This Side of: Bridge Year

“This Side of”is a series of personal essays in which Street writers discuss the various other roles they take on campus and how these experiences have shaped their time at Princeton.

[Bridge Year Program] Noun.

A University-sponsored nine-month program that gives incoming freshmen the opportunity to travel and live in a foreign country, speak the local language and engage in community-based service work.

To be a Bridge Year alumnus is to be a conscious and thoughtful witness in this world. It is to undergo the nine-month initiation process of feeling hopelessly lost, radically amazed, incredibly frustrated and acutely aware of the world at one point or another. It is to be the type of unreasonable, adventure-seeking, passionate student who would defer her freshman year at Princeton to travel to a foreign country and speak an unfamiliar language with six strangers for nine months.

There’s the lingering sense of a longing for unrestricted escapades, for spontaneous dance parties in the plaza and political conversations with host relatives. There’s the burden of assuming the responsibility of somehow digging deep into the Princeton experience, to represent the wonderful, afflicted people you once knew. There’s the wandering mind that will think about the way that it felt to climb that mountain with the panoramic view for the first time, how you cried when you reached the top for the last time. There’s the fear that this world will never look like the same place you once knew it to be, but the understanding that coming back to a place is never the same as leaving it in the first place.

Becoming a Bridge Year alumnus is like joining an all-consuming friendship and therapy group that doubles as a service-oriented, religious eating club. If there’s anything we tell ourselves, it’s that Bridge Year is a family — made evident in the way that every email sent is addressed “Hey Fam!” and every meeting is called a “family dinner.” Being a part of the Bridge Year community is like having 140 brothers and sisters with whom you can feel comfortable talking about anything from diarrhea to classes for next semester to how love works.

Bridge Year alumni are the kind of inquisitive people who want to major in anthropology or geosciences with certificates in regional studies, who volunteer with the Petey Greene Program or Students for Prison Education and Reform, who join vegetarian co-ops and spend a semester abroad in Cuba. They are the voracious kind of people who feel the urge to go on random hikes once in a while, attend as many cultural celebrations as possible and find reasons to leave the country every so often. They are some of the oldest members of their grade, the kids who feel the need to talk in a foreign language when intoxicated.

At times, Bridge Year is like this magnificent, far-away dream that feels like it never happened if it weren’t for the Indian food feasts, the Chinese classes, the parties with Spanish language music, the African dance performances and the niches of Bridge Year alumni that you find yourself gravitating to again and again. It’s not simply the cop-out interesting fact you give at orientations, or an answer to the question of what community you are part of on campus. Bridge Year isn’t just another student group united together by common interest; it is this metaphysical, unshakeable identity that explains so much of yourself, yet in some regards, hardly explains enough.