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E-Prince
Created by Katherine Elgin
Opinion editors and columnists 2010 (left to right): Mendy Fisch, Brian Lipshutz, Kelsey Zimmerman, Adam Bradlow, Adi Rajagopalan, Charlie Metzger, Jacob Reses, Brendan Carroll, Monica Greco, David Mendelsohn, Camille Framroze, Chris Troein, Joey Barnett. Not pictured: Andrew Saraf, Haley White, Sophia LeMaire, Michael Collins, Miriam Geronimus.
Columns
What are you afraid of?
I feel that Princetonians have a keener sense of fear than is typical for young adults. We fear many different flavors of failure: social failure — having no friends, academic failure — performing worse than our peers and professional failure — not achieving career prospects worthy of our institution. It is these fears that drive us to succeed, to socialize and to strive for brighter futures. In addition to being capable enough to have gained admission to Princeton, we might have just been more afraid of not getting in than most students. This extra anxiety over our personal success may have driven us to put in the extra time, to do all of the little things required for a chance at Princeton. Fear is a powerful motivator and one that can compel us to great heights.
A view from the minority
I’m a graduating senior, and it looks like a majority of the Class of 2013 enjoyed the Princeton experience. I can say with absolute sincerity that I am tremendously happy for everyone who found great enjoyment at Princeton over the last four years. Still, I am in what must be the perplexing minority who did not.
Welcome home
But Princeton doesn’t feel like home either. While my classmates updated their “current location” in September, it seemed like too big of a step for me, so I let it be, maintaining digital status quo while placing myself squarely between two worlds. I may say “I’m going home” when I mean “I’m going back to the 100-square-foot cinderblock cell that houses my bed,” or jokingly (as I did four weeks ago) refer to Icahn labs as a group home for Integrated Science students, but there’s something ever so slightly off about calling anywhere in New Jersey home.
Manic delight
In an especially dark section of a letter to his younger brother Zooey, J.D. Salinger’s Buddy Glass writes, “I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.” This sentiment is one I have come to understand in my final days at Princeton. I grieve that I ...
Not knowing everyone
Maybe it really is a fundamental ideological difference between the icy cold North and the warm, warm South, but I found coming to Princeton refreshing. The thing about small town America is that it’s only cute in indie movies and worn-out romance novellas.
The P-word
Put simply, privilege allows some people to walk around safely and comfortably without having to worry about, or even think about, how they are perceived. They can be ignorant to the reality that the rights and benefits they receive are not universal. In terms of race in the U.S., the benefactors of privilege are white people. White privilege does not stop outside the FitzRandolph gates — it creates inequalities in experience on Princeton’s campus.
An introvert's insight
My extroversion experiment lasted about two months before inevitably the novelty of nights out at eating clubs and excessive drinking wore off. I gradually returned to my natural, more reserved self, but not happily. For a large part of the next two years I blamed myself for feeling self-conscious or bored when in the large party environment every week, finding flaw with myself for feeling tired, for not wanting to get drunk and for judging others disdainfully to soothe my own insecurity.
Negative action?
Last month, Princeton University only offered 7.29 percent of its applicants a spot in the Class of 2017. With many qualified candidates and few spots, the question of how to stand out is constantly an issue. There are the factors that we view as in our control — such as extracurriculars or grades — but we recognize that the uncontrollable — namely race — is also taken into account. To the many who believe that college admissions should solely reflect one’s academic ability, the concept of admission based on the uncontrollable is unsettling.
Inclusion
In many ways, the University’s moves toward diversity are more reactionary than progressive. Instead of being as inclusive and representative of the population as possible, diversity on campus seems to target specific groups deemed important. As the categorization of different groups as marginalized changes in the public conscience, the University scrambles to demonstrate inclusion of that group.
Multicultural obligation
I realized the enormous weight of America’s future that had always been looming over the shoulders of our generation. But contrary to my father’s claims, the burden of reaching racial harmony is not just for blacks; it is shared by Latinos, by Asians, by whites, by both minorities and majorities and by us all as we continue to define what it might mean to be American in the 21st century.
Faking nonchalance
Plenty of other people talk about how they spend hours procrastinating and not accomplishing anything, but meticulously finish math homework nearly a full week ahead of schedule. It has almost become a competition. The person who does it all — goes to parties, has a billion extracurricular activities, goes on Imgur and YouTube 24/7, and still gets perfect grades — wins. This facade of nonchalance is what we deem “cool,” even though actual nonchalance is at odds with academic achievement.
Jumping ship: (Not) giving credit where credit is due
Just days earlier, I was forced to reject an internship offer because, due to University policy, I could not receive academic credit for it. My heart sank as I read an email that stated that the company of interest could not offer me a position if I did not receive academic credit for my work — “otherwise we would hire you as an intern in a heartbeat,” they said.
Thank you to the peanut gallery
When I first came to Princeton, my mother showered me with the routine barrage of advice, ranging from remembering to get a decent amount of sleep to cleaning my room before I had a precept of dust bunnies under my desk. However, one piece of advice stuck out to me as particularly strange. “Lauren,” she told me, after perusing Princeton’s web-based materials, “promise me: Whatever you do, don’t write for The Daily Princetonian.”
Hating and loving Princeton
I encourage you — in whatever arena of campus life you feel it — to fervently hate the problems with that aspect of Princeton so that you can usher in a better Princeton down the road. Let your hate be motivated ultimately by an abiding love for Princeton that drives you to make it the best place it can be.
To not being remembered
I often tell the story of how a club I helped found commissioned me to put together a logo, which I did at 2 a.m. one random morning. That became the official symbol of the group, and it stuck, and now it is on all of our folders and stickers and pencils and posters. I like to say that after hundreds of hours working on my thesis and thousands of hours devoted to theater on campus, the only thing that will outlive me here is an early morning creation with MS Paint. And though I like this story, I don’t think it’s true at all — that’s not all I’ve left here.
Woody Woo or bust
I began the fall semester as an engineer, but I soon switched to A.B. and promptly set my eyes on joining the Wilson School. However, the more I thought about what major I wanted to choose and which classes I wanted to and needed to take, the more I realized that choosing WWS is a risky path to follow, especially for those of us who really don’t have any idea what we truly want to major in. Now that admission to the department is non-selective, it becomes even more important that prospective social science majors truly think about why they are choosing to join the Wilson School.
It's time for Princetonians to act
President Obama’s brilliant speech and Kerry’s urgent warning have made it clear: The window for a two-state solution to the conflict is closing, and if we care about Israel or Palestine, or about the very cause of peace itself, we must act now.
A review of Princeton’s bars
Inspired by Street’s series on Princeton’s favorite eateries, I figured I would give my opinion on Princeton’s less frequented non-Street places to drink. The greater University area, that is Nassau and Witherspoon streets, includes six bars. Each has its own flavor and unique clientele and are all mostly devoid of a Princeton student presence.
Thoughts on food
This is why we attach so much importance to food. We select eating clubs based on which ones offer the dietary balances we need. We catalog our food choices so that we can remember every meal we had in the last week. We balance our campus food selections with meticulously scheduled outings to eateries on Nassau whose menus are paragons of culinary virtue.
No? Yeah, I don’t do that either.
Fully habituated
We label a group as a majority and another as a minority, but honestly, as a Brazilian immigrant, I have never felt like a minority. Oftentimes (though clearly not always), segregation is a self-fulfilling prophecy; we expect to be discriminated against and therefore deter ourselves from other social groups and only end up causing ourselves to be more segregated. If there is one place where different racial groups can stand together, while also maintaining their individual cultures, it is here at Princeton.
Bothering the President
A university president’s life is not a happy one. True, it comes with a high salary, a splendid residence and even a really good cook — the latter, perhaps, more of a rarity in Princeton than the other advantages. But the president of Princeton is confronted by unreasonable demands on every side. He or she must range the world in search of lavish donations and strategic alliances and deal with local crises that are as all-consuming as they are unpredictable; support a faculty, a staff and a student body who treat their access to extraordinary resources as ordinary, even banal, and constantly want more; make strategic decisions while wise guys scoff; and stay affable and accessible to everyone in our community.
I miss eye contact
I remember hot summer days of strolling through the French Quarter, just far enough from the familiarity of my small town, with a quiet sense of home and peace running through me. My inner contentedness could not help but show outwardly. I won’t lie and say everyone always looked and smiled back. But an overwhelming number always did. And it was comforting, a sort of affirmation of both self and community. Even though I didn’t know most of the people I looked and smiled at, there was an intangible connection between us.
I just cannot find that here.
Leaving
And then I got to campus. Sitting in the passenger seat of a car I barely knew, we rounded the traffic circle and billowing above the road was a giant, orange and black “Welcome” banner. Maybe I’ve watched one too many romantic comedies, but if there has ever been a moment of love at first sight, it was then and there.
54-46
There’s a tendency to focus on the different, the obvious, the engrossing. The slow burn of small arms violence in American cities fades into the background after we hear about it enough times. In a quote whose variants should be attributed to German author Kurt Tucholsky, “The death of one man: That is a catastrophe. One hundred thousand deaths: That is a statistic!”
An open letter to Suzy Lee Weiss
You have reaped the benefits of privilege by seizing an uncommon opportunity to rant in one of the nation’s largest newspapers in circulation because you didn’t get into the colleges that you wanted. Do you not realize that there are millions of other students in this country who are not even given a platform to voice their concerns when they are not accepted into any university, let alone afford to matriculate at one after being accepted due to financial constraints?
An imagined community called Princeton
Princeton is an imagined community, to use author Benedict Anderson’s term. It is not about the buildings, and it is not built around face-to-face contact. It is a community built around something we believe in. Something we believe in strongly enough to leave our homes, leave the families that have raised us in the hope of understanding or fulfilling some higher cause. It’s all in our heads.
Go with your gut
The unconscious mind may be more powerful than the conscious one — not just as a deep cavern of primal, unpredictable emotions, but as a finely tuned processor and synthesizer of information. It may be a bridge builder and calculator with a much higher capacity than our active reasoning processes, which are very limited.
The tragedy of solidarity
It was the quintessential act of terror, meant to tear apart and shake the foundations of one of America’s oldest cities. The brothers Tsarnaev emerged from a cloud of breaking-news paradoxes, “talented” and “angelic” yet also capable of massive atrocities. They brought out in Boston what CNN called both the best and worst of America, a reminder of Boston’s resilience but also a blur of ethnic profiling. Much has been said about the strength of American solidarity, yet the impact of the bombings on international students has been overlooked. With the Senate debating immigration policies following the tragedy, international students are potentially facing an even greater tragedy of sustained discrimination.
Immigrant America: A redundancy
A century ago, swelling numbers of immigrants poured into factories and built the country’s manufacturing base. The American economy no longer relies on the production of tangible products, but rather on the unleashing of immaterial innovations.
Dishabituation
In my new world, it seems that everyone can be associated with one culture or another, more specifically, the majority culture and any number of minority cultures. Based on my experiences at Princeton, it feels as though people who are categorized along these lines of separation do not mix, and any effort to mix comes from the person of the minority culture.