The Value of the Thesis, Realized in Retrospect

We are grateful to Jimin Kang ’21 for her thorough research and look back at the centennial of the Princeton thesis in “The Senior Thesis at 100: Back to the Future” (May issue). Kang’s article properly credits Dean Luther Eisenhart as progenitor of Princeton’s independent study and the senior thesis from his time as dean of the faculty in the early 1920s.   

Like many other readers of the piece, the pain of this ordeal and ultimately sense of accomplishment came back to us as we relived our own thesis sagas. What gives us additional pride, though, is how this capstone project of the Princeton undergraduate academic program has not only survived but thrived for a century, for reasons not only relayed in Kang’s piece but that Eisenhart himself understood as stated in his 1945 book, The Educational Process: “Many students have said that it was their first experience in college in feeling that what they were doing was really their own. Also graduates have testified that their work on a senior thesis was excellent training for investigations they made later, as part of their business or professional life, or as interesting avocation.”    

The true value of the thesis experience, it seems, is most often realized in retrospect. We say thank you to Jimin Kang for her fine article, and we also say thank you to Dean Eisenhart for this enduring contribution to Princeton.      

Editor’s note: The writers, brothers, are great nephews of Dean Luther Eisenhart.