Don't mention the 'Big T' around seniors

Let the countdown begin. Friday marked the six-week point before my thesis is due. This quintessentially Princeton event, designed to force the liberal arts undergraduate to specialize in one particular area, has made me realize several contradictory things. I can't read enough, can't write enough and can't devote "enough" hours in my day to delicately crafting this precious brainchild of mine. While I've experienced "work overload" in the past, I never appreciated the reality of reaching the point where you must stop reading, stop revising and start finishing.

Before this spring, my experience with the thesis came from my siblings, '96 and '01 grads. I asked their advice over Christmas on this "yearlong project" that I had really yet to start.

Kristi laughed. Apparently, spring of '96 came a little before the fully functioning Internet. She borrow directed all her sources, prompting our mother to pull her hair out: "You go to a school with five million books in the library, pick something you can research from there!" Mom grumbled weeks later when she and I drove five hours to Atlanta's public library to copy 300 pages of a Reserve Room text. "What do you mean I can't check it out?" she asked. The librarian refused to budge, even when my mom returned an hour later with an anthill-sized pile of dimes.

Todd proved to be of a different, but no less difficult, mindset. He refused to research anything he couldn't access on the rapidly expanding information highway. However, once he settled on his topic, Conversions of Death Row Inmates, he found his Internet research capabilities to be finite and resorted to the age-old practice of penning letters to inmates.

A high school senior at the time, I picked up the mail every day on the way home from school. Todd began getting stacks of letters with what looked like third grade handwriting adorning the front.

"Mom, is Todd corresponding with elementary kids for some reason?" I asked, flipping through the letters, some addressed with red ink, others with crayon or colored pencils. "Oh no, nothing like that," she replied, glancing at me wryly over the stack of letters she was sorting. "He just gave our home address to the inmates."

I cornered Todd over Christmas, inquiring what on earth could have possibly prompted him to distribute our home address through the national incarceration system when he had a faceless Princeton P.O. box at his disposal. His words comforted me: "It's not like they're getting out, Ashley."

While their words of wisdom proved helpful, what they really showed was exactly how different each thesis experience really is. My sister's class called it a "book report;" Todd's called it the "Big T." As for the Class of 2005, well, I think our nicknames for it are, to date, unprintable.

Granted, four and a half weeks from now, when I am busily researching binding options, desperately hunting for sources and frantically editing more than 100 pages, I might eat my words — but so far it hasn't been bad.

My sister's parting advice after our talk? "Make it fun. My year, the 250th anniversary of Princeton, the class sponsored a trip to Mexico for the senior who fit 'bicenquintennial' into his or her thesis." The winner? A physics major studying the amount of weight an ant can physically carry, which turned out to be the exact weight of a letter in Campbell's Alphabet Soup. No one contested his win — or his thesis — after seeing the picture portraying a row of ants lined up, each supporting a letter on its back.

So we have games. My girls and I have decided to all fit The Daily Show into our citations somewhere, and even though we range from politics to English to Woody Woo, we think it just might work, just so long as none of our advisers or second readers examine the 'Prince' too closely.

For the next 33 days, be kind to your local seniors, and sensitive to their caffeine addictions. Check on your neighbors. Make sure they're eating, sleeping and bathing at least fairly regularly. After April 4, I promise to return the favor. Ashley Johnson is an English major from Florence, Ala. She can be reached at ajohnson@princeton.edu.