A few weeks ago, I went with some friends to the Old Graduate College for dinner. Getting there was a hike — we had to walk to Forbes College from Butler College and then take a bus, which was late — and the general geography of the place is confusing if you’ve never been. But my post-reading period semi-vegetative state and temperature shock — as a Floridian stuck in New Jersey in the dead of winter — quickly evaporated when I walked into Procter Hall, the dining hall around which the Graduate College (GC) is built. If you’ve never eaten there before, add it to your list of things to do before you graduate. The physical beauty of the place is awesome, in the most literal sense of the word.
When I came to Princeton nearly six months ago, the GC was mentioned to me only in passing. There’s a picture of Cleveland Tower on the Princeton Wikipedia page. Someone told me that my meal plan worked there. An overly excited freshman from the Midwest once whispered to me that Dining Services runs something there called the “Sand Bar,” which lets 18-year-old kids drink. (They don’t.) I thought little of it. Until last month, that is, when its special post-Dean’s Date dinner reminded me that it exists.
To me, the GC’s relative anonymity nicely sums up the relationship Princeton undergrads have with TAs and preceptors: one that’s usually cordial, but rarely collaborative and seldom friendly. The University makes little effort to change this. Intramural sports and the Resident Graduate Student Program do little to help. Because Princeton students have so much work to do, we rarely have large, undedicated blocks of time to spend on intramural sports. And if I needed something from one of the Butler resident graduate students, I wouldn’t know where to begin. That statement, of course, assumes that I know what RGS’s do or that they exist in the first place.
This is a problem for two reasons. The first is that Princeton’s self-conception as an academic community hinges on the idea of collaboration and shared learning. Most undergrads never see grad students outside of class or lab, and if asked they probably couldn’t identify where most of them live. (Don’t check the Butler Apartments or GC website if you’re curious — neither has pictures.) While we come here to learn from professors, experiences with grad students, whether TAs or preceptors, can be just as valuable, if not more. While it may sound cliche, today’s grad students are tomorrow’s professors. Imagine spending time around a Cornel West, a Richard Feynman or an Alan Turing (all of whom were once grad students here) long before they became legendary and buried in work.
Second, an absence of interaction undercuts the personal part of the graduate student experience. Friends of mine complain about TAs and preceptors who either appear not to care about the students they’re responsible for managing or very obviously don’t speak English. While talking about the latter could be borderline politically incorrect, it isn’t entirely unreasonable to expect that the person responsible for helping you learn math (or chemistry, or physics, or economics or any discipline) speaks your language at least proficiently. When foreign grad students spend little time around native English speakers, there’s little incentive for them to learn the language fully or to have a truly instructive teaching experience.
Thankfully, this is a relatively easy problem to fix. Collaborative events (planned well and taken seriously) between the GC and the undergraduate residential colleges would help. Hiring more RGS's to improve the RGS-to-undergrad ratio and promoting the RGS program would make grad students more accessible.
The academic facet is slightly harder to tackle. Wilson School focus groups led by grad students — optional, ungraded meetings of students getting together to talk about certain subjects with guest speakers — in the mold of Harvard’s Institute of Politics would increase undergrad-grad face time. Offering graduate student-led seminars on an audit-only basis on topics not normally taught by Princeton professors (ocean engineering or biomedical engineering, just to name two) would give undergrads interested in those fields early guidance, as would giving interested students the chance to sit in on or actively participate in social and hard science research groups.
My list of suggestions above is by no means exhaustive. The ideas I’ve presented could be colossal failures. But it would be difficult for the University to focus less attention on strengthening undergraduate-graduate relations. It’s also downright weird to think that Princeton students could go four years without realizing that a residential college the size of Rockefeller or Mathey colleges exists just a stone’s throw from (admittedly isolated) Forbes. The University administration is awfully good at public relations. If Princeton puts its mind to it, it just might put the GC back on the map.
Charlie Metzger is a freshman from Palm Beach, Fla. He can be reached at cmetzger@princeton.edu.
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