A visit to Harvard brings a reminder of a Princetonian virtue

It's Saturday night, 1:30 a.m. Instead of chugging the rest of my plastic cup filled with Beast, popping my collar and heading to the dance floor, I'm dead sober in what looks like a miniature eating club watching the last few people file out. The friend I'm here with leads me into a cramped carpeted room where the only thing people could possibly do is sit around on a pair of old smelly sofas chatting about their GPAs, SAT scores and how they're going to be the president of the United States in 25 years or so.

In the room to my right, two guys are playing pool on a scaled down red billiards table. One of them hits the cue at an off angle and creates a small ringing noise that echoes throughout the empty building. It's very eerie. I want to tell him as he passes his stick to his opponent that all he needs is some chalk to make a cleaner shot. Then I realize they don't have any chalk — and that they're sharing the same pool stick because the club only has one.

Suddenly, I feel the same way I do when I see the Orange Key tour guides walk backwards into a lamppost. Sure, I cringe and make sympathetic eyes. I even manage a half smile half frown face. The truth is though I'm smirking inside and all I want to do is point and laugh obnoxiously.

To be fair, I suspect that my experience at Harvard can't be the definitive one. There were probably tons of parties I didn't know about that night, it being the Head of the Charles weekend and all. I bet every night of the week Harvard kids are pouring out of their dorms to Cambridge's wild party scene like flies attract to dog feces. Every night someone's getting drunk — whether by two-beer testimony or not doesn't really matter, right?

After all, what do I know? I was just at one of their illustrious finals clubs, their version of frats, where my friend had been "punched" (in Princeton terms, selected to bicker). Perhaps one of the other ten clubs had a good party going on, with free booze, good '80s music and tons of people.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe Harvard just sorely lacks in the one thing we've got that makes us really unique, a designated area where practically everything happens: the Street. While they may have the whole of Boston at their disposal (until 12:30 a.m. when the subway system shuts down), that might end up being a disadvantage. It's probably harder to meet people from school. It's probably more difficult to know where anyone is at any given moment or where you should go to hang out. You end up only making friends with the people you live next door to because you stay in your dorm so often and that, because it is conducive to studying, is just plain sad.

Despite Harvard's lame party scene, I did notice a few similarities, especially in their finals clubs. Apparently there's a artsy one, a rich snobby one, one for football players, one for people who didn't get punched anywhere else but still wanted to join a finals club because they didn't want to look back on these four years and think they missed out on something. Sound familiar?

I guess this means that in the end, even if the ways we party are different, fundamentally we're the same kids. Then again, at least we can still take comfort in the fact that we have a larger endowment per student and our professors actually teach classes. And of course, we're better looking. Ryan James Kim is a freshman from Los Angeles, Cal. He can be reached at rjkim@princeton.edu.