Thesis Trauma and a Recurring Nightmare

The recent PAW thesis piece honors the glories of the senior thesis, but doesn’t spend much time on the agonies.

As a Nassoon, I spent year after year watching my good friends senior to me go through the rituals of getting their theses done, such that I had acquired a good case of “thesis PTSD” by my senior year.

I hated my carrel, used only for working with books that had to say in the “libe”; wrote my thesis in a two-week marathon session of getting up at noon, eating lunch, then writing until 6 the next morning (visited nightly at 3 a.m. by the herds of cockroaches who lived in Laughlin Hall); and finished a pedestrian effort that earned me the Princeton equivalent of a B+, then graduated.

Looking back, I so regret the lost opportunity to really do something with my thesis (as I regret not majoring in history to study the 20th century, as I do now on my own). I also marvel at how that effort seemed so daunting looking back from much higher hills conquered in later life.

For decades afterward, I periodically had the thesis equivalent of the famous “exam dream” — It’s due today! Have I started it? Where do I turn it in? No wait, I was an early concentrator and actually wrote it last year — whew! Or did I? Ugh!