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E-PrinceThe University has appointed a new director of fellowship advising. Deirdre Moloney, an impressive historian and an experienced adviser, seems highly qualified: someone who will collaborate well with concerned faculty and provide thoughtful, effective guidance to undergraduates who wish to ...(back to the article)
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I don't think this is true at all. I chose to attend Princeton because I thought it was exceptionally open to conversation, including strong opinions and noisy argument, and in my experience it has absolutely lived up to that idea.
thank you so much for writing this column, professor grafton. as a current senior, the most disappointing aspect about princeton--for me--has been the utter lack of intellectual life, both inside and outside the classroom.
sure, interesting conversations occur now and again, but it's sad when you realize you miss the lunchtime debates you had with classmates in high school. princeton, for all of its academic strengths, just does not seem to attract the kinds of people eager to share their thoughts and engage in conversation about current events.
sorry for the long post, but as i was filling out my senior exit survey, i realized how princeton made me miss four years of intellectual growth outside the classroom--something i was told would be even more important than the day-to-day homework assignments for my courses.
I think finding intellectualism at Princeton is very much dependent on who you spend time with. I didn't really feel like Princeton was overwhelmingly intellectual outside of the classroom until I found my current group of friends and began to eat my meals mostly within my own eating club. People who want to have lunchtime debates are out there!
"To expect that expert advising can make up for the absence of organic and continual debate on campus makes as much sense as it would to think that in athletics, coaching could make up for an absence of practice and training."
No, not practice and training, more like extra workouts on your own outside of practice (i.e., like the women's XC team here).
Lunchtime debates? I spent my high school lunchtimes talking to my friends about who was hot, who was not, who slept with who, and how classes sucked.
I can, if you really want me to, "share my thoughts and engage in conversation about current events," but those conversations are so tiresome and so argumentative and confrontational. At the end of the day, they just get me heated up for no productive reason.
And as for that PHS girl, did she really think that sort of thing happens all the time at Harvard? Maybe I'm wrong, but that's definitely not the impression I got from H.
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I don't think this is true at all. I chose to attend Princeton because I thought it was exceptionally open to conversation, including strong opinions and noisy argument, and in my experience it has absolutely lived up to that idea.
You're also a freshman. Wait until next year, when all anyone in your year will want to talk about will be bicker. For all that the selective admissions process and the thousands of applicants rejected seems to mean, people here are much more shallower than you would expect.
I'm glad this column came out, however I feel the terms 'conversation' and 'dialogue' have become much like the word 'diversity', they make the people who say them feel good and the University uses it to promote itself. However there's no real discussion happening at Princeton. Most of the guests who come have liberal opinions and when a non-politically correct speaker, such as Darwish, is invited hell breaks loose.
I'm not trying to defend Darwish, but it seems the people who did defend her only used the argument 'she should be allowed to speak for the sake of discussion'. None of her supporters defended her claims, with the exception of the anonymous commenters on the Prince, because doing so would immediately label one a bigoted right winged conservative ignorant etc.. etc.. When it came time to report on Healthcare, the Prince reported a campus that seemed to unanimously support the new bill. But now I fell I'm rambling.
The point is this campus is very political, but there seems to be the assumption that one must silently agree with politically correct views because college students are supposed to be welcoming of everyone and their opinions.
So here's my point: the word Dialogue has come to mean 'let's give each other's side of the argument and agree to disagree'. This defeats the entire purpose of discussion. There are two opinions, but one is right and one is wrong. Until students begin to defend their opinions with more conviction we will never have true discussion on campus, and to see real opinions we will have to resort to these anonymous comments on the prince.
You're also a sophomore. Wait until next year when all everyone wants to do is talk about i-banking and consulting. Hahaha - so yes, we are shallow, but I don't see how Princeton's selection process is supposed to combat that; they ultimately look at superficial things about us (after the kids with too-low stats have been pared away) to determine if we'd be a "good fit."
I can't speak to the level of 'conversation' at the undergraduate level here, but I am struck by how few of my best students have even considered applying for top fellowships. Princeton has many, many students who would be highly competitive for grants like the Fulbright, but most of them seem to be unaware of opportunities such as teaching English abroad on a Fulbright. I hope the new fellowship adviser will do much more publicity and target qualified students much earlier on.
Many of the schools that are most successful at producing Fulbright fellows are probably not as selective as Princeton, but I'm sure their fellowship advisers are extremely active in recruiting students as sophomores or juniors.
http://chronicle.com/article/Top-US-Producers-o...
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I mean, I'm already talking about my life after college (which may or may not involve i-banking). But I still disagree with you. How many guys you hooked up with this weekend, bicker gossip, other catty gossip >>> what type of career you want/what you want out of life on the shallow scale.
Yes, you're right - it's not a perfect admissions process. What I meant to say is that before I came to Princeton, I thought (naively) that the people that would surround me for the most part at this school would be people who loved learning for learning's sake, and not the hoardes of greedy social climbing whores looking exclusively to pad their resumes and make $$$ by using their Princeton diplomas. It's the way it is, but just sayin'.