Another point to add. Your original method, initializing the member field to a valid value when accessed, is a technique called "lazy initialization" and is good for initializing objects that may have a heavy penalty such as in time or memory usage. For example, if your object contains a large collection that is not used in say 50% of the cases, you can put off initialization until it is needed. Or if that collection may take time to initialze, may be populated from a database, you can put it off until after the object has been created. only two letters away from being an asset