Athletes put to the test
As I see it, athletics have everything to do with the mission of a university like Princeton.
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As I see it, athletics have everything to do with the mission of a university like Princeton.
After Donald Trump referred to the press as the “enemy of the people,” there’s been a lot of talk about keeping journalistic integrity and protecting the First Amendment. For all his blubbering, Trump won’t silence the media. But I’m afraid that, in some ways, the media has already silenced its own voice.
The three weeks on campus that preceded Dean’s Date and finals felt eternal. But what was most painful was having no idea what to do with myself after I did eventually finish all of my schoolwork. Many of us went from a frantic working pace and wanting nothing more than a short break, to having no idea what to do with ourselves. What is most depressing are not the challenges that we expect to be unpleasant, but rather when the thing that we hope will bring relief is itself another burden.
I never understood why old people liked to go on walks. Not even nice walks out in the country or the sunshine, just walks up and down unseemly neighbor streets.
The question of what it means to be an American has rarely been of more importance than it is following an election that has divided so many Americans. When America elects a president who blatantly disregards many of the morals and values that Americans are supposed to stand for, we are left to wonder what the common threads that unite us are.
Due to how much success we’ve experienced and the praise that often comes with it, many of us have the tendency to associate our self-worth with that success and praise. We confuse innate value with our skills or jobs or good looks. Instead of being “Luke who happens to write and has good test-taking skills,” in my mind, I become “Luke the writer and the test-taker.” The operative identity has switched from a person to a skill, from an unchanging essence that endows you with worth and value and purpose to an arbitrary set of skills you ironically have very little control over.At school, this often exhibits itself as a paralyzing fear of low grades. We become the kings and queens of the “Type A” personality. We try to control that and many other aspects of our lives as if our very identities depended upon it. Part of us really does believe that if we were to lose that skill or attribute, we would somehow lose the very core of our essence. A failed test is not just an F, it’s a big “Failure” written all over the transcript of your life, a trauma we feel justified to revisit years after the actual impact of the low grade.When we operate with this exhausting fear for failure, this constant need to perform, we live in what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset.” In a fixed mindset, natural traits can’t be developed or grown. You have a given amount of brains or talent that defines how you are going to do in life. As a result, you constantly have to prove your worth. It’s not enough to become —you have to be, right now.As Maria Popova writes, “striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled.” Our approach to our studies shifts from an emphasis on learning and growth towards mindless, exhausting sprints to avoid failure or low grades. What could be a fruitful four years of genuine growth descends into seemingly endless grunt work and to-do lists. We read because we’ll have to write a paper on it or take an exam on it. We try to see how many books we can get through before class instead of slowing down to see if a book can get through to us. A precept goes from being an engaging conversation to yet another area where we might say the wrong thing and look dumb. The activities we take part in are largely the same, but conflating ourselves with our grades and skills — adopting a fixed mentality — renders our time an entirely different experience.Other students display a less stressful, but equally tragic, expression of the fixed mentality upon getting to Princeton: they choose to check out. They rationalize this by concluding that if you don’t try, then the failure to succeed won’t reflect poorly on you. If you don’t put forth effort you can say you would have succeeded, but that you’ve been investing your efforts elsewhere. More often than not this “elsewhere” amounts to little more than what Jack Bryan referred to mockingly as his “FIFA and napping skills” in his Opinion column. They don’t fail in their endeavors, but that’s because they never really had any ambitions at all. It’s a safety mechanism for the same identity crisis the “Type A” perfectionists experience.I came into Princeton very confident about my writing skills, but freshman year I received a lot of unsatisfactory marks on my essays. Unfortunately, I didn’t absorb the criticism. Upon receiving an essay back from a professor, I would immediately flip to the back page looking for a letter grade. If I received anything below an A-minus I wouldn’t even read the comments. I assumed that if a professor had a problem with my work then it was due to some inherent bias or personal beef with my argument. It got so bad that I started writing all my papers the night before they were due so that I could always either blame the teacher or the fact that I had written the entire paper in one night.I wasn’t really interested in learning or growing. What I really wanted was a pat on the back and affirmation that I was all I thought of myself — effortlessly brilliant. I missed out on a lot of valuable criticism, humbling, and eventual improvement because of it. Now I keep every essay I get back and look over the comments several times a month, making sure I’m making progress on my various weaknesses. What I should have done was to not worry about what sort of writer I was, but to look towards the writer I wanted to become.Real learning can happen when we stop worrying how we are perceived, when we stop worrying so much about how we are performing right now, and when we begin to invest our effort into becoming the people we want to be after graduation. Then we can begin to view “failures” not as evidence of being damned to a life of unintelligence and mediocrity but as, Dweck writes, “a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities…”Luke Gamble is an English major from Eagle, Idaho. He can be reached at ljgamble@princeton.edu.
This year, many Wall Street investment banks, including J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse moved their application and interview processes for summer internships even earlier in the fall. As part of a continual effort to hire the best talent ahead of other industries, this change will prompt students to make decisions about their summers and eventual careers sooner than ever before.Many are paralyzed by the fear that if they graduate from college without a job or graduate school admission lined up, they’ve made some cataclysmic mistake and are destined to have mediocre pay and monotonous misery for the rest of their lives. As a result, many students give into this fear and end up taking respectable, well-paying jobs, but ones that deep down, they know probably don’t suit them.The great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson weighs in, “If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”Emerson wrote this more than a hundred years ago, but it’s probably more applicable to our mentality today than it was even then. Today there are more ways than ever to develop your own skills, determine your own career path, create your own job, and get involved in meaningful and enjoyable work.The epidemic of worry and job insecurity threatens to affect students’ psychologies and outlooks. During frosh week, the first question often asked after, “How was your summer?” is “Do you know what you are doing next summer yet?” The student is rarely allowed to live in the present with the work that is presented to them. Even a high-powered banking or consulting intern spends a great deal of time distracted from the work given to them because they are compelled to consider how they are coming across to their superiors.Few students believe the truth that if they operate entirely in the present for these four years, taking care to do justice to the myriad of opportunities Princeton throws their way, they will graduate, actually get hired, and be successful in whatever opportunity they are next given.The insecure student who takes the job they know isn’t right for them might ironically work to bring about their own fears. They want a well-paying job, financially secure future, and potential for social mobility. We all do, especially the English major behind this column desperately trying to convince himself he’s not going to be unemployed for the first two years after college.But if we accept a job that does not genuinely feel like it is the work for us, we may have delayed the certain symptoms of failure we are so terrified of being associated with — moving back in with our mom, unemployment, an embarrassingly low-paying job — but we really are only delaying the start of our own lives. When I talk to students who are heading into finance, many of them are actively eager to finish their two years of being an analyst first. Far from being excited for their first job, they soon express that what they are really looking forward to is not this job, but the one they hope will come after. Like Emerson says, they are postponing, waiting to begin what they imagine as their real lives.I hope that it does not pass you by. I hope that two years and then sanity in private equity does not become, “three years then I’ll be a CEO,” or “five years then I’ll be a millionaire,” and then “15 years till I can retire to Malibu.”If an illustrious and taxing (and taxable) career path is the one for you, then really live that. If how you spend your days is how you spend your life, whatever job you take, do not wait for that life to slip away; start this very moment. Be here. As C.S. Lewis writes, “The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life.”Luke Gamble is an English major from Eagle, Idaho. He can be reached at ljgamble@princeton.edu.
Dear freshmen,The day you were accepted and chose Princeton was a defining moment in your life. It was the reward forof a lifetime of work and study and growth. Though there are thousands of other well qualified applicants, your acceptance is the natural culminationof the person you’ve spent your first 18 years becoming.The University has now spent the entirety of frosh week celebrating your very existence and preparing you for what is to come. Soon, what you have been looking forward to since admission and have been working towards for so long will actually begin. The anticipation of moving in and actually beginning the school year will fade away, and you’ll begin to make your way through stack after stack of books and draft after draft of essays.More likely than not, you’ll find that it is hard. Maybe you aren’t quite the writer or the mathematician everyone thought you were in high school. To thrive in this environment, you'll have to do the grunt work. It won't be enough that you grew up reading just to fudge your way through vocabulary tests. You’ll learn that, maybe, you never knew what it meant to work hard.Despite the difficulties you’ll inevitably face and the self-doubt that will creep in on so many levels, you do belong here. The Office of Admission didn’t make a mistake. You aren’t an impostor. You belong here. You deserve to be here.But you also aren’t particularly exceptional. You are neither the mistake in the Admission algorithm, nor the genius for whom these four years should be a cakewalk. If you let it, Princeton will inflate your ego and destroy the very things it wanted to foster in you when it accepted you. Time and time again, you’ll be told, “it’s Princeton, after all.” It’s a statement you’ll soon find out is used to justify anything.You deserve to be here, but so do thousands of other high school students who got rejected and could easily and eagerly have taken your place. If you let the fact that you were accepted here define you, if you begin to let the name of an institution replace you, you will soon find yourself far outstripped by students at mediocre schools like Columbia and Penn.Rather than puff you up, Princeton is supposed to humble you and then build you up. If you don’t approach Princeton with the capacity to grow, it will break you. You’ll fail like you’ve never failed before. You can let the realization of your own inadequacies crush you, or you can be thankful for the opportunity to improve, cognizant that however impressed the world will be that you went to Princeton, that glamor will soon fade if not followed up by real substance.In his recent New York Times op-ed, David Brooks quotes Terence J. Tollaksen and says the "'big' decisions turn out to have much less impact on a life as a whole than the myriad of small seemingly insignificant ones." Choosing to go to Princeton was certainly a “big” decision. It’s a name that will sell you well for the rest of your life. But how you spend your days here, whether or not you believe in the process and do justice to the work, responsibilities, and gifts that are put in front of you on a daily basis, that is how you will spend your life.Your time at Princeton is too rare of an opportunity to waste it by treating it like just another stepping-stone. You have to live this process, step by step, day by day. So I implore you, choose to live in the moment, and at the end of your four years you’ll be able to say, “at least I had my eyes wide open, experienced Princeton for what it is, and I let it do its work on me.”Luke Gamble is an English major from Eagle, Idaho. He can be reached at ljgamble@princeton.edu.
College students in the United States are involved in political activism now more than any other time in the last 50 years.According to a recent survey conducted by UCLA, more students are committed to social justice now than since the height of the Civil Rights Movement. There’s a growing sense among undergraduates that they have a responsibility to contribute, to leave their mark upon something during their brief undergraduate years, to call attention to some wrong, to raise their voice for those who cannot speak up for themselves.
*This piece is satirical.
This week Western media has been firmly fixed on the Brussels bombings. In her most recent “Prince” column, Sarah Sakha ’18 laments how coverage of the Brussels bombings has completely eclipsed coverage of attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Turkey, Iraq and Ivory Coast. She writes, “Terrorism may not discriminate based on geographical location, but the mainstream media does.”
In every election cycle, pundits and politicians alike assert that the United States is at a unique moment in history, a tilting point. No, I’m not going to argue that this time, "it's for real." What is striking about this election cycle, however, is how polarizing the candidates in both parties are. In the 113thSenate, Bernie Sanders was the thirdmost liberal senator, and Cruz the fourthmost conservative, with Rubio only a few spaces behind. For lack of many specific policy proposals or any voting record whatsoever, Donald Trump cannot be placed on this spectrum, but in his own way, he represents the same approach. That is one of uncompromising commitment to, in his case, his own self and outlook, but in the senators’ cases, to their own convictions and points of view.
Many humanities majors cannot withstand the temptation to validate the existence of their own major. It seems every third lecture in my English class references why studying English or comparative literature is so important. Even my classmates often bemoan the fact that computer science, engineering and economics students find no such need to incessantly validate their own field of study.
Classes have started up again, but as students begin the second semester, many wonder why it starts so late. We are almost a full week into February before teachers finish passing out syllabi and move on to real content. Every year Princeton’s unique schedule comes into question, but the issue is quickly forgotten as students plunge into a semester that proceeds non-stop except for spring break.
Over Thanksgiving break, my best friend Jeff’s father died. Just two weeks earlier, Jeff’s father was initially diagnosed with stage 4 inoperable kidney cancer. With his mother having passed away a little over a year ago and without any siblings, Jeff, who is only 19, has suddenly been left more alone than anyone else I know. Jeff has suffered, and is suffering, in ways few of us will ever know. I can’t pretend to understand Jeff’s suffering and I felt powerless to help. All I could do was sit and listen to my friend in pain.
In the days following the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, Nov. 13, the world has come together in remarkable ways to show France solidarity. Sporting events across the United States took a moment of silence to honor the victims. Facebook implemented a temporary French flag profile picture. President Obama made a statement that the United States was prepared to aid France with whatever it needed in the coming days. Here at Princeton, a candlelight vigil was held.
The Honor Committee is an enigma to many students. As a freshman during orientation, you walk into Dillon Gymnasium, sign your name under the Honor Code and think nothing of it until the night before your first paper is due. Then, you try to remember the right wording for this complex but highly specific phrase that affirms that you have not cheated or plagiarized on the assignment.
Though midterms are looming, last week Princeton students endured the first real storm of the season, the tail end of Hurricane Joaquin. With everyone confined to their bedroom for the two days of downpours, Yik-yak was saturated with one-liners about “Netflix and chill” and other complaints or celebrations of getting “wet.”