The senior thesis, as we are frequently reminded, is a quintessentially Princeton experience - the culmination of four years of scholarly pursuit. But if you ask around on the B level of Firestone Library as the end of March approaches, you might get a slightly more pessimistic answer about topics like "A Study of the Cyclostages in the Morphology of Vibrio Phosphorescens with an Attempt to Correlate the Morphological Changes with Certain Physiological Changes Evidenced by Loss or Attainment of Luminescence." (Apologies to Joseph Wilson Johnson Jr. '33).
But for some upperclassmen finishing their independent work, the process can be a bit more personal. One need not look further than Hollywood, or the White House, for that matter, for proof.
Michelle Robinson '85 - better known today as First Lady Michelle Obama - famously wrote her thesis on a group she belongs to: "Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community." Brooke Shields '87's thesis was titled "The Initiation: From Innocence to Experience: The Pre-Adolescent/Adolescent Journey in the Films of Louis Malle, ‘Pretty Baby' and ‘Lacombe Lucien.' " You may wonder how she came up with the topic, but a quick imdb.com search reveals that an adolescent Shields starred in "Pretty Baby" in 1978.
Students are encouraged to study what they are passionate about, and sometimes this passion extends beyond purely intellectual interest.
For Carly Cline '10, her junior paper is an opportunity to explore synesthesia, a condition with which she has personal experience.
"I have linguistic color synesthesia," Cline said. "When I read letters, numbers or musical notes, I perceive color there, but it's not actually there."
Cline, an anthropology major, explained that she decided writing on synesthesia would be a "fantastic topic" because "as I do research, I learn more about people that have the same thing as me."
For English concentrator Dennis Lee '08, his thesis was an opportunity to describe "Korean-American culture as I knew it for myself," he said.
He added that he considers his 97-page thesis a memoir in that the writing is "heavily personal. Although not all the chapters are written in the first person, it eventually all comes back to my opinions about certain things," he explained. "I try to make larger claims about what my generation or my culture feels, as the stories in the thesis are not completely specific to me."
"My research was essentially talking to people about these issues and getting a sense for what other people thought," he said. "I would bring up these issues in everyday conversation, and I could look forward to living in college as a kind of research, getting to know people."
"It didn't start as being something consciously about myself," he said. "A lot of the thesis is about how it was kind of inescapable that the thesis became about myself. I mostly wanted to write about my father and my family."
While few students write about themselves or their surroundings as directly as Lee did, Cline's adviser, anthropology professor Rena Lederman, noted that often students connect to their research based on "ethnic or regional connections." She has seen a number of anthropology students travel to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America because of interest created by family ties, she said.
Politics professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell, however, noted the ambiguity involved in crediting research to personal connections.
"Are white students who write about the presidents writing about their group? Are male students who write about Plato writing about their group?" she said in an e-mail.
Lederman agreed that the category of students writing or researching about "themselves" is difficult to define, but she noted that even if a tie between writer and topic is not obvious at first, it may be present.
Lederman described one of her current advisees, a Ghanaian who is "interested in return migration and the relations between return migrants from elsewhere, back to Africa."
"You could say that it is sort of relevant to her experience as somebody who has family ties to Africa," Lederman said. "She's got parents who were born in Africa, so it's relevant in some sense. Is she a return migrant? No. But obviously she's drawing on connections she has."
Researching a personal topic can have its benefits. For Cline, writing partly about her own condition has allowed her to better relate to her subjects.
"I know exactly how they feel," she explained. "It's a kind of solidarity thing."
Still, Lederman cautioned against students having too much of a connection to their research topics. "The most obvious downside ... is that you can't be objective," she said. "If [students] participate as a kind of insider in the topic, [they] may not be critical of the kind of information that they're getting."
"They might not have the sense that there could be alternative ways of thinking about things," she added. "[And they] may have a tendency to be too readily satisfied with what their interlocutors say. There is a worry that if they are too familiar, there may be a tendency to draw upon their own subjective experience."
Cline echoed that sentiment, noting that when writing about linguistic color synesthesia, she might leave out things that seem obvious to her but might not be to others. "It's a little bit difficult, because when I'm writing about synesthesia, I have to resist the urge to write all about my synesthesia."
Though Lee did not have to worry about his research from an anthropological perspective, he said he was concerned about what other people might think. "I didn't want my contribution to be ‘Read this; it's so amazing. It's about me, who is very interesting,' " he explained.
"It's pretty bold to go ahead and say, ‘I'm going to be writing about myself,' " he added. "I think the first reaction you would get is that people would laugh and say, ‘That's not really contributing or doing much [new].' "
Lee's adviser, English professor Benjamin Widiss, said in an e-mail that Lee successfully avoided this trap. "The self he articulated in the thesis was one born of multiple heritages: genetic, national (both Korean and American), culinary, bibliographic, and so on," he said. "Writing about himself meant writing about all of these, which meant that most of the time he was looking at anything but his own navel."
Lee added that some of his friends were jealous of his topic, as they "didn't have theses they were extremely proud about."
Still, Lee remembered having different feelings during the writing process.
"I was very, very reluctant to admit to my friends that I was writing a thesis about myself, as it seems like not too much work at all," he said. "I didn't want to show off to people that ‘This is what I did to graduate from Princeton: write 97 pages about myself.' "
But despite his hesitations, he said he is happy with the result. "I'm not sure how many people have read my roommate's thesis," he said. "It was great, but it was about conservation in Costa Rica. Not to discount all the amazing things other people are doing with their theses, but in terms of readership, as an English major, it was really rewarding."
Cline echoed that statement. "The bias can be difficult, but if it's something that you're interested in, then why not? You should pursue it," she said. "It can be challenging, but it's worth it."
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