And they won't have to work as hard come March, when most theses are due.

Seniors who opt for a "quieter"--or maybe not so quiet--final year say that they have more freedom.

"It opens up my senior year," says Daniel A. Kaufman '89. "I want to take more time to spend with my friends and just do what I feel like."

Kaufman admits "it's sort of a cop out," but adds that he did spend much time thinking about writing a thesis after writing his junior paper and "just couldn't come up with something that interested him."

Lack of interest is also one of the reasons Gorm H. Ginsberg '89 cites for his decision not to go for honors. "The most important thing is to have some kind of intense experience before you leave [Harvard], but not necessarily academic," Ginsburg says.

Although most students who choose to honors actually complete a senior thesis, some do not. Ten percent of all honors history concentrators drop down into the non-honors track over the course of their time at Harvard, Kuhn says.

The largest drop-off occurs during junior year, but some students wait until later. The English Department's Assistant Head Tutor for Seniors A.W. Phinney says that approximately five seniors annually drop honors in September of their senior year, and two to five additional honors candidates drop their theses over the course of the year. The English Department currently has 87 honors seniors and 54 non-honors seniors, he adds.

Phinney says seniors who drop honors often find the thesis work a burden and less interesting than other electives, but he adds that there are "not too many cases where they get into trouble with the thesis."

And then there are the government concentrators like Prior who basically feel forced to go non-honors.

Government concentrator Kelly also complains about the lack of thesis advisers. She says she was given a runaround when she went looking for a supervisor. When she asked three people for assistance--all of whom said they were either too busy or didn't think they could help her--she was given a list of other possible advisers to call.

And if that doesn't work, she can look for an adviser elsewhere at Harvard. "After [concentrators] have made a serious effort to find an adviser in the department, they can get advisers outside of the department--usually from the Law School or the Kennedy School--with the permission of the head tutor," Gray says.

But, Kelly says, while she may seek further for an adviser, she now has doubts about writing a thesis at all.

"I'm having trouble with two to three pages [her thesis proposal] in the beginning," she says. "With no one to help me and talk to me, how can I do 80 to 100 pages?"

If Kelly decides that a thesis is just too much trouble, she will join the ranks of the group that Professor of Government Joseph S. Nye, Jr. once called "the forgotten third of the Harvard class."

Many non-honors seniors say they feel unconnected to their department and somewhat adrift.