Word: background
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...sponge boats would go out for a month or two and come back with their fluffy treasures of the deep and, some said, with additional crew members. New faces moved against the bright background, new voiced joined in the native songs...
...University that were unknown before. He meets visitors of world-prominence; and seeks with equal eagerness the photographs of European exchange professors and of ponderous teeth newly-discovered in the Dental School. Though each individual experience in his CRIMSON career may be of slight importance, nevertheless, there results a background of knowledge which is immensely valuable throughout his undergraduate years. He has learned where to go for information of all kinds when he desires it, and this intimacy with his surroundings gives him a self-assurance which many first-year men lack...
This division may be a salutary one. But it seems that conducting specialized work along with the general would establish a more equable balance between the two. A student with three full years to absorb his entire subject for examination at the end of his course will have sufficient background by his Senior year to attempt a specialized job in the form of a thesis, while he is finishing his general work on his field. Each portion of his work should profit from association with the other. The final divisional examination then becomes a true test of general knowledge clarified...
...face of the more specialized work awaiting the student. Two years can hardly give an undergraduate a mastery of his field sufficient to quality him for intensive study in a portion of it. What it will give is a birdseye view whose details fade rapidly into a shadowy background...
...Senior, then, is thrown into the work of a thesis and concentrated study on a restricted field with a background so hastily assimilated that it is unwieldy for practical purposes. Specialization founded on this will lead in all probability to one of two things: intensive concentration on a small subject to the point of pedantry, or, more dangerous still, a mental confusion arising from insufficient absorption of background. Here the specialization becomes a hindrance rather than a help, a confinement rather than a liberation of the mind...