Almost 200 more people applied Early Decision to Princeton this year than last. Since Nov. 2, Stephen LeMenager has been reviewing applications for the coveted slots. As acting Dean of Admission, he will make more than 1,850 decisions.
But these four students only care about one.
Thomas Cheung
Thomas Cheung sat in class and stared at the picture his teacher was presenting. He was in third grade and seeing Princeton for the first time.
It changed his life.
"There was something that hit me, just the mention of it," said Cheung, a student at Brooklyn Technical high school. "From then on, I had this whole thing for Princeton. It was really weird. I don't know how to explain it any other way."
At the time, Cheung was living with his parents, grandmother, two uncles and little brother in a cramped apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The bathtub was in the kitchen. There were two beds in the living room. Cheung played on the fire escape or in the halls of the building because there was no room inside and would sit for hours amused with small objects like a calculator.
His parents, who spoke almost no English, left the house each day at 6 a.m. and returned at 2 a.m., leaving Cheung and his brother in the care of their grandmother. When he needed his mother, he would go to her bed and breathe in the scent of the Chinese medicine oil she always rubbed into the pillow.
"It sounds like an Amy Tan story or something, but that's how it was like back then," Cheung said. "Growing up with parents as immigrants, you have special wants in your life, special dreams that you have and you try to achieve. It was plain, but I don't regret living that lifestyle. It makes me not take things for granted."
So when Cheung decided Princeton was his future, he gathered as much information on the school that he could. He signed on constantly to the Princeton Review Website to study student evaluations, where he saw students who had published books being given slim chances for being admitted ("It crushes me," he said). He began reading The Daily Princetonian in high school.
Princeton was everything he had dreamed. Its pristine campus was a stark alternative to the congestion and clutter of the city, a sense heightened by his crammed and uncomfortable living quarters — even after the family moved to a one-bedroom apartment.
Cheung paid for the apartment to be remodeled this summer, spending money he had earned working at the League for the Hard of Hearing. He hired contractors and helped them retile the kitchen and erect a wall in the bedroom to provide privacy to the family. But he knew he still wanted something more.
"I'm sick of the city," he said. "And Princeton's not too far from home. It's close. It's the perfect everything. I grew up in the city. I guess you want to see more grass, more trees, more peacefulness."
And so he defended the school against his skeptical classmates. When Cheung told an academically gifted friend that he was applying to Princeton, she had an immediate response.
"Ew," she said.
Cheung glared at her angrily.
"I was like, 'Do you even know what you're talking about? Are you just feeding off the stereotype or are you talking from experience?' " he said. "I was just like, 'Don't judge based on what you heard from other people.' "
He is the only person applying early to Princeton from Brooklyn Tech this year.
At Brooklyn Tech he enrolled in a rigorous schedule, overflowing with honor classes that replace lunch.
"I want that white picket fence," Cheung said. "A dog named Spot. That whole mental dream that you have — what, if you're an American, you can achieve. The dream is burned into me."
Tarleton Cowen
Tarleton Cowen's grandfather never told her he wanted her to go to Princeton. But when she peeked into his closet, she saw it stuffed with hats bearing floppy tiger tails.
George Cowen '40 did not pressure his granddaughter — but he dropped Ivy football scores into casual conversation. And so when Tarleton visited Princeton during her sophomore year at Milton Academy in Milton, Mass., she saw a school that had shaped her grandfather's life — and could do the same to her own.
"I got the good vibes when I was on campus," she said. "I saw so much orange and black on campus — they seemed really proud of their school. It overwhelmingly gave a good impression."
And it was not just the students displaying school spirit. When she visited for a special humanities seminar weekend for high school seniors, Princeton served black and orange ravioli for dinner.
Cowen lives in education-innovator Horace Mann's two-story converted carriage house, in a quiet tucked away corner of suburban Massachusetts close to Boston. In an area peppered with colonial and Victorian houses, hers is set back from the street.
"It's cozy," she said.
She saw Princeton as the perfect continuation of her lifestyle: proximity to a city with the comforts of the country.
That description could also fit Milton — a quiet, exquisitely crafted school that draws half its students from the surrounding area, and boards the others on site.
"I have a kind of affinity for green grass and cherry trees," she said. "I don't like feeling like I'm going to be run over when I cross streets."
Cowen talked with her mother, Julia Bell, for hours about the merits of different colleges and applications, trying to work through the process and her place within it. She spoke of her worries about not getting in.
"We talked ad nauseum about colleges," Bell said. "We would just talk and talk and talk about advantages and disadvantages. But I think mainly the way she faced the fear was she just put her head down and covered all her bases. She just worked."
Easier said than done.
"It is so hard," Cowen said, "There's a lot of pressure with the grades. The grades that go to colleges — that period just closed last Friday. I think the entire senior class applying early breathed a sigh of relief."
But, she cautioned, Milton is not competitive in the way one might think.
"I think people perceive it as a lot more grade-grubbing than it is," she said. "Scores, for instance are never discussed. People have the philosophy that SATs are arbitrary measures of intellect or arbitrary measures of your standardized testing ability. In a way, it's a kind of an academic snobbery. But I prefer that to out-and-out 'what did you gets?' "
The style of the school suits her.
"I like to think of myself as somebody who throws themselves into something and who doesn't just get involved at sort of a superficial level," she said. "I try to do my best to get the full experience."
She is an editor on her school newspaper, which publishes twice per month and competes with an underground paper that frequently tracks down news first. She is in charge of the French Club and the French magazine, building on summer experiences studying in France.
And she may be a self-admitted "academic snob." But that is fine with her.
"The way people approach the college process is, 'I'm going to write my English essay before I write my college essay.' It's a matter of prioritizing. Rather than seeing the bigger picture, this is four years of my life, four years of my intellectual development, they see it as this is one important night in my life preparing my essay about the Lady of Shalott."
Greg Ruiz
Stella Ruiz is afraid she made a mistake.
She insisted that her son visit Princeton one more time before settling his decision to apply early. But since returning, he has not been able to talk about anything else.
"I only cemented how much he wanted to go and how disappointed he's going to be if he doesn't get in," she said. "I don't think he's ever wanted anything this much. But that's life, you just take risks."
Ruiz, a student at Jesuit High School in Carmichael, Calif., has minimized the risk as best he could. He has not told his father he is applying to Princeton. He has not told his sister, who goes to Yale. Besides his mother and college counselor, he has not told anyone.
"I just didn't want anyone to worry about it because I'm so worried about it," Ruiz said. "My dad would just worry about it being on the East Coast and all that. There's such a high chance of not getting in, I didn't want to make it into a big deal. I am just applying. If I don't get in, I don't want to feel like I should have gotten in."
Ruiz, whose parents divorced when he was in second grade, did not want nervous people jittering around him, judging his chances. And so he has kept silent about a school whose spirit appealed to him so much that he canceled a trip to Yale at the last minute so that he could spend an extra day on campus.
His mother watched, and hoped and worried.
Though he saw his father on weekends whenever he could, his mother was the parent he went to with problems, and he helped her care for his brother — one of three full siblings (he has nine including step-siblings) — who has Down syndrome.
After his mother and sister went to Bosnia in 1998 to work at a day camp for children, Ruiz organized a debate camp for teenagers under the auspices of Balkan Youth Link. Ruiz was inspired watching — and assisting — the people optimistically patching their lives back together and focusing on the fundamentals of democracy.
"But," he said, "the strongest memories I have are of things that were kind of depressing. I met a lot of fun people. The things I remember the most were just really moving. I was walking through town with one of the guys I met, and he showed me a post office that had been destroyed by the NATO bombing. He said he remembered his house shaking from the bombs."
The trip provided perspective — and a hunger for a college experience that was different from his laid-back California life.
Princeton's intellectual atmosphere was part of the attraction. Even more appealing, though, was how it seemed to blend academics and outside activities.
"It seemed really cool when I visited," Ruiz said. "It seemed like a ton of fun. The thing I liked about Princeton was the fact that everyone goes out but at the same time they do work. It seems like a good balance. There are places like U.C. Santa Barbara which I think would be insanely fun, but it doesn't seem like they work much. I want to have fun in college, but I want to come out having learned quite a bit."
"It would be really nice to just get in and not have to think about it."
Andrew Baldwin
Andrew Baldwin would wander into rooms in his house, following his father to the bookshelves. He was in 10th grade, and conversations with his dad that delved into the nature of existence or the origins of the universe had begun prompting fatherly reading recommendations on physics.
Baldwin, a student at Central Bucks East in Pennsylvania, stayed in bed at night riveted by Stephen Hawking and books on string theory.
"Everything about physics totally excited me," he said. "I've had this dream of being able to explain everything — the state of the universe. It's probably not going to happen, but it's got to be fairly exciting to look into it — to spend my life searching for a way to explain the world."
But, he said, "In the past, I've occasionally switched my interests from creative interests to more scientific interests, so I feel assured of doing well at Princeton because they've got the creative and scientific side covered."
Baldwin is planning to apply to three schools: Princeton, Cornell and Dartmouth. He was accepted at Penn State, but has decided that he will not go there even if he is denied admission to all his other choices.
He and his parents know that no matter how his academic resume sparkles, that is a real possibility.
"It's a little bit frustrating," his mother Karin said. "You wonder how many schools should a brilliant kid apply to to be sure he'll get in?"
But Baldwin knew what he wanted — a place where he could shift seamlessly from physics to photography if he wanted. He had started out wanting to be a filmmaker and now divides his time between physics and music — another thing his father introduced into his life.
He needed a school that was strong in varied areas — but not at the expense of student sanity.
At first, Princeton did not seem to fit that description.
Baldwin's first visit was on a freezing day last February when finals had just begun and the day was spent darting from deserted building to building, ducking inside as quickly as possible. The tour guide was puzzling and off-putting.
"The only thing he talked about, was like, it's so great — the food is so great," he said. "I don't want to go to a college for food."
But Baldwin visited again early this fall on a beautiful day and felt entirely differently.
"Princeton and I clicked," he said. "The social aspects interested me more. And I'd always been interested in the academics. It just seemed right."
It also seemed a stark change from his high school, where the main activities were organizing dances and coordinating events for Key Club — a community service group. But despite the lack of extracurricular activities, Bucks East is competitive in a different way from Milton Academy.
"It's all 'What did you get?' A lot of kids are interested in how other kids stand up to them. A lot of kids are concerned about what other people got on their SATs."
Baldwin took two non-honors classes in the past semester and was stunned at the difference.
"That group was made up of a lot of kids who cheated on tests and didn't care. The kids were like, 'Oh, I got a C, I was sort of expecting that.' But they would still cheat on tests and stuff. It was just a totally different attitude toward school."
And neither was ideal. Baldwin is hoping Princeton is different. And if he does not get accepted to any of his schools, he will take the year off and try again.
"It's absolutely scary," his mother said. "I worry about him, because if he doesn't get into one of those top schools, I just think he will be miserable. But on the other hand, I don't worry. Because he is so driven, I think the dream will stay alive."
Princetonian Staff Writer Matt Simmons contributed to this report.
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