With many months between receiving a Princeton acceptance letter and arriving on campus, incoming freshmen have plenty of time to wonder what life on campus will actually be like. By the time they finally arrive in early September, their imaginations have already created a whole university life, both socially and academically, within the realm of the mind.
Princeton "seemed so prestigious and elevated," Kathryn Pocalyko '10 said. "Not many people from my high school came here, so it made Princeton feel like something so far away and very surreal."
"Not until I came to campus did I feel like Princeton was actually a real place," she added.
"Before it was just a name, but now it has become an experience and still continues to be one."
For Tina Zhen '09, the ideas she formulated regarding Princeton were strictly those she gathered from looking through catalogues, seeing the architecture and overall physical beauty of campus. Just knowing Princeton through the physical aspects of what she saw in books and on tours, she let her imagination run wild.
"I always thought of Princeton as a really calm place, not busy at all, with things moving very slowly," she said. "I related it to an extremely pretty garden."
Social life
Edie Lederman '09 went to an all-girls school in New York City and had been in school with the same people for almost a decade. As a pre-frosh, she thought Princeton would have a greater sense of community than she enjoyed in high school.
"It's a lot 'clique-ier' than I thought," she said. "You really don't venture that far outside your groups. I thought that would be over with in high school."
But Lederman did foresee a divide between those who made academics their first priority and those who alternated between the social and academic scenes. "I thought there would be a split between nerdy, super-smart people and the people who manage to get by and party a lot and are definitely not 'A' students," she said. "I still think this is pretty true."
Not only did students have beliefs regarding their future peers' intelligence, they also made assumptions regarding student fashion.
"I thought it was stuck-up and exclusive and incredibly preppy," Sadye Teiser '09 said of the University. "I went and bought Lacoste shirts the summer before I came."
Living quarters
For many precollege students, the immediate challenge of going to college is learning to live in close quarters with students they've never met. Lederman said she was uneasy about moving into a dorm because she had never been to camp and wasn't used to the idea of roommates. She was convinced she would be housed with "freaks."
Instead, she ended up choosing to live with her roommates again sophomore year.
Nonetheless, she expressed disappointment that the University doesn't offer hallway dormitories. Though Lederman's roommate assignments turned out well, she spent her freshman year in the only room on the first floor of her entryway.
"I expected more of the TV college experience with there being hallways with rooms all along them," she said. "I lived in Holder so there was absolutely no hallway life. Before coming, I imagined everyone's door being unlocked with everyone being in a tight-knit group. I just didn't have that living in an entryway."
Competition and self-doubt
With Princeton's highly competitive admissions process, students, once accepted, often imagine their future peers to be on an academic level much higher than themselves.
"I expected everyone to be well-versed in literature in like three languages," Zhen said. "Either that, or they would be super smart in math and science, like computer geniuses — just geniuses all around who worked their butts off in high school."
A year and a half later, Zhen said she still thinks most students are overachievers but has come to realize that they often tend to be extraordinarily good at one particular thing. This talent, which each student manifests in a different area, then contributes to diversity on campus.
Pocalyko said she tried to gain perspective on University life by contemplating how the social and drinking scene was going to affect her academic life.
"I realized before coming that I wasn't going to get the same grades as I did in high school," she said. "But, with that, I knew that for the first time I was going to feel OK with expressing my intelligence. Here, everyone is smart and it's OK to show it, and we all understand each other because of it. Before, in high school, it was almost embarrassing to show it."
Lederman, who had also assumed that students would be competitive, said she used to believe that getting into Princeton was the hard part and that academics wouldn't be as hard once she was actually here.
"Work didn't even occur to me," she said.
"I was delusional."
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