If you thought you came to college to learn something practical, forget it. Princeton is one of the last bastions of the high-minded, esoteric and abstruse — the liberal arts education.
Come September, when you arrive at this small liberal arts university in central New Jersey, it will be time to begin your new life as an A.B., a candidate for Princeton's Bachelor of Arts degree.
Ignore your calculator-toting roommates when they casually mention their courseload of "Electromagnetic Field Theory and Optics" or "Mechanics of Solids and Fluids," ad nauseam. They are only engineers. In a few weeks, they will be so busy working that you will barely even see them.
You will find few professional schools at Princeton. Instead, buckle your seatbelts for an experience in the purest form of learning — "Modern Political Theory" and "The Arts of Medieval Europe," to name a couple of the A.B. gems.
Graduation requriements
To graduate, A.B. students must take at least 31 courses in four years and complete two semesters of independent work and a senior thesis within their departments.
The University suggests that students take four courses in their freshman fall, five in either their freshman spring or sophomore fall, four through junior year, and three each semester of senior year.
No A.B. student should feel unduly bound by this system, however, since different arrangements will meet the total course load. Some students take more than four courses per semester early in their academic careers to take fewer courses later.
Though this is not officially encouraged, many second-semester seniors breeze through "guts" — courses that demand minimal work and time investment — while cranking out their theses.
Additional courses may be taken by the A.B. who merely wishes to sample eclectically from Princeton's veritable smorgasbord of academic dishes. The University offers more than 75 departments and certificate programs, and many students take advantage of this academic diversity.
For example, a student majoring in molecular biology can take VIS 311: Introductory Video and Film Production or an art history major can sample MAE 223: An Introduction to Thermal Fluid Engineering. Usually, however, students stick to their general fields of interest, particularly in their upperclass years, when departmental requirements must be fulfilled.
Distribution requirements
To prevent A.B. students from focusing on a narrow field of study too early, the University enforces a system of distribution requirements, which was revised in the fall of 1996. Students must take a total of 10 courses spread over seven categories to fulfill the requirements.
Under the guidelines, A.B. candidates are required to take at least one course in each of the following areas: Epistemology and Cognition, Ethical Thought and Moral Values, Historical Analysis and Quantitative Reasoning. In addition, A.B. students must take at least two courses in the categories of Literature and the Arts, Science and Technology (with laboratories) and Social Analysis.
For the non-scientists among you, the lab requirement can be satisfied through fairly painless and occasionally fun lab courses such as "Physics for Poets" and "Rocks for Jocks."
Writing requirement
Every member of the Class of 2007 will be required to take a one-semester writing seminar offered by the Princeton Writing Program.
The seminars are organized around four major essay assignments, for a total of about 30 pages of work. Don't expect yours to be easy.
The freshman writing seminar requirement began with the Class of 2005, when administrators decided A.B. students could handle taking one more course on top of the normal four during their freshman spring or sophomore fall.
Language proficiency
Another demand on all A.B. students is the foreign language requirement, from which B.S.E. students are exempted.
A.B. students already proficient in a language can place out of the language requirement by taking a placement exam offered during frosh week. Alternatively, high scores on SAT II or AP exams can exempt students from the language requirement. Consult the language departments to find out the precise scores required to place out.
If you choose to start a new language at Princeton — as many freshmen do — you will normally be required to take two years of the language in order to satisfy the requirement.
P/D/F
A Pass/D/Fail option — which means that a final grade of A+ through Cis marked as a pass, a D counts as a D and an F is a failure — is available for a sizable but decreasing number of courses. The University only allows students to take up to four P/D/F courses — and only one per semester. Additionally, students have the option to rescind the P/D/F option in favor of a letter grade as late as the ninth week of the semester.
Some courses, such as foreign languages, cannot be taken P/D/F. Courses that can only be taken P/D/F, such as creative writing classes, do not count toward a student's budget of four.
Auditing
Another way to sample courses is to audit them. Though audited courses do not count toward the 31 required for graduation, if a student passes the final exam he or she receives credit for auditing the course — without having to do the papers and problem sets or even attending class.
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