Thesis Challenge: What I Tell Applicants

As an volunteer alumni schools interviewer for the past decade, I provide a set of web links in advance of the interview to undergraduate class papers I wrote in physics and history as an example of what constituted A-level work, at least in my Class of '75 days. I do not post a link to my senior thesis as I do not have a copy of it. (I think I still may be able to dig up a couple of boxes of punch cards somewhere.) I do, though, relate my experience in tackling and writing that thesis. (No idea whatsoever what my junior paper was about.)

At a reunion a few years back, I did take the time to track down and reread, or at least carefully peruse, a copy in Princeton's Mudd Archives. I was, indeed, impressed at the cleverness of the mathematical applications of what are now known as "fractals" in that work. I also, from my current perspective of having written many dozens of scientific articles, cringed at the way I wrote the non-mathematical portions.