History department claims more errors in thesis printing process from Pequod

Undergraduate Program Administrator for the Department of History Etta Recke said at least half a dozen students found many errors in the final printed versions of their theses. History is one of four departments that required thesis submission on April 3. Recke said she saw roughly three or four times more errors from Pequod than she had seen in previous years.

“What I have seen in all the years [is] that whenever there’s a problem on thesis day — you know, somebody’s standing in front of me and suddenly they’re looking through the thesis that they have bound at Pequod — a page is missing, something’s upside down, a lettering that was put on the cover was incorrect — whenever there are errors, and I see them all the time, they were at Pequod,” Recke said.

Owner of Pequod Communications Jim Robertson said in a phone interview that he was surprised to hear such reports.

Previously, Robertson said in an email that his “distinct impression” of this thesis season was that it was the “best” in Pequod’s history.

“We felt that we had a very high success rate in terms of not screwing anybody’s orders up,” Robertson said in the follow-up phone interview.

Robertson added that all Pequod staffers make sure that the students check their products before leaving the shop.

“A lot of times, I have to guarantee at least 99 percent of the time, when the kids find problems, and it’s not infrequent that it happens, it’s because of a mistake they made,” Robertson said. “So, at that point we scramble with them to figure out what’s wrong and make it right.”

“There are occasions when there’s something wacky that happens when it goes to the machine,” he said, noting that while technical printing problems sometimes do occur, Pequod ensures they get fixed.

Neither the politics department nor the Wilson School, two other departments whose thesis deadlines were April 3, reported receiving complaints from students about Pequod.

Nevertheless, several seniors in the history department reported problems with the thesis binding process. Peter Runfola ’12 went to Pequod around 1:45 p.m. on April 3 — just over an hour before his 3 p.m. deadline — to have his thesis bound. He was told that the thesis would not be ready until 4:30 p.m., so he handed in a non-bound copy of his thesis to Recke, who extended his deadline for the hardbound copy to 10 a.m. the next morning.

When he returned to Pequod the next morning, he was told that his thesis would not be bound until 5 p.m., over 24 hours later than he was initially expecting.

“It was their inability to complete my order that day as promised — or even be working on it when I got in that morning — that was the last straw that broke the camel’s back,” Runfola said.

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According to emails Recke showed to The Daily Princetonian, another history concentrator complained of technical difficulties in submitting his thesis online through the Pequod website, while another claimed that Pequod forgot the gold-stamping on her velo-bound thesis.

Students in other departments also said they had some problems in the thesis printing process but noted that Pequod fixed them quickly.

Economics concentrator Sam Roeca ’12 said there were 10 pages that needed to be slightly changed on the morning of his thesis deadline on Tuesday, but the Pequod workers simply switched the pages for him.

Politics concentrator Habin Chung ’12 said the softcover binding machine broke down while Pequod was printing her thesis, but Pequod replaced it with a more expensive hardcover binding for no additional charge.

Chung is a former photography editor for The Daily Princetonian.

Robertson said he could not identify why there would be a concentration of printing problems for the history department.

“For us, there’s no differentiation between departments,” Robertson said. “As the thesis is making its way through the system, nobody’s really aware of what department the thesis is in, [and] if there happened to be somebody with a problem, it would be random that all problems would have happened in this one department.”

Robertson also noted that having four departments with the same thesis hand-in day made the process more difficult for Pequod.

“There’s no real reason why history, Woody Woo and politics all have to have theirs due the same day,” Robertson said. “There were no big due dates the day before that, there were no big due dates the day after it.” Theses for English department concentrators were also due on Tuesday.