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'