Why you shouldn't take classes on Wednesdays
Hear me out: you shouldn’t take classes on Wednesdays.
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Hear me out: you shouldn’t take classes on Wednesdays.
This piece is part one of a two-part Dispatch collection and part of the Dispatch summer 2022 series. Dispatches at The Prospect are brief reflections from our writers that focus on their experiences during the summer break.
Dispatches at The Prospect are brief reflections from our writers that focus on their experiences during the summer break. This piece is part of the Dispatch summer 2022 series.
“Я люблю тебя.” I love you.
Dispatches at The Prospect are brief reflections from our writers that focus on their experiences during the summer break. This piece is part of the Dispatch summer 2022 series.
Dispatches at The Prospect are brief reflections from our writers that focus on their experiences during the summer break. This piece is part of the Dispatch summer 2022 series.
Content Warning: The following piece contains mentions of death.
Dispatches at The Prospect are brief reflections from our writers that focus on their experiences during the summer break. This piece is part of the Dispatch summer 2022 series.
Dispatches at The Prospect are brief reflections from our writers that focus on their experiences during the summer break. This piece is part of the Dispatch summer 2022 series.
Dispatches at The Prospect are brief reflections from our writers that focus on their experiences during the summer break. This piece is part the Dispatch summer 2022 series.
Dispatches at The Prospect are brief reflections from our writers that focus on their experiences during the summer break. This piece is part the Dispatch summer 2022 series.
Dispatches at The Prospect are brief reflections from our writers that focus on their experiences during the summer break. This piece is part the Dispatch summer 2022 series.
It was a little over four years ago that I first stepped foot onto campus. I had missed Princeton Preview because of classes, so I was touring campus with my family later in the spring. I remember the sun scorching the back of my neck as I questioned why the Engineering Quadrangle was so distant from everything else. I was most confused by how buildings with vastly different architectures could constitute a cohesive campus — take, for instance, modern buildings such as the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and compare them to gothic buildings like Firestone Library. Nothing appeared to fit in.
On the last day of April, I was rudely awakened by the noise outside my window. Assuming it was from the museum construction, I tossed in my bed and attempted to capture a few more precious minutes of sleep. Having failed in this attempt, however, I soon walked over to my window only to discover that the noise — the banging and humming, the occasional cracks and deep thuds — was not from the raising of a new museum but from the razing of the tree right in front of my dorm.
I am often tormented by the etiquette of email. As a literary form — if we can call it that — email sits somewhere between the formality of handwritten letters and the intimacy and expediency of text messages. At times, due to its vast range of applications and correspondents, learning the craft of email often feels like learning how to code switch online, perhaps more so than any other form of digital communication. Though there are not many hard skills I’ve acquired at Princeton as an English major, I’ve at least learned how to write a pretty decent email.
When I gave campus tours during my first-year summer, I first explained the senior thesis by intimidating prospective students: it’s a 70-to-100-page behemoth on a topic entirely of their choosing, as traveling to great lengths and conducting deep research to defend your arguments is expected of (roughly) all Princeton students. Properly worried, one could then explain how the University actually prepares you for that process. During writing seminar in your first year, you become familiar with the conventions of research standards. Then after some exploration sophomore year, you get to focus your writing in a junior paper or two — challenging, but not overwhelming efforts that ultimately prepare you to tackle the greater task. I would feel an exhale from the group after providing that reassurance, which I gave with false confidence as if I knew then what it meant to live through it.
Michael Pratt has been the Conductor of the Princeton University Orchestra (PUO) for 44 years and has served as the Director of the Certificate Program in Music Performance since its inception in 1991. He provided the original inspiration for and continues to direct Princeton’s partnership with the Royal College of Music, London. Throughout his career, he has conducted many esteemed ensembles — including the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and the Odessa (Ukraine) Philharmonic — and in 2018 he was awarded an honorary membership to the Royal College of Music, London by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales.
I’ve always had a morbid obsession with the aestheticization of my own reality. In my mind, if I existed within the realms of the aesthetic — if my room was beautiful, if my clothes looked good on me, if my hair fell in just the right way — I would be happy. I aspired towards the Platonic ideal of “that girl” for the longest time.
“Long live all the magic we made
There is something unusually cruel about making friends in the four short years of college.