Extra(neous)-curriculars

Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing. I really love the clubs that I ended up sticking with and have made some of my best friends on campus through them. But at the end of last semester, I realized that I wasn’t able to dedicate as much time as I wanted to my academics, and I didn’t know what to do. I talked to an academically-oriented friend of mine. This friend assured me that I had a legitimate concern and that bowing out of some of my extracurricular responsibilities in favor of my academics was perfectly fine. This is a sentiment I wish was more common on campus.

Nathan Mathabane rightly pointed out in his recent column that “many Princeton students meet their closest, most enduring friends through the common interests that they can explore together outside of the classroom.” I agree, and I think that doing work for a club that is very different from your academic pursuits provides a mental break and that being involving in a club that is similar to your classes provides a different way of looking at and dealing with a problem.

I am not advocating for people not to join clubs, nor am I claiming that non-academic work is not an equally important part of a college education. However, I am afraid many feel a pressure to join clubs that just isn’t there.

Princeton cannot accept everyone who is able to handle the academic workload, so high school students have to go above and beyond to get in here. For many of us, that meant joining every club our high schools had to offer and founding a few that they didn’t offer. Because that got us success in our high school years, we assume that such extracurricular pursuits will get us success here at Princeton. There is no obvious “best choice” for the next step, as there was in high school.

Some of us, maybe many of us, as Mathabane argues, will develop skills we can use in the working world. But extracurricular refers to the things that are “outside of the curriculum,” not things intended to be a curriculum of their own. They support and add valuable content and experience to our academic pursuits, but academics remains the necessary center of education. So participating in extracurriculars at Princeton, unlike in high school, makes sense if used as part of a broader education; they aren’t supposed to be arbitrarily lopped onto a schedule for admissions purposes.

Less conceptually and more logistically, it comes down to the fact that there are only so many hours in a day. When I am given the choice of completing the reading for my English class or attending a meeting for a club, I often choose the club, because I made a specific commitment to being in that club and being there. But this means my academics suffer, in both grades and in preparation for my future. So, this semester I simply decided to make a stronger commitment to my classes and my independent work.

Again, this is not a decision I think everyone should make, and I especially think that freshmen joining a bunch of random clubs, just like taking a bunch of random classes, is an important part of their formative college experience. But at the end of the day, this is a school, and one should not feel compelled to forsake his academics to keep pace with the Princeton student for whom classes too often seem to be a tedious but necessary chore in their extremely busy schedules.

Luke Massa is a philosophy major from Ridley Park, Pa. He can be reached at lmassa@princeton.edu.