One reason why a Princeton education cannot be over-valued is its requirement that most of its undergraduates (all A.B. and some B.S.E. students) complete a substantial amount of independent work. This is one of the most popular sound-bytes on an Orange Key Tour, and it is repeated to the point of banality in the halls of the Admissions Office. Nevertheless, until having recently completed my first Junior Paper, I didn't quite understand its importance.
The obvious benefit of independent work is that it encourages us to work on a topic of our choice at a depth we haven't been accustomed to reaching. We have to stretch our time management abilities and strive for a level of excellence that shorter assignments simply cannot attain. And of course, everything — the research, the structure, the ideas and the paper itself — is on a larger scale. This is what makes independent work exciting and daunting.
An attentive prospective student already knows this. What he probably doesn't know is how the experience of completing independent work makes us better students — students who have gained working knowledge that is not absorbed from books alone. Allow me to explain from my own case: In philosophy there is a famous epistemological distinction between 'knowing how' and 'knowing that.' For instance, you may know that hitting an accurate and powerful serve in tennis requires weight transfer, a reliable toss and a powerful wrist-snap, but this knowledge does not guarantee that you'll be able to hit a powerful serve down the center of the service box at your will. In order to do that, you must know how to do it — i.e. you must know what it feels like to hit such a serve. As far as I can tell, this feeling is the product of intense practice and dedication (or just blind luck). So you may know what it takes to hit a good serve, even if you can't do it. The reverse is true as well.
This analogy with tennis, I suggest, holds true for successful academic work. I, for example, have long known that a good essay requires a strong, interesting introductory paragraph, smooth transitions between successive paragraphs and a forceful but non-repetitive conclusion. I've probably known this since eighth grade, but it's taken a whole lot of practice to know how to do it (and of course I still have a lot of work to do).
The same applies to my understanding of philosophy — my discipline of choice. I'm a novice at studying philosophy; it wasn't until last year that I could say I had any idea what it was all about (well, I'm still working on that one). Before completing my first Junior Paper, I may have known a bit about what makes some philosophical arguments better than others, but I hadn't the foggiest idea of what it felt like to do philosophy. This isn't something I could glean from studying — and being mystified by — the works of Descartes, Kant or Plato.
It would be presumptuous and outright false of me to claim that after having completed a sliver of independent work, I know how to do philosophy — shoddy or not. Far from it. Nevertheless, if I was in complete darkness before my JP, now I can at least make out the shadows on the wall of the cave, as one might say. I can sort of understand the mental bushwhacking required to sort through complex concepts — the initial clarity that quickly gives way to confusion and gradually reforms itself into a more mature understanding, the mental gymnastics necessary to come up with plausible counter examples and the creative madness needed to stick with it throughout the roller coaster of dashed hopes and illusions of insight.
To get better is going to require a whole lot of practice and dedication — just like in tennis — but that's one thing I know I'll get by the time I graduate. And the great thing is, I won't have a choice in the matter. This is why we should be justifiably proud of Princeton's independent work requirement and should bite our tongues when our JP rough drafts or thesis chapters are due — because we gain what we could not have grasped without the intense and rigorous process of learning how.
(Jeff Wolf is a philosophy major from Chevy Chase, MD. He can be reached at jeffwolf@princeton.edu)
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