Another Doctoral Defense, Another Hat

A few days ago, I wrote about the cultural differences in academics between Germany and the Netherlands. One thing specific to the German doctoral defense includes building a crazy academic cap. Well since tomorrow another colleague of my is defending, we've wasted a full day on building a cap.

Here is the beginning of the construction including a square base plate that represents the square of a regular academic cap .

As mentioned in my previous post, the hat typically represents parts of the candidate's life and work at the institute. You can guess it, my colleague likes windsurfing (like me!).

My colleague also drank way too much RedBull while writing his thesis. He also owns a VW camper van that he takes surfing (not the old one, unfortunately).

One fun fact is that my colleague always had a lot of BSc and MSc students working for him. We jokingly called them his Minions (his name is Norbert).

Here are a few more snapshots of the final product:

And of course, all this DIY stuff can get messy sometimes:

But I must say I really like this tradition! It's kind of fun making this for the people you've worked with and make it kind of a joke towards the person and his life.

Do you guys have/had weird traditions during studying?

Thanks for reading my stuff!