solutions don’t solve for the needs of your business, we can work with your engineers and internal team to identify and develop custom strategies.

Trusted by the best.

Thesis is a remote company headquartered in Brooklyn, NY.

Theses and Dissertations: Welcome

• Submitting Your Thesis
• Submitting Your Dissertation

Thesis and Dissertation FAQs

Thesis and Dissertation Submission

Graduate students must meet the following thesis or dissertation submission requirements in order to receive their degrees.

UMI/ProQuest (often referred to as simply “ProQuest”) is a private company that has acted for more than 60 years as the publisher and distributor for the majority of theses and dissertations written in the United States. Published theses and dissertations are listed in the  Dissertations & Theses Full Text  database and work by LIU students also appears in  Dissertations & Theses @ Long Island University . Online access to the available full text of theses and dissertations (including those written at LIU) is through paid institutional subscription. LIU students who choose to publish their work in open access form will see their work in a third database,  PQDT Open . PQDT Open  is freely available on the Internet.

As you go through the submission process, you will be asked to make several decisions regarding publishing, embargoes and copyright. It is important that you understand the ramifications of these selections. To make informed decisions, you, your faculty advisor, and your committee should be aware of the publication practices in your field of study.

Process for Submitting Thesis

Process for Submitting Dissertation

For more information regarding the submission process, please contact:

[email protected]

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• Last Updated: Mar 26, 2024 4:07 PM
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A Guide to Thesis Writing That Is a Guide to Life

“How to Write a Thesis,” by Umberto Eco, first appeared on Italian bookshelves in 1977. For Eco, the playful philosopher and novelist best known for his work on semiotics, there was a practical reason for writing it. Up until 1999, a thesis of original research was required of every student pursuing the Italian equivalent of a bachelor’s degree. Collecting his thoughts on the thesis process would save him the trouble of reciting the same advice to students each year. Since its publication, “How to Write a Thesis” has gone through twenty-three editions in Italy and has been translated into at least seventeen languages. Its first English edition is only now available, in a translation by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina.

We in the English-speaking world have survived thirty-seven years without “How to Write a Thesis.” Why bother with it now? After all, Eco wrote his thesis-writing manual before the advent of widespread word processing and the Internet. There are long passages devoted to quaint technologies such as note cards and address books, careful strategies for how to overcome the limitations of your local library. But the book’s enduring appeal—the reason it might interest someone whose life no longer demands the writing of anything longer than an e-mail—has little to do with the rigors of undergraduate honors requirements. Instead, it’s about what, in Eco’s rhapsodic and often funny book, the thesis represents: a magical process of self-realization, a kind of careful, curious engagement with the world that need not end in one’s early twenties. “Your thesis,” Eco foretells, “is like your first love: it will be difficult to forget.” By mastering the demands and protocols of the fusty old thesis, Eco passionately demonstrates, we become equipped for a world outside ourselves—a world of ideas, philosophies, and debates.

Eco’s career has been defined by a desire to share the rarefied concerns of academia with a broader reading public. He wrote a novel that enacted literary theory (“The Name of the Rose”) and a children’s book about atoms conscientiously objecting to their fate as war machines (“The Bomb and the General”). “How to Write a Thesis” is sparked by the wish to give any student with the desire and a respect for the process the tools for producing a rigorous and meaningful piece of writing. “A more just society,” Eco writes at the book’s outset, would be one where anyone with “true aspirations” would be supported by the state, regardless of their background or resources. Our society does not quite work that way. It is the students of privilege, the beneficiaries of the best training available, who tend to initiate and then breeze through the thesis process.

Eco walks students through the craft and rewards of sustained research, the nuances of outlining, different systems for collating one’s research notes, what to do if—per Eco’s invocation of thesis-as-first-love—you fear that someone’s made all these moves before. There are broad strategies for laying out the project’s “center” and “periphery” as well as philosophical asides about originality and attribution. “Work on a contemporary author as if he were ancient, and an ancient one as if he were contemporary,” Eco wisely advises. “You will have more fun and write a better thesis.” Other suggestions may strike the modern student as anachronistic, such as the novel idea of using an address book to keep a log of one’s sources.

But there are also old-fashioned approaches that seem more useful than ever: he recommends, for instance, a system of sortable index cards to explore a project’s potential trajectories. Moments like these make “How to Write a Thesis” feel like an instruction manual for finding one’s center in a dizzying era of information overload. Consider Eco’s caution against “the alibi of photocopies”: “A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and the manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many.” Many of us suffer from an accelerated version of this nowadays, as we effortlessly bookmark links or save articles to Instapaper, satisfied with our aspiration to hoard all this new information, unsure if we will ever get around to actually dealing with it. (Eco’s not-entirely-helpful solution: read everything as soon as possible.)

But the most alluring aspect of Eco’s book is the way he imagines the community that results from any honest intellectual endeavor—the conversations you enter into across time and space, across age or hierarchy, in the spirit of free-flowing, democratic conversation. He cautions students against losing themselves down a narcissistic rabbit hole: you are not a “defrauded genius” simply because someone else has happened upon the same set of research questions. “You must overcome any shyness and have a conversation with the librarian,” he writes, “because he can offer you reliable advice that will save you much time. You must consider that the librarian (if not overworked or neurotic) is happy when he can demonstrate two things: the quality of his memory and erudition and the richness of his library, especially if it is small. The more isolated and disregarded the library, the more the librarian is consumed with sorrow for its underestimation.”

Eco captures a basic set of experiences and anxieties familiar to anyone who has written a thesis, from finding a mentor (“How to Avoid Being Exploited By Your Advisor”) to fighting through episodes of self-doubt. Ultimately, it’s the process and struggle that make a thesis a formative experience. When everything else you learned in college is marooned in the past—when you happen upon an old notebook and wonder what you spent all your time doing, since you have no recollection whatsoever of a senior-year postmodernism seminar—it is the thesis that remains, providing the once-mastered scholarly foundation that continues to authorize, decades-later, barroom observations about the late-career works of William Faulker or the Hotelling effect. (Full disclosure: I doubt that anyone on Earth can rival my mastery of John Travolta’s White Man’s Burden, owing to an idyllic Berkeley spring spent studying awful movies about race.)

In his foreword to Eco’s book, the scholar Francesco Erspamer contends that “How to Write a Thesis” continues to resonate with readers because it gets at “the very essence of the humanities.” There are certainly reasons to believe that the current crisis of the humanities owes partly to the poor job they do of explaining and justifying themselves. As critics continue to assail the prohibitive cost and possible uselessness of college—and at a time when anything that takes more than a few minutes to skim is called a “longread”—it’s understandable that devoting a small chunk of one’s frisky twenties to writing a thesis can seem a waste of time, outlandishly quaint, maybe even selfish. And, as higher education continues to bend to the logic of consumption and marketable skills, platitudes about pursuing knowledge for its own sake can seem certifiably bananas. Even from the perspective of the collegiate bureaucracy, the thesis is useful primarily as another mode of assessment, a benchmark of student achievement that’s legible and quantifiable. It’s also a great parting reminder to parents that your senior learned and achieved something.

But “How to Write a Thesis” is ultimately about much more than the leisurely pursuits of college students. Writing and research manuals such as “The Elements of Style,” “The Craft of Research,” and Turabian offer a vision of our best selves. They are exacting and exhaustive, full of protocols and standards that might seem pretentious, even strange. Acknowledging these rules, Eco would argue, allows the average person entry into a veritable universe of argument and discussion. “How to Write a Thesis,” then, isn’t just about fulfilling a degree requirement. It’s also about engaging difference and attempting a project that is seemingly impossible, humbly reckoning with “the knowledge that anyone can teach us something.” It models a kind of self-actualization, a belief in the integrity of one’s own voice.

A thesis represents an investment with an uncertain return, mostly because its life-changing aspects have to do with process. Maybe it’s the last time your most harebrained ideas will be taken seriously. Everyone deserves to feel this way. This is especially true given the stories from many college campuses about the comparatively lower number of women, first-generation students, and students of color who pursue optional thesis work. For these students, part of the challenge involves taking oneself seriously enough to ask for an unfamiliar and potentially path-altering kind of mentorship.

It’s worth thinking through Eco’s evocation of a “just society.” We might even think of the thesis, as Eco envisions it, as a formal version of the open-mindedness, care, rigor, and gusto with which we should greet every new day. It’s about committing oneself to a task that seems big and impossible. In the end, you won’t remember much beyond those final all-nighters, the gauche inside joke that sullies an acknowledgments page that only four human beings will ever read, the awkward photograph with your advisor at graduation. All that remains might be the sensation of handing your thesis to someone in the departmental office and then walking into a possibility-rich, almost-summer afternoon. It will be difficult to forget.

• University Libraries
• Research Guides
• Dissertations & Theses: Guide to Research

Finding UB Dissertations and Theses

Dissertations & theses: guide to research: finding ub dissertations and theses.

• Identifying Dissertations and Theses
• Obtaining Dissertations and Theses
• Information for UB Theses Authors

To borrow a UB dissertation or thesis from our collection, do an author or title search in the UB Libraries Catalog to get a library location and call number.

By Department To find or browse dissertations or theses by department conduct a keyword search in the Library Catalog , search by department name You may also choose to include the year to limit your search.

Example Search:

Dissertation  (in any field)

American Studies (in any field)

Thesis (in any field)

Media Study (in any field)

Dissertations & Theses @ SUNY Buffalo - this database provides title, author, and subject access to University at Buffalo dissertations submitted to ProQuest's Dissertations & Theses database. You can search by department as well.

• << Previous: Identifying Dissertations and Theses
• Next: Obtaining Dissertations and Theses >>

Electrical and Computer Engineering

• Resources Everyone Should Know
• Background & Reference
• Article Searching Using Databases
• Bibliographic Tools
• Conference Proceedings etc.
• Dissertations & Theses
• Professional Organizations, News & Jobs

Dissertations & Theses as Research Sources

Repositories of dissertations and theses submitted by PhD and masters students are good places to survey pre-publication research. Dissertations are usually very narrowly-focused thorough and in-depth explorations of a topic. Dissertations and theses are also excellent bibliography-mining territory. Because submitters of Masters and PhD theses and dissertations are required to conduct a comprehensive survey of the existing literature relevant to their question, these documents often contain useful literature reviews and contain meticulously compiled bibliographies.

Searching Dissertations & Theses

Dissertations and theses in Electrical and Electronic Engineering can be searched across institutions using ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

• Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window Dissertations and Theses Global contains indexes, dissertations and some theses. Full-text is available for many dissertations and theses, including those from NYU.

Dissertations & Theses in Institutional Repositories

Many academic institutions host their own repositories of faculty and student research. In addition to dissertations and theses, institutional repositories often contain technical reports , datasets , conference papers and other files associated with conference presentations . The following is a list of some of the more robust institutional Computer Science repositories.

Hundreds of PhD theses and other technical reports from Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory. The repository contains current documents and extends back to the 1970s.

• Carnegie Mellon Research Showcase Carnegie Mellon’s institutional repository contains conference proceedings, working papers and technical reports, and theses in four separate collections relevant to Electrical and Electronic Engineering. The two main relevant collections are: the “Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering” and the “Robotics Institute” Of the two the “Robotics Institute” is more current.

Over 300 documents related to Electrical Engineering, including Columbia dissertations, articles, datasets, and technical reports.

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• Last Updated: Aug 14, 2024 1:19 PM
• URL: https://guides.nyu.edu/electricaleng

Architecture, Urban Design, M.S.

Program snapshot, program resources.

• Semester Map

Admission Requirements

• Tuition & Financial Aid

Related Links

• School of Architecture & Design
• Department of Architecture
• Atmosphere Architectural Journal
• New York, NY

The Architecture, Urban Design, M.S. program is at the forefront of urban design research focused on issues of urbanization through the exploration of social, environmental, and technological domains. Gain a global perspective on urbanism through the study of diverse urban metropolitan regions around the world.

Why Earn a Master’s in Architecture, Urban Design from New York Tech? 

Our M.S. in Architecture, Urban Design is a forward-thinking, two-semester post-professional program that delves into the intersection of urban forms, applied technology, climate resilience, ecosystems, and socio-cultural dynamics. Positioned at the forefront of urban design research, this program addresses the complexities of urbanization by exploring social, cultural, technological, and environmental domains. 

Our program explores urbanization from metropolitan to regional and global, with an eye to addressing climate change and promoting sustainability. You’ll explore the impact of social and cultural factors on urban spaces and leverage technologies in urban design. 

Located in the heart of New York City, the program draws from world-class faculty and active professionals, offering unparalleled access to public and private organizations. Students blend theory with practical experience through field studies around New York City and integrated global study abroad programs that have included Paris, Naples, Milan, and Shanghai. 

Our comprehensive curriculum prepares you to excel in an interdisciplinary field of urban design. You’ll engage in case studies and apply new theories and designs to challenges facing global cities, while mastering tools such as digital modeling, data-driven urban processes, resilient strategies, and environmental performance indicators. You’ll also explore the historical, physical, social, political, and philosophical contexts shaping urban environments. 

Choose from our advanced urban design studios that range in topics from exploring contemporary metropolis after relentless urbanization to researching the intersection of urban form, low-carbon cities, and climate to prepare future practitioners confronting a rapidly urbanizing world threatened by climate change. 

This full-time program requires 15 credits per semester, with some flexibility. Courses may be team-taught, depending on the project and collaborations with public agencies, civic organizations, and research entities. 

Request Information

Learn where an Architecture, Urban Design, M.S. from New York Tech can take you. Complete the form to start the conversation.

What You’ll Learn

You’ll draw from world-class faculty, public and private organizations, working professionals, and New York City. The urban setting encourages you to combine theory with experience by living, working, and conducting field studies in a metropolitan area. Take your studies abroad, where you’ll investigate urban design scenarios in a global context. 

Customize Your Studies

Summer Abroad Programs

Acquire a broad, global perspective of the role of architecture and related technologies. Whether in New York or overseas, you’ll learn from architects, designers, and industry professionals while observing various built environments. 

Design Workshops

Through workshops and collaborative experiences, students from across the School of Architecture and Design use their knowledge to actively assist communities in need due to ecological, social, or economic factors.  

Fabrication Labs

Define your vision and deepen your creativity in two Fabrication Labs equipped with advanced tools for 3-D printing models, experimenting with AI, constructing virtual and simulated environments, and exploring the capabilities of robotics. 

M.S. in Architecture, Computational Technologies

Harness the creative capabilities of emerging technologies—from new materials to data that refines your designs to robotic systems in fabrication. 

M.S. in Architecture, Health and Design

Investigate the intersection of architecture, design, health, wellness, and the environment—from their influence on built environments to material selection and related prototyping and simulation technologies. 

Masters in Architecture

Whether you have an undergraduate pre-professional degree in architecture or a bachelor’s degree in another area of study, the New York Tech Master of Architecture program offers a pathway to a professional degree.  

Stats & Rankings

Best architecture colleges and universities in New York

Prepler.com

U.S. colleges for salary potential, based on alumni’s mid-career earnings

Payscale.com

Most diverse student body among colleges and universities in the United States

24/7 Wall St., USA Today

Career & Salary Outlook

Employment of urban and regional planners is projected to grow 4 percent from 2022 to 2032 with approximately 3,700 openings for urban and regional planners projected each year, on average (BLS). 

Employers & Internships

• H2M Architects + Engineers
• Spector Group Architects
• Paul Russo Architect
• Campbell Design and Construction

Career Options

• Sustainability Planner
• Urban/Space Planner
• Architectural Designer
• Architectural Technology Manager

Salary Projections

The median annual salary for urban and regional planners was $81,800 in May 2023, with the highest 10 percent earning more than $126,120 (BLS). 

Program Details

Learn more about the M.S. in Architecture, Urban Design program, including admission requirements, how to apply, and scholarship/funding opportunities. 

• Professional architecture, landscape architecture, or planning degree from an accredited college or university approved by the National Architecture Accrediting Board (NAAB), or the equivalent if applying with a foreign degree from another country 
• Minimum GPA of 3.0 
• No standardized tests (including GRE) are required, except TOEFL/IELTS for international students.

If you do not meet the above criteria, you may, at the discretion of the director, be admitted under a probationary period with an opportunity to demonstrate qualifications by achieving a graduate GPA of 3.0 or higher in your first three graduate degree courses. If your graduate academic record includes any failures in coursework, you may be dismissed from the program.

Application Materials 

• Completed application and $50 nonrefundable application fee
• Personal essay  
• Copy of college diploma or proof of degree  
• Supplemental Application: Digital Portfolio and Curriculum Vitae  
• Two letters of recommendation 
• Copies of undergraduate transcripts for all schools attended. All final, official transcripts must be received prior to the start of your first semester. 
• International student requirements : English proficiency, I-20, and transcript evaluation 

Scholarships & Aid 

Explore opportunities to offset program costs, including New York Tech scholarships, graduate assistantships, and federal financial aid. 

STEM OPT Extension

International F-1 students who successfully complete this degree program are eligible for an additional 24-month STEM OPT extension to work in the U.S. in an area directly related to their area of study immediately upon completing the customary 12-month post-completion Optional Practical Training (OPT) . 

Alumni Voices

I was able to grow and expand my connections through the lectures and events that were set up for graduate students. Shiva Ghomi (M.S. ’15) Learn More About Shiva

Keep Exploring

Transform urban landscapes and shape the future with the M.S. in Architecture, Urban Design from New York Tech. 

August 15, 2024

NewsDoc Alum Rishabh Jain’s thesis documentary, A Dream Called Khushi, is named a finalist in the documentary category of the 2024 Student Academy Awards

About: A Dream Called Khushi

Against all odds, a Rohingya refugee fights for education in Bangladesh’s camps. When she meets AP journalist Rishabh Jain, her story ignites public outrage, revealing her resilience and the plight of Rohingya refugees denied basic rights. Dreaming of a life in Canada, where she can study, will she be the one in a million to break free?

Read more on oscars.org

• About The Institute
• Course Listings
• Institute Projects
• Multimedia Resources
• The Science Communication Workshops at NYU
• Administrative Staff
• Enrollment, Retention & Graduation Statistics

A breaking hero emerges: Meet Australia's Raygun

An australian professor had some breaking moves, and people had thoughts., by nbc staff • published august 9, 2024 • updated on august 9, 2024 at 3:19 pm.

As Dr. Rachel Gunn, she's a 36-year-old lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia . She holds a PhD in cultural science. She researches and lectures on the cultural politics of breaking .

As Raygun, she's an Olympian breaker, competing for Australia.

Raygun lost all three of her matches, against B-Girls named Nicka, Syssy and Logistx. Yes, that sentence is accurate.

24/7 New York news stream: Watch NBC 4 free wherever you are

But Raygun had some moves. And people had some thoughts.

What my nephew does after telling all of us to “watch this” pic.twitter.com/366LjIRl4j — Liz Charboneau (@lizchar) August 9, 2024

There has not been an Olympic performance this dominant since Usain Bolt’s 100m sprint at Beijing in 2008. Honestly, the moment Raygun broke out her Kangaroo move this competition was over! Give her the #breakdancing gold 🥇 pic.twitter.com/6q8qAft1BX — Trapper Haskins (@TrapperHaskins) August 9, 2024

Get Tri-state area news delivered to your inbox. Sign up for NBC New York's News Headlines newsletter.

All I can think about when I see this is the hip hop dance teacher from Bob’s Burgers but if instead she was from Australia and was a 36 year old woman named Raygun https://t.co/nUwYVLnrms pic.twitter.com/Wl5FResHw7 — Shereef Sakr (@ShereefKeef) August 9, 2024

Paris 2024 Summer Olympics

Watch all the action from the Paris Olympics live on NBC

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif honored by celebratory parade upon return from 2024 Olympics

Olympic wrestler who missed out on gold medal for being 3 ounces overweight breaks her silence

when Raygun hit the kangaroo jawn I couldn't see the screen I was crying so hard pic.twitter.com/jcICfTu11d — Bradford Pearson (@BradfordPearson) August 9, 2024

I think I found the source of inspiration for the Raygun breakdance at the Olympics. https://t.co/t94Iyu1dPZ pic.twitter.com/a7DL9etwRz — Noodson (@noodson) August 9, 2024

Raygun was like pic.twitter.com/KvXVPVGScx — Charles J. Moore (@charles270) August 9, 2024

Raygun did THE SPRINKLER at this breakdance thing, this is the worst thing Australia has ever done. — Luis Paez-Pumar (@lppny) August 9, 2024

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His Murder Conviction Was Overturned. Why Is He Still in Prison?

Brian Scott Lorenz was convicted of killing a young mother near Buffalo in 1993. The district attorney is fighting a judge’s decision last year to throw out the case.

By Jesse McKinley and Danny Hakim

After 30 years in jail, Brian Scott Lorenz thought he might be going home. Last summer, an Erie County judge threw out his conviction in a 1993 murder that had set off a raft of accusations involving bad cops, famous killers and prosecutorial misconduct.

Nearly a year later, the crime is still unsolved and Mr. Lorenz remains behind bars.

In 1994, Mr. Lorenz and a co-defendant were found guilty of the savage slaying of a young mother, Deborah Meindl, in the Buffalo suburb of Tonawanda. Last August, a state judge set aside the conviction, citing DNA taken from the crime scene that did not match either defendant and the fact that prosecutors had not revealed evidence to the defense.

But the Erie County district attorney’s office continues to appeal the overturned convictions, raising the prospect of a second trial despite a paucity of physical evidence or potential prosecution witnesses. And the district attorney has successfully fought efforts to release Mr. Lorenz, who has spent more than half his life behind bars for a crime he insists he did not commit.

“It just seems like it’s never going to end,” Mr. Lorenz, 54, said in a recent interview from jail in Erie County. “I’m on a treadmill, in a tunnel, with the light at the end. But it’s just not getting nowhere, man.”

James Pugh, Mr. Lorenz’s co-defendant, was released on parole in 2019. But the trial judge and an appellate judge in Rochester refused to intervene to release Mr. Lorenz pending another possible trial. In late June, his lawyers asked the chief judge of the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, to intervene. A spokesman said the court would “decide the motion at a future session.”

Ilann Maazel, one of Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers, called his client’s continued imprisonment a “Kafkaesque nightmare” that is “intolerable, unconstitutional and wrong.”

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The ‘Gestapo Game’ at the high school where Tim Walz worked was part of a trend Holocaust educators now reject

As Tim Walz was inveighing against trends in Holocaust education in his 2001 master’s thesis , the high school where he worked was employing one of those methods: a “game” that, by today’s standards, would repel almost every expert in the field.

A fellow teacher divided his class into halves: Some would have to wear yellow stars and play “Jews,” while the others would play the part of Gestapo officers charged with tormenting them.

A Jewish former student who was disturbed by the activity told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last week that Walz had stepped in to stop the game after her father complained. But her father, Stewart Ross, subsequently told JTA that he did not recall anything beyond his daughter’s distress.

Bob Ihrig, the teacher who led the Gestapo activity, and John Barnett, Mankato West’s principal from the time, also told JTA that they did not recall such an incident. But Ihrig said Walz, now the Democratic candidate for vice president, had been aware of the activity.

“When students start wearing stars, walking down the hall, they go from my classroom down the hall past Tim’s classroom,” he said. “There’s no way that you could avoid that.”

What is certain is that in another context, Walz had cautioned against exercises like the one Ihrig used, which was called the “Gestapo Game” and was a trademarked activity conducted in settings around the world. In his thesis for his master’s degree in experiential education at Minnesota State University, Mankato, which argued for changes to Holocaust education, Walz noted that researchers had “deemed counterproductive” activities in which students were asked to play roles from the Holocaust.

“Trying to simulate the conditions that victims of the Holocaust experienced was absurd,” Walz wrote. “The result on student learning was a trivialization of the horrors experienced during the Holocaust.”

Walz was not alone in objecting to the game: The activity championed by Ihrig is anathema in the field of Holocaust education today. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the Anti-Defamation League all warn against Holocaust role plays.

“Even when great care is taken to prepare a class for such an activity, simulating experiences from the Holocaust remains pedagogically unsound,” the U.S. museum says on its website. “The activity may engage students, but they often forget the purpose of the lesson and, even worse, they are left with the impression that they now know what it was like to suffer or even to participate during the Holocaust.”

Looking at a pictorial story of their country’s history, German high school girls appear aghast as they wander through the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. The exhibition titled “Warsaw Ghetto,” staged in 1963 and 1964, was the first of its kind in Germany. (Getty Photos)

Walz completed his thesis at the same time that Agustin recalls being in Ihrig’s class. The thesis reflected a longstanding interest in teaching about Holocaust and genocide that predated Walz’s years at Mankato West and extended into his current tenure as Minnesota’s governor.

Walz’s thesis argued that schools would do better to remove teaching about the Holocaust from units about World War II and instead situate it within instruction about genocides and human rights. That way, he said, students could understand the root causes of the violence with the aims of preventing future genocides.

The belief appeared to be long-held. Walz had previously taught about the Holocaust and other genocides in an early teaching role in Alliance, Nebraska. There, after studying the Holocaust as one of several genocides, his class accurately predicted that Rwanda was the most likely place for a future genocide to take place ; one unfolded there the following year.

But Walz did not discuss his outlook on Holocaust education with some of his closest colleagues, several of them told JTA. Ihrig and Mike Sipe, another teacher who was also Mankato West’s wrestling coach, both said they had been surprised to learn last week that Walz had written a thesis about Holocaust education while they worked with him. They noted that completing a master’s degree conferred benefits including a pay raise and did not always reflect a teacher’s core interests.

Both recalled Walz as an inspiring teacher and good colleague who participated in the collaboration that took place informally in their department. (The student yearbook named Walz “Most Inspiring” the same year it called Ihrig “Most Likely to Conquer the World.”) Ihrig said Walz had been “encouraging” and “inquisitive” about the Holocaust activity, showing curiosity about elements of the exercise — which Ihrig recalls as a highlight of his teaching career more than a decade after he retired.

Ihrig said he first encountered the activity in a catalog for teachers in the late 1970s — making him one of thousands to purchase Rabbi Raymond Zwerin’s Gestapo game since its release in 1976.

Zwerin, a congregational rabbi in Denver who was married to a Holocaust survivor, designed the game in response to clamor from classroom educators for more engaging curriculum materials about the Holocaust, according to a 2022 story in the Forward . He told the news outlet that the game was meant to illustrate the role that luck — mazel, in Yiddish — played in survival.

“I think about my wife’s situation. Her parents were killed, her sister was killed, and she escapes,” he said. “Somebody found her on the street, as a little kid, and got her to the right ship at the right time. Total mazel.”

Israeli schoolchildren visit the “From Holocaust to Revival” Museum in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai in southern Israel on May 4, 2016 on the eve of the Holocaust Remembrance Day. (Menaham Kahana/AFP via Getty Images)

Zwerin’s game landed in a receptive climate. An explosion of interest in the Holocaust had generated an NBC miniseries , best-selling books and courses in high schools and colleges across the country. Simulation activities abounded: A made-for-TV movie released in 1981, “The Wave,” dramatized a classroom activity that turned students against each other without ever mentioning the Holocaust. Even some Jewish schools and camps engaged in simulations, with one boasting the slogan “Creative camping personalizes the Holocaust,” according to a 1980 New York Times story about the growing popularity of Holocaust narratives .

But qualms were already emerging. The Times story reported that Elie Wiesel, the survivor and novelist who became the face of Holocaust memory and would later win a Nobel Prize, was “appalled by the fact that well-meaning teachers think they have conveyed the meaning of the Holocaust to children by locking them in small rooms to simulate gas chambers” — a move that he traced to the NBC miniseries. “When he asked one teacher why she used simulation techniques,” the newspaper reported, “he was told, ‘If NBC could do it, if they could create fake gas chambers for their audience, why can’t we do it for children?’”

Ihrig’s classroom was never made to resemble a gas chamber. But the Gestapo activity morphed and expanded as generations of Mankato West students experienced it, Ihrig said. Students suggested that some of them act as the Gestapo. The stars, he said, were his own innovation. So was the decision to have the activity extend beyond his classroom walls.

“I wanted the students to understand that the Jewish people didn’t stop being a Jew and stop being persecuted, that it was a constant 24/7,” he told JTA. “It was too easy for these students, when the bell rang at the end of the period, to pick up and leave and life was back to normal. And so I wanted that stress, that tension, that experience, to last longer.”

But “Gestapo” students started harassing the “Jewish” ones in uncomfortable ways, Ihrig recalled, including in the bathrooms. The escalation was problematic but also instructive, he said.

“They hadn’t been coached, they hadn’t been taught. They took this upon themselves,” he said. “Probably 95% of the students were just totally compliant and obedient, which is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany.”

Borka Marinkovic, far left, talks about her experiences as the daughter of Holocaust survivors with a group of Serbian teachers during an August 2023 TOLI education seminar in Šabac, Serbia. (Larry Luxner)

Holocaust educators today say there are far better ways to teach that lesson: through survivor testimonies, by examining primary source materials and by learning about psychology and human behavior. They say role plays serve to traumatize students and trivialize the experiences of survivors and victims while not teaching anything about history.

“In the Holocaust education field, it’s universally frowned upon in the strongest way — role plays are inappropriate — and I think we’ve done a good job. All the organizations are communicating that to teachers,” said Deborah Lauter, executive director of the Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights.

“Today it would not be seen as common,” Lauter added. “It happens once in a while, and it’s shut down pretty quickly.”

A Florida middle school was inundated with criticism in 2006 after dividing students between the “privileged” and “persecuted” groups as part of a unit that included reading “The Diary of Anne Frank”; according to the ADL, one student told his parents, “The only thing I learned today is that I don’t want to be Jewish.”

A 2015 article in an Indiana newspaper described a one-day simulation participated in by teachers and students alike — and where the teacher who had conducted the activity for over a decade said he was increasingly having to combat Holocaust denial among his students.

Sipe, who still teaches at Mankato West, says there are no longer Holocaust simulations conducted in history classes there.

“I certainly don’t think it’s something that should be part of public education today,” he said. “No, the activity is certainly not part of something we do anymore.”

Ihrig said he understood that times have changed and that many would see the simulation as “traumatizing” today. But he also recalled years of positive feedback about the Gestapo activity that he said had predated Agustin’s experience, and followed it.

“I had a mother who was a school board member who talked to me and said, ‘You know, this was really emotionally draining for my daughter, and she’d come home at the end of each day and all of the stress and tension,’ because I told the students that, you know, you take this seriously, it’s going to have an impact on you,” Ihrig said. “And she said, ‘You know, that was really difficult to deal with in the week before vacation break,’ but she says, ‘I’m glad that you did that for my daughter and other students, because they needed that experience.’”

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