24 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(05/19/16 10:58pm)
The Office of International Programs at Princeton University posts lots of post-graduate fellowships. 54 to be exact. The fellowships provide potential opportunities for Princeton students to continue their education in the US or abroad in a wide range of topics, from studying the Senegalese language of Wolof to atmospheric sciences, oceanography or hydrology.
(04/08/15 3:18pm)
This past year,the most prevalent statistic for college campuses across the country was the suicide rate — a number that has been re-calculated time and time again.In the past week alone, the LA Times, the Boston Globe and campus newspapers across thecountry have reported increasing rates of student suicides and the accompanying demand for more psychological services. The University and the Princeton student body have similarly voiced concerns about the culture around stress, depression and suicide on campus, along with the establishment of student organizations such as the Mental Health Initiative and the in-development Peer Connections program. It’s clear that students want to be more sensitive to this issue — after all, no one wants to be unhelpful or unsympathetic to friends who reach out for help. However, few of us are equipped to help in the correct way.
(03/24/15 2:25pm)
Do you remember that film “Good Will Hunting”? Where Matt Damon’s character calls out this guy in a Harvard bar for regurgitating some advanced textbook just to impress a girl? At one point, he’s sitting on a park bench with Robin Williams and Robin says, “you’re just a kid, you don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.” Matt’s supposed to be playing a young genius that has gone unrecognized by the world. As a student on Princeton’s campus — as a part of the Ivy League community — I’m pretty sure I’ve met a couple of geniuses and probably a lot more who could almost qualify. We all talk about this top-class education, where the students are reading all the time. We’re busy taking advantage of all the information that’s out there. After hearing Monica Lewinsky’s TED Talk, I've begun to wonder if that’s actually a good thing. Should we be striving to know everything, to pass judgement on everything?
(02/24/15 2:08pm)
There really aren’t any shortcuts on Princeton campus. For a student body whose day-to-day activity involves quite a lot of walking and biking, it seems like there’s never enough time for the trek from Frick Chemistry Laboratory to East Pyne. The new construction and renovation projects scattered around campus certainly don’t make those ten minutes between classes any easier. What many students don’t know is that these new buildings represent something that we should be proud of — the University’s commitment to sustainability.
(11/24/14 6:51pm)
“I swear I’m not homophobic,” a student said defensively at dinner the other day. “I mean, some of my best friends are gay,” he continued. Having just heard the insensitive remark he had made moments before, I didn’t know what to believe.To an extent, the purpose of his assertion made sense. After all, at a university where levels of image and self-identity are prized and therefore vehemently protected and monitored, no student wants to be called a bigot by his peers. However, his statement sounded a lot like the phrase “not to sound offensive or anything,” a common excuse for saying something that is irrefutably offensive. When we’re called out for being prejudiced, statements like these show that we don’t hold ourselves accountable for the things we say and perhaps even the ideas we subscribe to. Even more so, it shows how far we still have to go on the road to acceptance.When I heard the student say this at dinner, I found myself to be the only one taken aback by his statement. Whipping out the fact that his friend group included people from the LGBTQIA community as justification for the fairly offensive comment he made beforehand still seemed like discrimination to me. While this most likely was not his intent, it reflected the culture that still prevails today — an underlying insensitivity covered up by the appearance of acceptance. While his statement may have seemed harmless enough, we have to remember that no person ever signs up to be the token gay friend, or the token black friend, or the token female friend. Pulling out characteristics of people, like playing cards, for one’s own benefit is simply using them to feel at peace with the possibility of one’s own prejudice. It is merely an example of homoexoticism: exoticizing gay people as a platform to make insensitive comments in order to view them in a different light that is nonetheless offensive.In the 1970s, when policies regarding underrepresentation of historically privileged groups and affirmative action were being discussed and implemented, the definition for discrimination was extended to include the concept of reverse discrimination — the act of favoring individuals belonging to historically disadvantaged and discriminated against groups. However, in the simplest sense, discrimination, to me, is the act of putting people “in their place” and deciding exactly what “place” that is.For example, the term, “gay best friend,” coined and popularized by social media, has glamorized and exoticized the value of having homosexual friends compared to heterosexual friends. I find this phenomenon to be incredibly offensive because behind its illusion of acceptance, it forces people into a restricted niche beyond which any real personality or value system they have to contribute is not only unexpected, but to an extent, unwelcome.A friend once stopped me to draw my attention to a gay couple holding hands and said, “Wait, that’s so cute.” At first, I brushed it off as admiration for a public display of affection; however, I wondered if she would make a similar comment about a heterosexual couple holding hands. Would she have stopped me to take notice of an opposite-sex couple’s moment of romance as she had in this instance?In the modern context, words like “cute” and “adorable” often refer to things that entertain us with their vulnerability, and in this way, our comments have begun to have patronizing undertones. Therefore, when we use these to characterize a homosexual individual’s relationship, it is almost as if we are delegitimizing it, since “cute” and “adorable” describe things that we rarely take seriously. In a sense, by saying these words, we show how we have transitioned from a period of homophobia to one of what I call homoexoticism: acknowledging and applauding homosexuality for what we perceive as its unconventionality. However, neither homophobia nor homoexoticism is even close to true acceptance. True acceptance entails approaching people with non-mainstream sexual orientations or gender identities in the same way we would approach someone who is heterosexual.Even though I’ve heard students make homoexoticizing comments on campus, I do believe that the University and its student body have made exceptional strides with regard to the LGBTQIA movement. After all, just this past Sunday, students gathered for the memorial ceremony on the New Jersey Statewide Trans Day of Remembrance to honor those who had been killed due to anti-transgender hatred and violence. A little more than a month ago, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center released a video to commemorate National Coming Out Day — a day that marks the anniversary of the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights and continues to celebrate those who have come out as LGBT or to join the community as a straight ally.Despite these services that reflect the potential and solidarity of the student body, and the on-campus presence of institutions such as the LGBT Center, there is still so much personal work that each student must do, beyond the scope of what these events can do for them. Unless this happens, we will continue to find ourselves enabling a form of discrimination that our generation has conveniently fashioned in order to exonerate ourselves from any blame.Isabella Gomes is an ecology and evolutionary biology major from Irvine, Calif. She can be reached at igomes@princeton.edu.
(11/11/14 7:22pm)
“Don’t bother befriending any visiting students,” says Creative Director and Deputy Arts & Lit Editor of The Oxford Student, Natalie Harney. “Yes, they’re unbelievably exotic, but too late will you realize that they aren’t in it for the long haul, and before you know it, they’ll have abandoned you for their ‘real’ friends back home.”Ever since this statement was published in an OxStu articleon Oct. 17, Harney has received substantial backlash for advising matriculating students to avoid associating with visiting students. Harney thereby insinuated not only that friendships with exchange students are temporary but also that they are, frankly, shallow. It’s hard to figure out who the victims would be, considering both visiting students and matriculating students would suffer from an attitude that basically shuns a valuable minority of a college’s student body.If we consider the premise of weighing the pros and cons of a relationship, Harney’s statement implies that we’re judging and, even more so, setting a value on a group of students before we’ve had the opportunity to get to know them. To me, this seems like outright discrimination. This outlook reinforces the flawed approach of making friends in college with the sole motive of making connections. While college is one of the first entry points at which young adults can independently network, this doesn’t mean that every interaction you have should be quantified by its potential return.Even if we do consider that many of the relationships students make in college are connections, then wouldn’t it be in their best interests to broaden these horizons, regardless of how they do this? From Harney’s perspective, we’re almost assuming that our careers are limited to the opportunities and people who are available to us in our immediate geographical vicinity in our four years as undergraduates. As students with majors sweeping from global health to international relations to politics and economics, shouldn’t we make an effort to learn more about different societies from the very people who are experiencing them firsthand, rather than only having an understanding based on class readings from humanities textbooks? And this doesn’t just apply to students in the social sciences. Even majors that don’t explicitly advertise international collaboration, like science, technology, engineering and mathematics, they inevitably demand that their professionals have an ability to network internationally and have an understanding of the sociological and historical factors that impact their work.Furthermore, I personally resent the word “exotic” in characterizing a student’s value in any relationship. I can almost guarantee that no admission or study abroad committee accepts students to their university based on the criteria of “exoticism” —a word that in and of itself reduces the personal worth and academic merit of an entire demographic of students to an inappropriate and undeserved stereotype. In fact, it’s really not even appropriate to say that the main value of befriending international and visiting students is that they can bring their individual cultures and stories to the table. After all, this inconsiderate expectation would basically demand that they limit themselves to talking about their countries without being acknowledged as an intellectual being beyond this contribution.Most of all, Harney’s quote highlights the temporality of the relationship as her reasoning for why it’s not worth it to befriend international students. This is problematic on many levels —the first being that compared to the grand scheme of our careers and our lives, most of our college interactions can be seen as temporary. However, this hasn’t meant that students have just stopped trying to bond and network with even the matriculating students. Her concern with the potential impermanence of friendships with visiting students puts an unreasonable pressure on a relationship that can actually endure if it is not approached with this kind of skepticism and reluctance. After all, just because we’ve gone away to college, doesn’t mean that we’ve stopped talking to our friends from high school — it only means that we have to use different means to continue the communication and that we have someone to visit if we ever travel. The opportunity to meet people and form a different kind of relationship is often a major reason why international and visiting students choose to study abroad in the first place, which means that it’s even more necessary that we welcome them rather than shun them based on the fact that they’ll reliably leave at the end of their program — lest they leave our institution regretting the experience.While Harney’s statement might have been a reflection of a bad experience or even a statement regarding the difficulties of enduring and maintaining a long-distance friendship, I certainly hope that this isn’t an outlook that the majority of students have toward international and visiting students. After all, should we ever choose to participate in study abroad —whether it last for a semester or a couple of years — wouldn’t we want to be welcomed into an environment that treats us as assets both personally and academically, rather than potential heartbreaks? After my four years at the University, I certainly hope that the last advice I can give isn’t for students to keep their distance from visiting students but to appreciate these students’ presences while they’re here and to sustain the relationships once the visiting students leave.Isabella Gomes is an ecology and evolutionary biology major from Irvine, Calif. She can be reached at igomes@princeton.edu.
(10/21/14 6:30pm)
With the revamping of its sexual harassment policy, the University has approved changes to how it investigates sexual assault on campus. In many instances, students, faculty and administrators have stood up in town hall meetings, committee hearings and in writing to discuss these policy change recommendations. The participants in these discussions often bring up the topic of a victim’s choice to report. When this topic arises, debate seems to attend more to the ethics and societal responsibility of reporting, rather than the personal impact the process of reporting may have on the victim.
(10/13/14 6:10pm)
Institutions of higher education are no strangers to high-profile gifts from their successful alumni. In particular, Cornell University is the recent recipient of a $50 million gift from alumnus and billionaire hedge fund manager David Einhorn. This $50 million donation, which will be supplemented by another $100 million from outside donors, will fund the university’s new 10-year initiative called Engaged Cornell, which will encourage students to go beyond the classroom and have hands-on experiences through community-university partnerships. The goal of expanding the percentage of student engagement in communities to 100 percent is certainly noble and inspiring. However, the initiative’s goal to enable departments to offer these community-integrated courses at all levels of expertise, including introductory-level classes, can be troubling.In her Oct. 6 article in The New York Times, Ariel Kaminer covered the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust’s gift to Cornell through the lens of the recent interest in integrating student education with community service experience. She states that “interest in educational styles tends to run in cycles, and community engagement is a trendy topic these days.” Besides the problematic notion of community engagement as being “trendy,” Kaminer’s article also references Engaged Cornell and other university initiatives that integrate community participation and learning as “experiments.” While these two word choices may not be part of the point of Kaminer’s article, they do highlight the possible consequences of squeezing students from introductory-level courses (and not just advanced courses) into potentially high-impact programs.If we take a look at Princeton’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy, we can see the emphasis on developing students’ understanding and research of the subject before application. The program requires field- or lab-based research specifically during the summer between junior and senior years —the purpose of which is to make sure that students will already have taken the required core courses—GHP 350: Critical Perspectives in Global Health and GHP 351: Epidemiology —in their junior years before they go abroad. This is so that students will make their best efforts to be prepared for their field experiences ahead of time through courses like GHP 350 and 351. These courses provide students with an introduction to the world of development and policy and to the importance of acknowledging that their future actions in this world will have socioeconomic implications that will directly affect the lives of people around the world. Courses like GHP 350 and 351 inform and remind students that there really is a way to do service wrong. After all, if a community is willing to receive a student’s help and input, shouldn’t that student be knowledgeable about that community’s culture, history and economy as well as effective ways to establish a program that is both integrated and sustainable. There is a way to do volunteering, community engagement and policy-making incorrectly so that while they might have a “high-impact” effect on the targeted community, that impact may be undesired and perhaps even harmful to that community.While the lofty goals for Engaged Cornell have fantastic intentions, allowing students to engage in communities before they have received a certain amount of foundation in the classroom and from existing literature on a topic means that they’re going into these communities with a very small toolbox. Even though the students can learn on the job, there’s really not enough room for “trial-and-error” as learning usually involves because these are real people whom students work with. And these people may have already been struggling before that student came to “learn on the job.”Furthermore, within the goals of Engaged Cornell listed in the Cornell Chronicle on Oct. 6, the program plans to “launch a new engaged-learning leadership development program, available to all students across colleges, Leadership for the Greater Good, where student exemplars who successfully complete the program will receive special recognition upon graduation” by 2025. The possibility of special recognition for exemplary completion of the program upon graduation could mean that many students will try to participate in the program without the purity of intention and sensitivity that should drive community engagement. Sure, a major factor of participating in community service for students may already be that added resume boost, but the official honors that the initiative offers and promotes in its goals may accentuate this misguided way of thinking, and if anything, conflict with the intentions of the initiative itself.Besides the lack of formal learning in the classroom and the potentially counterproductive effect of offering special recognition, the program’s inclusion of students in introductory levels is inherently problematic in that it may include college sophomores and even freshmen. It is true that our freshman and sophomore years are characterized by large 200-person-plus lectures without much individualized attention or practical application of material, so a program like this can be a dream come true. However, encouraging students —who might not have had as much training, guidance or culture-specific classes as would an upperclassman —to get out there in the “real world” and make “high-impact” changes in the communities they’ve barely studied cannot be a wise allocation of such valuable resources.In spite of their emphasis on out-of-the-classroom teaching, community-engaged initiatives often fail to recognize that the classroom may be the place where students learn respect for the communities they wish to serve before they make the mistake of learning it the hard way.Isabella Gomes is an ecology and evolutionary biology major from Irvine, Calif. She can be reached at igomes@princeton.edu.
(09/29/14 6:58pm)
As the University faces an investigation for possible violations of federal law under Title IX, it has directed some of its attention to the role of residential college advisers in new policy changes. In the past, RCAs were not required to report sexual misconduct cases to the directors of student life. However, under the new regulations, RCAs now have to report every case of which they are made aware, even if the victim isn’t one of their advisees. Once a case is reported, the University will conduct a mandatory investigation. While the University’s intended goal is to address sexual violence and harassment on campus, the policy change involving RCAs may discourage sexual assault victims from reporting their cases.
(09/17/14 11:07pm)
As of Aug. 29, 2014, the ALS Association proudly reported having received $100.9 million from over three million donors within a month, thanks to this summer’s viral Ice Bucket Challenge. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, is a disease in which the progressive degeneration of motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord results in muscle weakness and atrophy. This often leads to total paralysis and death within two to five years. In the campaign to find a cure, many non-profits, such as Project A.L.S., have adopted the Ice Bucket Challenge, posting it onto their front pages and turning it into a trending social media phenomenon that gathers more supporters each day. However, despite having had an impressive run with no signs of slowing down any time soon, the Ice Bucket Challenge has its critics — and rightfully so.
(09/14/14 6:38pm)
In her Aug. 18 column in the New York Post, Doree Lewak discusses how she views the act of “catcalling” to be an innocuous form of “self-empowerment" for women, saying that it should deliver a “drive-by dose of confidence” rather than being considered something as negative as street harassment. After reading Lewak’s column, I wondered just how common it was for professional or amateur writers as well as online commentators to pass off unacceptable social behavior by saying that it was merely “primal” and has probably existed for centuries, as Lewak did.
(05/04/14 6:10pm)
Around the time when sophomores were supposed to begin declaring their majors, I was talking to a female student at dinner about a friend of mine who was seriously considering Classics as his department of choice. He had taken classes in the department and excelled within this incredibly intellectual field of study. In consideration of the “white privilege” conversation that has been circulating, I will say that my friend is a white, heterosexual male from a fairly well off background — a legacy no less — but keep in mind that the student at dinner didn’t know that. Despite knowing nothing about my friend’s background except for his race and gender, as well as making false assumptions regarding the difficulty of certain humanities departments such as Classics, the girl at dinner said “it’s probably because he can afford to be a Classics major.” And I wondered what this meant.
(04/14/14 7:04pm)
In her April 11column “Ordinary people,” Morgan Jerkins tries to remind us that in spite of the distractions of an overwhelming workload, extracurriculars and the general stress that comes with being a Princeton student, the University allows us the chance to interact with world-renowned scholars and academic legends. She reminds us that while we are hustling to the next place we have to be, we often forget that we’re here — if only for just four years — at an incredible university.
(04/01/14 6:30pm)
My mother was an artist. She went into college as an artist and came out of it as one. At no point did she second-guess this career because of dips in the economy, cautionary tales of the struggling artist or the expansion of departments in “usable” majors. At no point did she doubt herself and acquire a backup. However, I grew up always making sure I had a safety net, as if I were afraid of the next fall. Regrettably enough, I’ve found that this is the case for many Princeton students. Why is it that so many students fear the “no-guarantee” pathway even if that risk might be right for them? Why is it that so many Princeton students shy away from visual arts, music, philosophy and creative writing or at best, say they’d only pursue these subjects through extracurricular activities, rather than more professional means? Can we really consider it wise and advisable for students to make their passions their backups if their “real” jobs don’t pan out?
(03/24/14 7:43pm)
While at Princeton, students are expected to talk about their experiences struggling to get here, their stories of trying to stay here — and stay sane, for that matter — and most of all, what helped them make it into this institution. Sometimes it seems like there is never a moment when we’re not trying to establish our merit whether to our peers or even to ourselves. Whether confronted with professors, preceptors, classmates or friends, we have to mark out what makes us special and remarkable, because in this case, “being special” sometimes seems to be as close as we can get to “belonging.” But what happens when your appearance and your stereotype dictate a false image or a misrepresentation of what really makes you special?
(02/25/14 8:37pm)
The Princeton University Library system holds almost 60,000 theses, written by senior students from 1926 to 2013. But, other than living trapped in Mudd Library, where do these theses ever really go? Your words or calculations will represent a space of the world that has previously gone unexplored. Your thesis will entail collaboration with sleepless nights,extraordinary professors and, most likely, a great deal of funding. But the bulky senior thesis, with its unnerving deadlines and demands, might not be the best way to get the most out of our education or prepare us for our future careers, whether we find ourselves thrust into the workforce or tethered to another academic institution.
(02/20/14 7:05pm)
When Princeton students try to show their school spirit to non-Princeton students, it seems the line between engaging in genuine school appreciation and inter-university comparisons isn’t always clear. School appreciation isn’t reliant on what another university has — it is more centered on liking Princeton for Princeton’s sake, while inter-university comparisons often seem to make reference to Princeton being better than other institutions.
(02/10/14 9:13pm)
During my internship at an HIV/AIDS research center in South Africa, a clinician recalled to me one of her earliest experiences with an HIV patient from a township in the Western Cape. The patient was a middle-aged woman who worked during the day and, when her children came home, took care of them and her husband. She was a provider, a mother and a wife —an entire support system within one individual. This woman had already completed a significant portion of the HIV treatment by the time she spoke to the clinician. However, during this particular meeting, the patient said quite simply that she wasn’t going to come back to finish the rest of the treatment. The clinician couldn’t understand it. Frankly, neither could I.
(12/09/13 9:20pm)
Princeton students never seem to fail to dazzle board members of clubs or job interviewers with their impressive resumes and laundry lists of commitments. However, once asked to discuss their interests in the field and to showcase what they know about current national and global events relevant to the position or organization they’re interested in, many students seem to struggle. In an interview for a public health-related club on campus, I found that my interviewees often managed to find some new health policy, a medical society census or national health concern to name-drop. However, when it came time for the interviewee to demonstrate their understanding of the implications of the policy or what their opinions were, I found myself in the midst of a lot of awkward standstills.
(11/18/13 10:14pm)
In her Nov. 13column, “Pursuing our passions,” Prianka Misra proposes that classes should “adopt a more applied philosophy and utilize an involved approach to assignments and activities, teaching students the problem-solving strategies that are reflected in the real world.” Misra discusses her experience in Professor John Danner’s interactive and application-heavy class, “Special Topics in Social Entrepreneurship: Ventures to Address Global Challenges.” The class allows students to delve into a “pre-professional realm of academics” by letting them apply the concepts they learn to their own venture ideas. While classes like Danner’s certainly offer students a new approach to learning about real-world subjects such as economic sustainability and entrepreneurship, Misra’s vision of the ideal course is not easily applicable to courses in other concentrations and could even be detrimental to the learning process of students in STEM fields.