“Thank you, thank you, thank you”: The Strange World of Senior Thesis Acknowledgments

Turn to the second or third page of a Princeton senior thesis to the acknowledgments section. It is usually between the title page and the table of contents, though sometimes the table of contents comes right before. The acknowledgments are typically what the reader will read first, and maybe even last, too, if you’re like me and on this mission. For example, these acknowledgments in a thesis called “BFFs on the Big Screen: A Study of Friendship and Gender in Film and Television."“A major shout out to The Bitchez Who Brunch, the women of eXpressions dance company (especially my SWUGs), the DBIC, the Broheys, my spring breakers, #Obeezy, and my fellow Terrans for giving me some ridiculous stories to tell my grandchildren.”In 2012, Sam Sachs published “Against Acknowledgments” in The New Yorker. He wrote, “Acknowledgments typically open with a statement to the effect that, although writing is lonely work, the author could never have completed his book without help and support. ‘This is my fourteenth novel and I am as dependent as ever on the wisdom of others,’ begins one, and another, plucked at random from a Barnes & Noble new-arrival shelf: ‘The creation of this book has removed any notion I may have had of it being a solo endeavor.’”Sure, Sachs is mostly referring to novels, which call for a solitary writing experience. However, a senior thesis is not a lonely thing; students are guided by advisors and professors, they might interview students, conduct fieldwork. Still, Sachs’ idea carries over. Senior authors love to thank each person, library, coffee shop, eating club, and higher power that contributed to the publishing of their first piece of scholarly writing.One acknowledgment reads, “It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes an army to write a thesis.”In high school, I became obsessed with book dedications. I thought of dedications as special notes that authors wanted to pass to me, glimpses into their lives or vulnerable confessions that their books do not answer all of the world’s questions. My favorite came from East of Eden. Steinbeck describes a wooden box he carved for Pat, his publisher, in which he presented the pages of his manuscript. “Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full,” Steinbeck writes. I visited the actual box in the Steinbeck Museum in Salinas Valley during the summer before my junior year of high school. The box, whose dimensions seemed much larger than the standard eight-and-a-half by eleven piece of paper, was covered with wooden block letters that spelled out “East of Eden” and “timshel” (translating to “thou mayest,” timshel is an important phrase and theme in the novel). In the museum, my two sisters complained and moaned the entire time.A book dedication and an acknowledgment are very different, though. A dedication comes at the very beginning, while an acknowledgments page comes at the end. A dedication is quite brief but powerful, while an acknowledgments page is usually long and loosely written. But relocate the thesis acknowledgments page to the beginning of the work—a Princeton tradition—and suddenly the acknowledgments page seems more significant than a list of thank-yous.Last week, a friend in the History department finished writing the majority of his thesis on Spy Magazine and Donald Trump, and was beginning to worry about his acknowledgments page. His thesis wasn’t due for another three days, but it seemed like he needed at least twenty just for acknowledgments.“What’s the big deal?” I said.“People are either not serious enough or take themselves too seriously,” he said. “It’s not like you just wrote Crime and Punishment. You just submitted a senior thesis that you wrote in probably three or four weeks. When you acknowledge people who brought you Hershey kisses, you look stupid.”He was right. Most thesis acknowledgments that I read, which I found publicly online through the Princeton Harvey Mudd Manuscript Library, were either extremely dramatic or very light, tinkering on inappropriate. On the far end of the serious spectrum, one author lists thirteen teachers who have each taught him something specific: “For their help I am beholden, and for their influence am enriched,” he begins. He takes an interesting approach to the classic list format: “Eduardo Cadava, my Ralph Waldo Emerson, facilitated rejuvenating conversations about the ideas closest to my heart,” “James Richardson, my aphorist, taught me secrets in the length of a line,” “John McPhee, my editor, took away my fear of red pens.”Students are also grateful for their eating clubs and more specifically, the parties. One comes from a thesis titled “Living Healthy or Living as We Can?” It reads: “Now to the Glorious Tiger Inn. The experiences you have brought me, and the life-long friends you have given me are some of my dearest treasures. As long as love and liquor last.” I couldn’t decide if this was ironic or intentional.Another reads:“To the animals of the Tiger Inn, thank you for taking me in. Thank you for the friends I will have sixty years from now. Thank you for nights I can’t remember but will never forget. Thank you for the weirdness. Thank you for the food and thank you for the beer.”God and Jesus are commonly thanked, usually at the beginning of the acknowledgments. One author opens with, “Firstly, praise the Lord!” and after seven paragraphs of thank yous, ends with a Bible verse and “Lastly, praise the Lord!”I showed a few of these pages to my friend’s roommate as we all sat talking about acknowledgements. “I would be really upset if Jesus cared about the senior thesis,” he said.Sachs said that the acknowledgments page “appears like an online pop-up ad, benefiting no one but the author and his comrades.” It may be that students use this page as a place to show how many friends and supporters they had. (The student’s thesis advisor, who will read and grade each advisee’s work, is almost always thanked profusely, too. I imagine an advisor, sitting at a desk covered in leather-bound books in the basement of McCosh Hall, opening each thesis to the acknowledgments page before anything else, just to see how he will be thanked.)Still, my favorite acknowledgments are the ones that I understand the least, like “Every doctor that told me to run away from medicine. That was a close one.” Or one acknowledgment from a 2016 sociology thesis titled “The ‘Eat’ in Eating Clubs: A Study of the Relationship between Eating Disorders and the Princeton Eating Clubs.” It was either insufficiently ironic or completely lacking in self-awareness. “To the University Cottage Club,” she wrote, “thank you for the inspiration, the people, and the food.”