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(10/20/15 6:15pm)
I’m interested in perverse incentives, those peculiar “M. Night Shyamalan plot twists” of policy-making in which motivational rewards actually cause unintended adverse effects. Take for example, the punishment system of Bangkok police for minor infractions like coming to work late or littering. They first tried to force minor rule breakers to wear tartan armbands. However, it only promoted pride instead of shame. Before the government realized what was going on, officers began actively collecting these armbands as souvenirs. In response, the punishment was updated to be a bit more emasculating — Hello Kitty armbands — blindingly pink and sufficiently humiliating. Fun fact.
(10/06/15 6:17pm)
I don’t usually talk in my columns. I mean, I say things, but you don’t hear my voice. I’m distant — linking and referencing the crap out of every fact. After four years, I'm out of those measured opinions — it's hard to have (publishable) opinions on a regular, biweekly basis. All I have left are thoughts.
(09/23/15 6:10pm)
For all of the efforts put in place to encourage entrepreneurship on campus, the University is still not what one would consider an “entrepreneurial” school. There are certainly successful entrepreneurs who are Princeton graduates, but the University is “not leading in number of successful startups.” There is a reasonable number of Princeton students who use startup experience during college as a springboard for corporate jobs or who pursue entrepreneurship as an extracurricular activity, but very few who actually choose to commit to entrepreneurship in the long run.
(02/22/15 2:06pm)
There has been a recent initiative on campus in the form of a petition to call forth a referendum to end Bicker in the Princeton eating clubs. The referendum calls for eating clubs to end Bicker by the 2019-20 academic year and to establish an Undergraduate Student Government committee, which must include a non-voting member appointed by the Interclub Council, to facilitate the process. Although an initiative to familiarize students with the downsides of Bicker and to introduce to students all available alternatives would be valuable, Bicker still ultimately has a place on this campus.
(02/10/15 2:33pm)
As University students, we are given access to a wide array of summer internship opportunities. It’s true — we have the International Internship Program, Keller Center internships, Princeton Internships in Civic Service, and several career fairs to help students find external internships independent of these programs. These programs are distinct, in that IIP internships stress experience abroad in all different fields, Keller Center internships emphasize engineering and entrepreneurial fields, and PICS internships offers civic service-oriented experiences. However, not all opportunities are financially accessible. Students who can’t find their own paid internships look to University programs for additional opportunities, only to find that there is an unequal distribution of funds. Some opportunities cover housing and travel costs, others are unpaid and offer minimal stipends. This disparity in funding places some programs at a premium over others, when a student’s choice should ultimately depend on interest and fit, rather than financial concerns.
(11/19/14 7:21pm)
The Princeton Perspective Project was recently launched in effort to combat the perception of “effortless perfection” on campus. This is an important step that the Undergraduate Student Government has taken to resolve an issue that was never heavily addressed before. However, there has been a lot of backlash and criticism directed toward it. Perhaps it is imperfect in execution, but it deserves to be seen as a positive addition to our culture rather than a mistaken endeavor.
(11/05/14 7:49pm)
In Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, the basis for a recent popular movie, a specific passage from the book highlights a particularly apt social dilemma women face. The main character Amy Dunne, the titular “gone girl”, says, “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping”. The problem with the Cool Girl concept is that she is considered not like “all the other girls” – she is considered superior because of her more masculine interests. Consequently, any women who fall outside of this narrow definition of “cool” are viewed less favorably.
(10/09/14 6:20pm)
In April earlier this year, 276 girls were abducted from an elementary school in Nigeria by Boko Haram, a terrorist group in northeast Nigeria. In the following months, the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls became near ubiquitous on social media and news broadcasts, gaining famous and influential proponents. Everyone from First Lady Michelle Obama to popular movie star Emma Watson took the time to write out the hashtag on a piece of paper, arrange some photo-appropriate writing, and then, at least in the case of Ms. Obama, hire a professional photographer to take a photo of her holding the sign with a reasonably forlorn expression.
(09/25/14 7:01pm)
In 2007, Princeton alumnus Sir Gordon Wu ’58, the namesake of Wu Hall in Butler College, completed payments of $100 million that he pledged to the university in 1995, bringing his total lifetime donations to over $118 million.He gave this donation to support the School of Engineering and Applied Science, particularly to increase the number of endowed professorships, supporting renovations and construction, and to provide fellowships to graduate students. As the giver of one of the single largest donations in the University's history, Wu was a pioneer in many ways.
(09/15/14 6:10pm)
The ALS "Ice Bucket Challenge," one of the biggest social media trends to sweep across the nation this summer, was also a source of controversy. The "Ice Bucket Challenge" asked participants to film themselves dumping buckets of ice over themselves and post the videos on Facebook in order to encourage awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and then nominate friends to do the same.
(04/09/14 7:40pm)
For the past six months, a Yale junior has been threatened with suspension because of her weight. At 92 pounds and 5 feet 2 inches, Yale Health officials considered her unhealthily underweight, according to an op-ed she wrote for The Huffington Post titled “Yale University Thinks I Have an Eating Disorder." Despite her arguments that her weight had been stable for years and that she is small by genetics, Yale Health had been requiring weekly weigh-ins and encouraging her to gain weight, she wrote. Although she said she began “stuffing herself with carbs and junk food daily to gain weight”, she only gained two pounds, which was not enough to satisfy Yale Health.
(03/24/14 7:31pm)
On both sides of the grade deflation debate, the most talked-about argument is its effects on postgraduation employment or admission to graduate schools.On one side, the administration allows students applying to jobs or graduate schools to attach a letter from the University explaining its tough grading stance compared to other universities.However,many students remain worried about the effects grade deflation may have on postgraduation plans. But whether or not these doubts about grade deflation barring seniors from jobs are true,I argue that we are overlooking an even more important issue grade deflation raises: the issue of whether or not it impacts the quality of our education itself.
(03/03/14 9:03pm)
Facebook’s recent announcement of its deal to purchase WhatsApp for $19 billion dollars has sent shockwaves through the tech world. While supporters of the deal laud Facebook for gaining 450 million monthly active users, analysts point out that WhatsApp has been overpriced. To put it into perspective, WhatsApp is now worth 10 percent more than Sony’s market cap and more than Southwest Airlines or Marriott International. For $19 billion dollars, each WhatsApp user is worth $42, even though the app is free and only generated revenues of around $20 million last year, a hundredth of Facebook paid to acquire it.
(02/04/14 8:42pm)
This past week, I visited my friend at MIT during the school’s Independent Activities Period, a month-long term that spans from the beginning to the end of January, somewhat parallel to Princeton’s Intersession. During this time, students can “organize, sponsor and participate in a wide variety of activities, including how-to sessions, forums, athletic endeavors, lecture series, films, tours, recitals and contests.” There were informal classes on figure skating, cooking, research methodology, etc. There were also formal, credited classes for certain subjects, including many pass/fail only classes. Some students also chose to take on winter internships, gaining perspective and experience that ultimately helped them decide upon or obtain summer opportunities in similar fields. Many students participated in the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, a career services program with company seminars and leadership classes, which has a near 100 percent success rate for matching its students with internships.
(01/07/14 9:52pm)
In 1829, Thomas Young, hailed “the last man who knew everything,” died, taking with him an era in which the polymath reigned supreme. During his lifetime, Young established the existence of light waves through his famous double-slit interference experiment, wrote several works in linguistics, helped develop the concept of Young’s modulus in materials science, contributed to the decoding of the Rosetta Stone and even entered the life insurance business. During Young’s time, the world population was less than an eighth of what it is today, with a smaller proportion literate and educated, collaborations were more difficult, and it was easier to make discoveries and significant contributions to several different fields.
(12/08/13 9:46pm)
As course selection draws near, I feel panic setting in. There’s this requirement and that distribution; I really wanted to take a class for fun, but there’s no space and no time. I look at ICE and see if I can still fit it in next year, but then there’s a whole slew of departmentals I’ve already entered in for next year’s schedule. I’m a first-semester sophomore. That means that three-eighthsof my college career is over. By the end of this year, I’ll be half-done with college. That’s jarring to think about. It feels like I just walked through FitzRandolph Gate for the first time; in reality, that was over a year ago. Pretty soon, I’ll be closer to walking out of that gate than walking in it.
(11/24/13 7:04pm)
In theory, the purpose of problems sets should be to reinforce students’ skills outside of class by application of what was taught in lecture. Problem sets in college do perhaps require more critical thinking than the rote homework problems given in high school, but the main purpose is still practice. Assessments, on the other hand, gauge a student’s progress, concretely measuring what they know and how accurately they apply it. Some classes confuse the distinction between these two concepts by implementing a strict “no collaboration” homework policy that prevents students from discussing problem sets together or checking over the answers. This confusion severely limits students from practicing their skills outside of class with accuracy because they may complete entire problem sets with the wrong knowledge, thus practicing mistaken methods until they become bad habits.
(11/12/13 10:10pm)
Before I came to Princeton, I thought of college as it was portrayed in the movies. Perhaps naively, movies like "A Beautiful Mind"or "Mona Lisa Smile"came to mind. Some students would lie around chewing pencils and discussing current events; others would be arguing over brainteasers the professor introduced as an extra challenge on a whiteboard in their common rooms. Students could just gather together and think in an unstructured way, learning through self-initiated discourse. Granted, I knew Princeton wouldn’t be about highbrow intellectual discussion all the time, but I thought there would be more time to just sit around and think.
(10/08/13 9:50pm)
When I was in elementary school, my class always had these timed multiplication tests — Mad Minutes. They consisted of 100 multiplication problems, and each person had exactly one minute to complete them. Every week, my class had a competition based on these Mad Minutes, and the winner would get a little prize, usually a colorful eraser or something else that third graders find rewarding. I was always mediocre at Mad Minutes, usually finishing in the middle tier of the class, or, on rare occasions, second or third. Either way, I thought I was pretty good at Mad Minutes. When I went home to tell my mom, I would spin the story to aggrandize my performance. I finished Mad Minutes faster than half of the whole class — I was just that good at multiplication.
(09/24/13 9:50pm)
Life was easy in elementary school. As long as we paid attention, didn’t fight other kids and dutifully recited our ABCs, we were good. We were smart, and we were praised for it. The same thing went on in middle school and, even to some extent, in high school. Even if you went to a challenging high school that was academically rigorous, the effort you put in was taken into account in one way or another. For most people, there was partial credit — even if the answer was wrong, as long as your steps looked somewhat logical, you got a few points back. The longer the essay, the better the score it was likely to receive. Sometimes just completing the homework was enough. Accuracy didn’t matter.