Senior thesis: It's all about the process

I started 15 months ago. Fifteen months to research, write and edit a senior thesis. With that kind of luxury, I was bound to create a masterpiece. If I could churn out decent papers in a weekend, I was sure able to produce a piece of original scholarly work in 15 months. Why, with the furious pace of life here, one would think that with 15 months, I could have written multiple theses, each voluminous and replete with obscure academic jargon.

Yet, even with 15 months at my disposal, time managed to elude me. I had planned to be finished by my final weekend. Instead, those final days were spent frantically trying to produce coherent sentences, editing such blatant errors as "This report reported" which, embarrassingly enough, started the second paragraph of my thesis.

On my last day, I found myself desperately correcting the errors I was finding on nearly every page and realizing in a moment of panic that the four gold-stamped covers I had ordered were incorrectly titled. I edited and edited until my phrases began reverting to the state found in previous drafts. I no longer aimed to create a masterpiece but just wanted my thesis to end up fairly coherent.

Eventually, I gave up. Not because my thesis was ready, but because I no longer had the mental capacity to differentiate between correct usage of the English language and the usage that I had artificially constructed — or as I called it then, "Kyle's thesis-speak." I had reached a breaking point and I had lost the ability to communicate anything. I saved my thesis, submitted it to be printed, and vowed that I would never open my thesis for the fear that if I did, I would be shamed by the egregious errors that littered every page. There was no moment of elation, no long-awaited catharsis when I finally handed in my bound copy. I really just felt defeated.

It is strange how differently we perceived the thesis a year ago. Advertised as the culmination of our academic experience, the thesis was to be the defining experience of our intellectual lives at Princeton. It is to be a significant body of original academic work that we are to be proud of, a contribution to academia and a future mantelpiece with the status of family heirloom to be introduced to all as "My Princeton Thesis."

As juniors we were given an orange and black booklet entitled "The Thesis: Quintessentially Princeton," a piece of propaganda filled with glowing accounts from past graduates about their rewarding thesis experiences. We left for the summer, excited about our upcoming research and looking towards that due date nine months later when we are to bear our thesis in all its leather bound and gold-stamped glory.

Yet somehow, by April our theses become more like, in the words of a fellow senior, "a bastard child." Our lofty expectations of scholarly accomplishment are reduced to the basic criteria of satisfactory completion. We hand it in feeling like we could have done better with more time but knowing also that we couldn't work any more. Disappointed and pale-skinned from months of artificial lighting, we emerge from our subterranean carrels and try to reintroduce ourselves back to Princeton society.

In the end, I realized it was the process and not the final product that matters. For many of us, this was our first foray into true academic work. For four years we have been absorbing and regurgitating the work of others. But the thesis required something new altogether. It required that we take time to learn one topic with such depth that we are able to produce a significant piece of work in it. It required us to be analytic and to compile, substantiate and present original material. It is a trial by fire and an introduction to what graduate school may have in store for us.

For me, that process had to take 15 months. Those final days of madness had to happen, simply because this process became my thesis. Certainly, the final product could have turned out better, but that would not have changed the journey I took to get there. It was academic boot camp and has truly become the defining academic experience of my Princeton education. Kyle Meng is a civil and environmental engineering major from Chappaqua, N.Y. He can be reached at kmeng@princeton.edu.