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Our obsession with structure

This past January I witnessed an odd phenomenon for the first time: that whole month after winter break without any daily class routine, which seemed to be a uniquely Princeton experience. First there was reading period — a time of collective procrastination as unstructured hours slipped through our grasp. Then there were finals, when everyone buckled down and waited for Intersession to come. And finally, strangest of all, there was Intersession. After a couple days of jubilation, many of us who hadn’t made plans beforehand quickly reached boredom.

While few would admit to being relieved by the beginning of classes again, there was a part in most of us ready to get back into a routine, no matter how intense. And now that we’re in the middle of midterms crunch, we again pine for that Intersession laziness. But even as we complain about being busy all the time, we usually fill up our own schedules. This is partly because as students, athletes, artists, musicians, actors and dancers we’re willing to give up our free time or sleep to pursue our interests. But I suspect that we’ve also developed a particularly acute need for structure in many different aspects of our studies, activities and life plans. Structure can take on many forms — from the way we pass an afternoon to the goals we set for the future — that can often be limiting.

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There are clearly certain aspects of the University’s academic approach that lead to an emphasis on structure. The language requirement and writing seminars compel students to learn in regimented, uniformly structured environments. A certain amount of structure is necessary to keep track and take advantage of the many opportunities and responsibilities available to us — it takes a lot of organization to keep up with the demands of courses along with internship applications, interesting events and lectures. Still, I have to wonder whether students may be overly concerned with academic structure.

These are not the kinds of things that we consciously think about on a day-to-day basis. We often find ourselves completing only the work that we know will get us through the week, assignments that we’ll put in a mailbox or that will get us through the quiz tomorrow. If there are readings we deem nonessential to our immediate academic survival, we skip them.

Part of this, of course, is a necessary prioritization of the short-term over the long-term. But another piece of this behavior, I believe, is our reluctance to commit ourselves intensely to less structured academic activity. To me, the habit of procrastination, more than a matter of short-term vs. long-term, is the consequence of a dependence on structure. Until a deadline forces us into action, we have difficulty motivating ourselves to invest in our studies.

For most of us, this survival strategy works perfectly fine. We get through the week, and then the month, and then the semester. But I can’t help but feel that we’re missing something by trapping ourselves in this self-constructed structure of the daily grind, cutting ourselves off from spontaneous inspiration and academic or artistic passion. Visual arts professor P. Adams Sitney explained in a recent interviewwhy the University is the “great enemy of poetry,” adding that “it turns poetry into homework” and that “there’s nothing less sexy than doing your homework.” Structure can be stifling — but worse, unsexy.

Beyond our classes, we carry our obsession with structure over to our activities and relationships. In high school I was accustomed to participating in arts groups that didn’t require some kind of well-defined structure, an experience that in retrospect feels entirely different from the extracurricular culture here. At times I get the impression that if a group or club doesn’t have a president, vice president and secretary then it’s not considered a worthy time commitment. It almost seems like people are unaccustomed to simply working and socializing together spontaneously — which could be why so many people seem anxious after Bicker that their friend groups will split up if they’re not all accepted to the same club.

But our need for structure goes beyond our day-to-day lives on campus — this need may shape the way we plan for the future. As William Deresiewicz points in his provocative anti-Ivy piece, “the irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things” — largely finance and consulting, fields that are practically built into the structure of Princeton through alumni networks.

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Perhaps we have jumped through too many hoops and juggled too many leadership positions to unlearn these tricks. Maybe admissions should start cutting into Brown’s market. But we can start small, maybe during spring break — those of us who don’t have plans can wean ourselves off boredom and Netflix. Eventually, maybe we can find time to delve intensely into course material we’re excited about or even write long, sexy poems.

Max Grear is a freshman from Wakefield, R.I. He can be reached at mgrear@princeton.edu.

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