"You certainly have an edge, but if you do lots of work here, you can do just as well," Page says. "It's very much dependent on what they do with the chance that's given to them."

But several grant recipients who traveled far and wide to do research say that their thesis would be incomplete without the information gathered abroad.

Nina P. Mercer '89 says she feels that her summer research was vital to her thesis. Mercer, a fine arts concentrator, received $2400 in traveling grants from Middle Eastern Studies and Radcliffe College to examine Izmik tile in museums in Portugal, France, England and Turkey.

Izmik tiles are glazed, brightly colored tiles, commonly found in mosques during the reign of Suleyman of the Ottoman Empire.

In the various museums, Mercer says, she talked to curators, took pictures and studied the tiles' effect on European tilemaking. She emphasizes that "seeing everything" was very important to her work.

Finn agrees, saying the opportunity enabled her to research mostly primary sources like manuscripts, and allowed her to start much earlier to do thesis work.

David J. Samuels '89, who received numerous monetary awards through the History Department to do thesis research in Washington, D.C. and South Carolina, agrees that the added time was a definite asset to his research.

"The real thing that this got me was the time to sit and think in depth without the distractions like school or anything else," he says.

Samuels is researching how the institution of slavery between 1820 and 1850 worked to undermine the ways in which South Carolinians thought about republican values and used republican catchwords--like "freedom" and "liberty."

The history concentrator examined collections of papers in the Library of Congress, the Southern History Archives in Chapel Hill, N.C., and in Charleston, S.C.

Although seniors who traveled sing praises of their experiences, not doing summer research does not preclude good work. As Page says, four of last year's top economics theses were written by students who had done no research abroad and still received grades of summa minus or higher.

For example, Samuels points out that while his South Carolina research was helpful, he "could have done the actual work at Widener."