First thoughts of a frosh

Maybe it's just the way my lips form around the word "trowel." Maybe it's the fact that I had never been on a camping trip before in my life. Regardless of the reason, it seems like I can't keep a strange half-smile half-sneer from surfacing to my face every time I think about my OA trip.

When I first met my group, CT-56, in Dillon gym, it was pretty much like I had expected. We went around in a circle playing a name game in which we said the name and sound of an animal similarly lettered our first names. Ryan the Rhino. John the Jaguar. Nate the Natterjack (a species of toad found commonly in the U.K.). As we went around, I remember the various stereotypes I still had left from high school coming to mind almost instinctively. She's the quiet one, he's the jock. He's the class clown, she's the pretty blond. However unfair, I suppose there is something comforting in being able to put others into boxes. Maybe it's a socially ingrained defense mechanism.

My views started changing almost immediately though. On the bus ride from Princeton, I sat behind Juliann Vikse '08 and we started talking about politics, one of those big three topics you're not supposed to discuss in polite conversation. Yet instead of falling back on easy answers of personal belief, she wholeheartedly fought back every point I made in a calm, collected manner, pointing out my own assumptions about Constitutional constructionism and challenging me to rethink my position more thoroughly. It was my first oh-wow-I-goto-Princeton moment in a series of several.

I guess no matter who you are and what your stereotypes, after being stuck with the same nine people for six days in the middle of nowhere without any running water or clean, detergent-scented clothes, it's almost certain that even the most distant strangers can become like your closest friends. If not by their words or actions, at least pain and discomfort will always pull people together.

At least for my group, that's what happened. It was only our second night when it started to rain and our leaders, remembering last year's apparent disaster, worried that yet another class of freshman would remember their orientation trip as Dante's third circle of hell. Yet, when faced with the almost impossible task of constructing shelter, our group rigged a spectacular double tarp system over three wooden camping platforms. The end result was a relatively dry night of rest and seven happy freshmen.

Of course, coming together so quickly leads to some rather interesting conversations. During OA, it is not so uncommon to talk extensively about which body shape is most aesthetically pleasing — male, female or our leader, John Dempsey '05 — or explore the causation relationship between a number one and a number two. Does the second trigger the first? Can there be a multiple sequence, a one-two-one, perhaps?

This is where a well-known OA euphemism, "troweling," comes in. For most of the trip, my group camped by an outhouse, a luxury not normally afforded to other groups, so thankfully, I only had to go trowel once. The experience was so awful I hope never to have to repeat it for the rest of my life.

One thing I did learn through the experience, though, is that troweling requires a lot more thinking than you might first imagine. Position is definitely important as are other factors like view and local foliage. By the end of the trip, our group would demand rankings from the most recent troweler, one through 10 on each factor. Like I said, we got close.

But regardless of all the troweling or the terrible smell or the bland taste of Sweet Sue's chicken or the merciless whine of mosquitoes floating around at night, the OA frosh trip was an experience I will never forget. Though filled with unpleasantness in almost every way possible, I would not give it up for anything. Perhaps that is why I both smile and sneer whenever I think about it.

Through OA, I have met some of the coolest students at Princeton, learned to see them as individuals, and shared some of weirdest conservations about bodily functions I will probably ever have in my life. Never before have I felt so surrounded by a group of intelligent likeable students who I knew would later change the world and in some way, I feel like the experience was so unique, I might never again. Ryan James Kim is a freshman from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at rjkim@princeton.edu.