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I wrote one thesis in LaTeX and one in Word. There were some challenges each way, but all in all, doing it in Word was easier. WYSIWYG helped a lot, Word had good documentation, and LaTeX was hard to customize to meet the university's formatting rules.

I will admit, however, that LaTeX run on default settings looks good. Whoever designed that bit had taste.

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The math department didn't have a package for that? I taught my middle school teacher latex so his quizes would look nicer.

I don't remember being offered a package or template or anything like that. This was in 1995; I expect things have improved.

I first became aware of TeX generally when towards the end of writing my comp exam responses, I came across @kjhealy's templates. While this looked interesting, I didn't have the time to dive in (I was on deadline for revisions, and borrowing a family member's MacBook as the 8600M in my 15" died).

With that said, I wonder if the people who actually did write a thesis/dissertation in LaTeX had to do all that customization themselves.

For example, I'm in NJ and although I didn't go there, I could imagine Rutgers OIT telling people, 'If you want to use TeX, just download our package, it will install everything you need and will output the correct format for submission'

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