It is traditional to grant students who complete their PhD a souped-up mortarboard. My department in Erlangen went for relatively simple yet personal and loving designs: mine had a red lamp, a green lamp, a cricket bat with some ashes, a bicycle, a crossword, a union jack and franconian flag, some alcohol labels, a broken glass tube, a high-frequency solenoid and another glass tube filled with little red balls.
The department in Bochum, being electrical engineers, seem to favour the major electronic approach. I spent most of Thursday helping to solder 30 Diodes and 160 Resistors onto a circuit board. The hat itself is in the mechanical workshop, and the ultraviolet LEDs and fluorescent foil should arrive on Monday. I'm not quite sure what this hat should do when it is finished, but it should be impressive.
Apparently some hats in the department have been considerably more complicated than the work for which the PhD was awarded, and this devotion could explain why it takes so long for anyone to finish their PhD.
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