126 SCIENTIST 



fully passed, the new doctor gave a dinner for his professor 

 which frequently exceeded the student's capacity to pay 

 without going seriously into debt. Usually he went further 

 into debt fulfilling the requirement that the thesis be pub- 

 lished in printed form. 



The color, excitement, and expense of the occasion have 

 been greatly reduced in the present age of quantity produc- 

 tion of Ph.D.'s, more democratic customs, and matter-of- 

 fact approach to life in general. The examination on the 

 thesis is still the climactic event of the graduate course, 

 but it is generally held behind closed doors. The attitude 

 of the examiners is on the whole friendly and directed at 

 finding out what the student knows rather than at tripping 

 him up on some obscure detail. Nevertheless it is a trying 

 experience for many students and there has been a de- 

 plorable tendency to postpone the evil day by spinning 

 out the writing of the thesis. 



Theoretically graduate training is supposed to extend 

 over a three- or four-year period, but the termination is 

 very flexible and depends entirely on when the thesis gets 

 done. I don't know what the longest time ever taken to 

 write a thesis has been, but I have personally known people 

 who have consumed more than ten years in the process. 

 Everyone, of course, wants his thesis to be outstanding. 

 Aside from the natural desire to do a good job, there is 

 the practical point that one's reputation among his col- 

 leagues, the kind of job one gets, indeed one's whole future 

 career depends rather critically on the quality of one's 

 thesis. There are a number of difficulties involved in pro- 

 ducing a really satisfactory result. In the first place one 

 must choose a question to work on which is neither so 

 obscure and difficult that the outcome is quite uncertain, 

 nor so obvious and routine that it can hardly be classified 

 as original work. It may in fact be quite hard to arrive at 



