At Wilson School, accepting an acceptance can be the hard part

Matt Rubach '02 was desperate. Thoroughly convinced through the entire college application process he would be enrolling at Yale, the time came to decide on a school and his resolve disintegrated. So he flipped a coin.

"I still don't know why I'm here," Rubach said yesterday, smiling and glancing down at his sweatshirt. "But I'm wearing orange."

After his acceptance to the Wilson School last week, Rubach knows that he will be betting on his future again. And he is just as uncertain.

Facing today's deadline, Rubach is not the only student struggling with the decision of whether to join the Wilson School.

Andreas Sotiropoulos '02 also applied to the Wilson School, but, nervous that he would not be accepted, began searching for alternatives. He settled on the classics department, where he could immerse himself in his Greek heritage, and became increasingly excited over the prospect.

Then he got the congratulations letter.

"Throughout Spring Break I was twisting my mind, turning the idea around," he said. "I was just trying to see which course of study I preferred because as I said, I do like them both very much. It was just a question of which I would do best in and serve my interests."

Out of 130 applicants, 90 students were accepted to the school, according to Wilson School professor Stanley Katz. But despite the competitive admission process — which requires students to spell out a concentrated course of study for the rest of their time at Princeton — for some, the period after acceptance is the most confusing.

"I think it's very, very hard to say no," said Annie Ruderman '01, who dropped out of the Wilson School this fall. "I was very excited. Everyone was all rah rah Woodrow Wilson School. I don't think I thought through my options very well or very logically."

Ruderman ended up enrolling in the history department, as did Peter Boger '01.

Boger was apprehensive about his initial decision to join the Wilson School, but was partly swayed by the prestige of being accepted to the only exclusive major on campus.

"You want to tell yourself that you're joining for the right reasons, but you know in the back of your mind that some people weren't accepted," Boger said, who emphasized that he enjoyed his experience in the department, which included a trip to Israel.

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"It's not until you get into the school that you realize, despite what they say about the close personal attention, the help that they give is more career and internship oriented," he said.

For Boger, the decision to switch to history was made easier after an experience he had last spring. On the final night of a storytelling class he took, Boger stood and told of his efforts working with endangered tigers and a Barbary leopard in North Carolina over the summer. Over that Spring Break, he had flown back to study the leopard more closely, but it was dead.

In his last sentence he revealed it had been the last Barbary leopard on earth.

When he was done there was silence, then furious applause.

"The reaction on 'earth' was so impressive I realized it had actually moved people," he said. "That's the power of stories. That's what it can do. I realized, that's not really what I can do in Woody Woo, which is more about actually crafting the policy changes."

Rubach, who is a pre-medical student, has poured over these perspectives, weighing which approach would allow him to best explore his interest in Latin America, and wobbling like jelly between the Wilson School, comparative literature, history and sociology.

Sotiropoulos decided at the end of Spring Break to pursue the opportunity at the Wilson School.

At the time of press — with the deadline looming — Rubach was still undecided.

But he could always check his couch for loose change.