I finished my dissertation this year, which was a grueling process. Something that helped was a Columbia University LaTeX dissertation template provided by Charles McNamara on GitHub. However, I and some of my colleagues had some problems with the template and had to change some things. I have forked off the GitHub repository and made changes to the template to make it work for me (and my preferences). It can be found here. Maybe it is helpful for some people!
Stephanie Lackner 