It is every student’s worst nightmare. It was the theme of the 1994 comedy “With Honors.” And now, it is senior Angela Steele’s reality. With 30 pages down and 10 to go, her honors thesis and every trace of it have vanished after a thief swiped her laptop bag from Roble Gym two weeks ago.

“Thinking about my thesis and the fact that all of my work from the past year had just completely disappeared — that’s what made me really hysterical,” she said, describing her initial reaction to the theft. She has been working on the thesis — for the Cultural and Social Anthropology Department — about hip-hop culture in Beijing for over a year.

Steele said she was running late for her first day of work at Roble Gym and set her bag at the front desk while she went to the bathroom. When she returned just minutes later, her bag — keys, laptop, thumb drive, wallet, cell phone included — had vanished. She searched the area and filed a police report, but disbelief turned to hysteria when she called her mother to cancel credit cards.

“She thought I had been in a car accident,” she said. Steele had printed no hardcopies, and the thesis backup file was on the thumb drive, which was also stolen.

Steele didn’t wait for action from the police. She sent emails to dorm chatlists, littered campus with flyers and talked to instructors who were teaching classes at Roble Gym at the time of the theft, but to no avail.

“Nothing’s turned up, and I haven’t had any leads,” she said. “No one saw anything. It was such a short amount of time that it’s really strange that it happened at all.”

One person she hasn’t talked to yet is her thesis advisor, but Steele isn’t worried.

“She’s really amazing, really supportive, so I’m sure she’ll just have really encouraging words,” she said.

Other mentors have been lending support as well.

“All she wants is her thesis,” said Susan Cann, Steele’s supervisor and the office manager of the Stanford Dance Division. “All that work, all that time — you just can’t replace that.”

Although she does have copies of earlier drafts that she had emailed to her advisor, Steele said she will have to recreate most of her work. The most important information for her thesis, such as interview transcripts and translated lyrics, were also on her computer.

Steele, however, said that she feels a responsibility to do a good job and not to let down all the people who helped her with research along the way.

“Everyone’s telling me it’s going to be better than before because I’m going to go back and rethink ideas and rework things,” she said. “I hope so. Right now I’m not motivated to do it at all.”

Steele received dozens of email responses from other students, who offered suggestions.

Varun Swarup, a co-terminal student in mechanical engineering and a former Residential Computing Consultant (RCC), said you can triangulate the location of any registered computer if it is using campus wireless. After reading Steele’s email, just two hours after it was stolen, he located her laptop in the Escondido Village network. In this case, however, the thief connected to the internet using an Ethernet cable, and its exact location could not be determined.

Steele still emailed the police to report Swarup’s findings, but said she never received a response.

“I think it is pretty standard for stolen property cases that the police don’t really do anything,” she said. “They just file a report and let it go, and if something turns up, then something turns up.”

According to Deputy Sheriff Ken Bates, there were 75 reported instances of laptop theft or burglary from September 2005 through June 2006. Seven laptops have been reported stolen since Sept. 1, he said. Bates urged students to report these thefts.

“It helps us figure out whether this is a random, isolated occurrence or whether we are starting to see a trend,” he said. “Although Stanford is a relatively safe community, never turn your back on any of your property,” he added.

Steele had just one message for the thief.

“Keep everything else and just send me my thesis!”

Her paper is labeled on her desktop as “Thesis,” and can be sent anonymously to P.O. Box 17050, Stanford, CA, 94309 or asteele@stanford.edu.