Graduate School 127 



this happy medium, and many students consume months 

 or years in exploring possible leads before the final choice 

 is made. If one is diligent, capable (and to a certain extent 

 lucky), some two years after settling down with a good 

 topic one will have reached a fairly obvious stopping point. 

 The literature will have been well canvassed, a number of 

 good experiments completed, and some sort of conclusion 

 reached about the nature of this or that bit of the universe. 



Unhappily, more often than not things will not have 

 progressed so well. Some of the barriers to rapid thesis 

 writing are to be found with the process itself, others are 

 concerned with the external Hfe of the thesis writer. In 

 the first place, the techniques originally planned turn out 

 not to have the accuracy required for differentiating be- 

 tween two alternative answers to the original question. 

 Time must be taken out to devise new ones. Unforeseen 

 delays occur in the deUvery of apparatus. A colleague who 

 was going to do the chemical analyses gets sick or accepts 

 a job somewhere else. Even if these preliminary setbacks 

 do not occur, it is more than likely that somewhere in the 

 course of the experimental program results will be obtained 

 which suggest an explanation that neither the student nor 

 his sponsor had thought of. 



Any one of these contingencies naturally has a tendency 

 to delay completion of the thesis. If the delay can be kept 

 to not more than a year or two, everyone remains quite 

 happy and the situation is regarded as normal. As time 

 wears on, however, more and more questions are likely to 

 be asked by the writer's friends and relatives and especially 

 by his sponsors in the department. This tends to react badly 

 on the writer, who becomes increasingly self-conscious and 

 uncertain. These feelings tend to make him less efficient 

 than before and a kind of anticompletion vicious circle is 

 set up. Finally, in the worst cases, the writer becomes aware 



