Looking back, senior wishes he had more foresight as a frosh

I am attending my last Princeton class today. After four years of alternately embracing and struggling with my academic experience, I like to think I have learned a trick or two. So here are six maxims I wish I had understood as a freshman.

Learning comes from within, not from without. The lecture-focused format of most Princeton classes fosters an insidious reliance on the professor's words. The "sage on the stage" speaks, and the student listens — thus is knowledge imparted. But real understanding cannot emerge from the mere absorption of received information, no matter how elegantly it is presented. Ultimately, one has to confront the intellectual problem without mediation. That is the hardest moment, and the wonderful one, when Montaigne's essay or polymerase chain reaction or the central limit theorem becomes as immediate and important as the next breath of air.

Choose the class, not the topic. A passionate professor can make the most obscure subject fascinating and provoke the effort needed to reach those thrilling moments of independent discovery. The unfortunate converse is that a desultory don can rapidly make engrossing topics dull. The implication — course descriptions are useless. The Student Course Guide might be helpful, but reviewers are rarely as critical as they should be. The only solution, then, is to choose classes based on careful shopping, supplemented by trustworthy word-of-mouth recommendations.

Read for themes, not just for facts. Admission to Princeton is a competitive process, one that disproportionately rewards excellent memories. Sterling SAT and AP scores — not to mention high school grades — are easily earned if one can turn to a vast library of memorized facts. That simple dynamic erodes in college, when depth of knowledge begins to matter. Is it better to remember how the graph looks after a price ceiling is imposed, or the general proposition that interfering with market equilibrium typically causes negative welfare effects? The first will answer one multiple-choice question on an economics midterm. The second will make obvious the unintended consequences of government policies ranging from tax subsidization of health care to agricultural price supports — and still give you enough purchase to figure out the answer to the midterm question as well.

Time estimates are always too short. After my research was organized, I was confident I could write my thesis in about 25 hours. Actually, according to statistics from Microsoft Word, I accrued roughly 38 hours of editing time. This 50-percent margin of error makes for a good rule of thumb. It applies, as well, to countless non-academic pursuits — doing laundry, eating dinner, buying toothpaste, checking e-mail, ripping CDs and writing columns for the 'Prince.'

Never turn in a piece you have not read aloud. I have received this bit of advice perhaps a dozen times, from a dozen sources. The present formulation comes from professor John McPhee '53, who has articulated the virtues of vocalizing one's writing. The mind, in its hurried transit from one word to the next, elides typos and solecisms that becoming glaring when spoken aloud. At the same time, the rhythms of speech cast a new light on phrases that have been so often repeated silently that they have become mantras. Reading one's writing aloud is like applying a strong exfoliant — cleansing, bracing, invigorating.

Commit or leave. (Corollary: Don't do things half-assed). The summer after my sophomore year, I contemplated ditching my newly adopted major, economics. The courses I had just finished — ECO 101: The National Economy and ECO 333: The Development and Use of Accounting Data — were boring and bad for my GPA. I wanted to construct an independent major, or switch to English. But I decided it would be too much hassle to try and meet the necessary requirements and to maneuver through the bureaucracy well after the official deadlines had passed. So I did not leave economics. But I did not commit to it either. I found many of my classes dry and dull and — with occasional exceptions — treated them with disdain. There is no middle ground between commitment and exit, save stagnation.

Abe Crystal '00 is an economics major from Columbia, S.C.