|
Web
Exclusives: Comparative Life March
27 , 2002: For this week’s column, I expended every ounce of excess energy I had to think of a topic not associated with my thesis. Admittedly, there wasn’t a whole lot of disposable brainpower. As underclassmen friends from Princeton and senior friends from other schools gossiped excitedly about their frenetic spring break plans – Key West, Cancun, Las Vegas – I quietly resigned myself to days of research and writing. As people took off by car, train, and plane to various exotic locations, I hunkered down in my carrel in Firestone Library. As the Middle East peace talks continued, I stared bleary-eyed at my computer; as the volatile world that is Wall Street rang the morning bell, I finally went to bed. Over this past week (spring break on Princeton campus), I communed with the early rising birds during the wee hours of the morning, fueled by caffeine and my increasingly ominous deadline of April 15. Needless to say, I failed in my endeavor to hatch a topic not associated with my thesis. Instead of indulging my complaints concerning little sleep and recalcitrant computers, however, I will adopt an optimistic attitude in this column. That is, I will discuss the completion of my thesis, an event to occur on what I like to call T-Day: Taxes for you, Thesis for me, and Death still remaining inevitable for us all. One time-honored tradition of T-Day is the departmental T-Shirt. Most larger departments exchange T-shirts for bound copies of the thesis on the due date. I am not sure when this tradition started, nor which department started it (probably Woody Woo, with all that extra cash), but ever since freshman year I recall deliriously happy seniors racing around in corny department T-shirts during the balmy month of April. Financially, the trade doesn’t seem particularly even; theses cost around $100 to bind properly (or so I’ve been told — perhaps that was an exaggeration by one of last year’s irate and resentful seniors) and the T-shirts can’t cost much more than $10 apiece. However, the T-shirt is arguably more useful than the thesis in the long run, and in many cases will enjoy a longer longevity than a hard copy of the thesis itself. Some departments recruit student input regarding the slogans on T-shirts. Others do it themselves. The history department produces the same shirt every year, proclaiming in loud sports-jersey letters "My Thesis is HISTORY!" with a sports number (this year, 02) on the back. Though having the department plan the T-shirts relieves the students of some added thesis stress, the departmental designers are not always as reliable or as punctual as the thesis-ing senior. Last year the economics department forgot to make T-shirts, so a few friends of mine took indelible marker to undershirts so as not to miss out on the tradition. The best T-shirts, in my opinion, are those created by procrastinating students. Last year’s English department T-shirt proclaimed "April is the cruelest month" (the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) and Woodrow Wilson T-shirts challenged, "Solve the world’s problems in 100 pages or less." Chemistry department T-shirts depict complicated molecules spelling out witty slogans, and economics T-shirts of years past have smugly proclaimed future financial superiority. This year is the first year that my department,
comparative literature, will offer a thesis T-shirt. They have asked
us to submit a few designs; in true corny Comp Lit fashion, I’m
crafting a T-shirt that announces "Thesis: Done!" in as
many foreign languages as possible, from Chinese to Arabic to Esperanto
to Pig (and traditional) Latin. If any reader of this column has
language suggestions or translations, please do not hesitate to
email … any procrastination from the thesis, while still in
the context of the thesis, is desperately needed! You can reach Kristen at albertsn@princeton.edu |
