Princeton graduate students: antisocial or untapped resource? Forty-four percent of the almost 600 undergrads polled in a 2005 Point survey said, "If they weren't my TAs, I wouldn't talk to them." The residential colleges' new Resident Graduate Student program aims to change that.
Resident Graduate Students, or RGSs, were selected by application and are meant to enrich undergraduate life by becoming part of the residential college community. Each of the six residential colleges has roughly 10 RGSs living in newly constructed apartment-style housing in the dorms.
"The idea of the position was just to start to erode away the huge divide between the two student bodies," said David Nagib, a Mathey RGS.
"In the past, we were viewed as just this precepting population," Whitman RGS Leann Wood said. "This RGS program will help us interact in a more informal way, and I hope it will help undergraduates use us as a resource."
The graduate students are expected to interact with undergraduates for at least 10 hours per week. Of these, five hours can be at meals in the dining halls. The RGSs also plan different events, such as poetry readings and film screenings, that relate to their personal and academic interests.
The RGS program was created by the same planning committee that produced the four-year residential colleges. Previously, two graduate students worked as assistant masters in each residential college to support the RCAs and help plan college activities. The assistant master role was eliminated this year when each college hired a full-time director of student life.
Integrating the RSGs into each college was a way to "add some graduate students back with much more limited but targeted roles," Dean of Mathey College Steven Lestition said.
"There was a longstanding sense at Princeton that the graduate students were this untapped resource," he said, adding that he hopes that the program will help in "bridging the gap between undergraduates and graduate students."
The RGSs said they believe that the program will break down established stereotypes about graduate students by providing a social and residential forum for graduate-undergraduate interaction.
"The term you always hear in front of grad students is 'sketchy,' " said Steven Lauritano '05, a Whitman RGS, who also attended Princeton as an undergrad. "I think there is a perception that graduate students lack social skills, have zero free time, basically the perception that they don't have the same social prowess as undergrads."
Sometimes all it takes is bringing interaction beyond a precept.
"I think if they just talk to us, they realize we're just as normal and unsketchy as they are," Wood said. "The ones that were chosen for this job are really great people, and the undergrads shouldn't be weirded out by us."
Breaking down these long-held perceptions has been a slow process, however. "I think that it is a small step in the right direction," Lauritano said, "but I don't think it will be able to completely change the undergraduate perception of graduate students."
It may be necessary, according to Lauritano, to add even more graduate students in the future for more "strength in numbers."
Housing limitations, however, make increasing the number of RGSs unfeasible for the next few years. "They had to build these new apartments, and that was really expensive and took away bed space," Lestition said. "There is simply no more room [for] them."
Many RGSs find the program attractive because it creates a sense of belonging that can be lacking in the graduate college. "As graduate students, we live off campus and pretty much go straight to our offices and back," said Sahar Sharifzadeh, a fifth-year graduate student living in Whitman. "I thought it would be nice to live with and get to know other people ... and feel like a part of Princeton."
"Ultimately, I think the most important thing is that we're here and not 20 minutes away," Nagib said. "We're all Tigers, and when we go out into the real world that is going to be a more bridging element than anything else."
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