Dear Antonia

Reading this letter, you are probably expecting a cheat sheet: a bulleted list that details your adventures and doles out advice that will ensure your wellbeing at Princeton. The idea of a "life" review sheet with recurrent themes (over-analysis, stressing unnecessarily) and terms ("street feet," "chain-chewing," "Wa-run") appeals to my (our?) persistent OCD. But I must say this: In such a short space, it is impossible to include all the anecdotes that have shaped my experience at Princeton and made it such an incredibly rich, diverse and overwhelming four years.

You will make mistakes, say careless things and rethink your abilities as a mathematician after one particular midterm freshman year. There will be countless moments of excitement, panic, exhaustion and delight, many of which will be recorded through bulletin-board pictures, frantic e-mails, parent-edited papers and the million Post-It notes you leave all over your room. You will learn that you prefer tests to papers, that Anne McCauley scares the hell out of you, that you miss your freshman year roommate and that, ok fine, writing your senior thesis was not a miserable experience, you just liked to complain anyway.

I write in general terms so as not to detract from the surprise and excitement of each day, but I will leave you with one specific episode that is indicative of the way you have changed over time. Though your daily planner is your life, you will wake up one morning during a semester in Florence and get on a train to Arezzo. You won't know why you picked the small, hilly Tuscan town, what time your train will arrive or if you'll stay for dinner. You will deliberately leave your guidebook, and you certainly won't have a map. And you know what? It will be one of the most liberating experiences to abandon your organized, list-making, obsessive-compulsive self and sit in a sunlit piazza with a chunk of foccacia and a blood orange. You will recognize both the cliche perfection of the moment and that had you brought a three-page itinerary, you'd be using it as a napkin.

The lesson of this particular moment - that an organized and a spontaneous self can coexist - won't hit you until junior year. Until then, I leave you with this: Expect anything and hope for everything.

Older (and, I hope, a bit wiser),

Antonia