“I got really into it,” O’Neill said, “and I started to make some pretty significant changes right at the end.”

O’Neill did have a working printer, although it ran out of ink, which had to be replaced.

“That was just the icing on the cake,” O’Neill said. He missed the champagne party, but turned the thesis in.

“It was pretty hellish at the end” he said. “But it was a labor of love.”

O’Neill said that temporary network outages on Wednesday and Thursday evening, which frustrated some thesis writers, actually helped his editing process.

“It kept me from the distraction of checking my e-mail,” he said.

However, for Katie H. Lynch ’03, e-mail—along with a constant supply of coffee—provided a lifeline of support for the past two weeks.

“I got a lot of encouraging notes from my adviser,” she said, “and from people updating me on their progress, writing things like, ‘I haven’t done my bibliography and I only have two hours!’”

Lynch said she spent most nights in the Science Center this week, where she worked in the company of other thesis writers and “a whole subterranean world of computer science people” that she hadn’t known existed. “I guess they do this all the time,” she said.

To celebrate the end of their travails, many concentrators went out to dinner or to bars, and made long-neglected contact with friends and family.

Many said the completion of their thesis opened up whole new areas of opportunity. “I started on the mound of laundry in my closet” said Miranda S. Richmond ’03.

Richmond said that this weekend, she has been able to exercise, go out, and sleep late for the first time in three months.

“I think I’m going to learn something new,” Richmond said, “like dancing.”

But for some seniors, with many friends still hard at work, the end has brought a letdown as well as a feeling of release.

“It’s like finishing a play or a performance,” Urbanic said, “and thinking, ‘Now what am I going to do with myself?’”