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Woman’s Way Of Celebrating Finishing Her Thesis Takes Internet By Storm

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Leaving for college? Lame. Getting your first apartment after living in the dorms for a year or two? No big deal? Donning the cap and gown and crossing the stage for graduation to get your degree? Who cares? The absolute best and most satisfying, “you’ve made it” moment in the entire collegiate experience, and/or graduate school experience, is the moment you finish your thesis. Writing your academic manifesto on the subject of your choice (and having to defend it to a panel of faculty members) represents the culmination of years of study and about a year of direct research, writing, editing, and never, ever sleeping. It’s the hardest some people ever work throughout their entire education, if not their entire lives. (Although probably not, because they chose such a fancy field of study and career path that it necessitated a thesis.)

The thing about a thesis is that even though it’s tremendous, and tremendously long piece of work, nobody, including its author, wants to read it ever again. A Columbia University postdoctoral candidate named Grace Lindsay wrote hers on computational neuroscience. She put part of it up online.

Lindsay also found a way to celebrate being done with her thesis that also ensures she’ll see it day in and day out for a long time, or at least in the winter: She had it printed onto a scarf.

Lindsay’s idea isn’t original—hers is just the first example of a thesis scarf that went viral. She took inspiration from another thesis-writer who did it with their thesis a couple of years ago.

Unfortunately, a scarf is only so big, so it’s not the entirety of Lindsay’s thesis, merely the “good parts” and also no diagrams and figures.

Nevertheless, academics and fashionistas on Twitter loved Lindsay’s smart sartorial choice.