'Twas the night before deadline and in old Princeton town, the seniors were typing, all hunkered down. Each thesis was read, every page with great care, in hopes that salvation would soon be theirs.
A near constant stream of students pooled in the tiny waiting area of Pequod Communications last night, dropping off their theses as mere stacks of loose paper and picking them up as professionally bound books.
The night was just another night of the month known as thesis season, which began last week with Anthropology and Woodrow Wilson thesis deadlines and ends in late May with Chemical Engineering.
Scott Fagerty, Bryan Latham and Brian Zehner were the three employees on call last night as Pequod entered yet another 24-hour thesis stretch.
After shepherding many seniors through the process, the Pequod is efficient at its job. "Our actual record for thesis copies and binding was seven minutes last year," Fagerty said.
Adam Gitlin '03 arrived at 8:40 p.m. with two copies of his thesis and prepared to order his gold stamped binding. Carefully counting the number of characters in his title, Gitlin began to worry about the 30-character limit. "You're going to have to do four lines no matter what," said Simone Schaner '03. "I had to go to five lines."
"Oh, that makes me feel better," Gitlin said.
His economics thesis title — "Social Capital, Welfare, and Work: Intergenerational Determinants of Wellbeing in Children of Low-income Single Mothers" eventually took four lines.
Schaner also had thesis troubles. Besides discovering a mistake in her table of contents, she also realized that the economics department requires gold stamping. Her finished thesis had to be unbound, fixed and rebound for a Wednesday deadline.
"It's about $120 for double binding like this," Schaner said. "The department should really help fund thesis binding."
One senior, Patrick Miller, was determined to enjoy the night and avoid the politics deadline rush. He brought in his thesis for binding yesterday morning and was ready to pick up the finished versions up last night.
As Miller flipped through his thesis carefully to look for mistakes, he discussed his thesis-free evening plans.
"Right now, I'm going to go watch the NCAA finals and drink some champagne," Miller said. "Tomorrow night, who knows?"
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