35 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(11/10/14 7:10pm)
One of the best parts of the University’s undergrad curriculum is the freedom to explore during your first two years (and to some degree, even after you’ve selected a major). We don’t have standard general education courses that every single freshman or sophomore has to take, like at Columbia. While writing seminar is required, the topics differ dramatically from class to class, and students are given the ability to rank their preferences, and even the distribution requirements we do have are, in my experience, extremely broad and flexible. The Admission website advertises Princeton as a place where undergraduates are “encouraged to explore the curriculum” and take classes unrelated to their prospective majors. The across-the-board high quality of the University’s departments means that it’s perfectly reasonable to come in as a math major and graduate with a comparative literature degree and expect a high-caliber experience in either department.
(10/13/14 6:10pm)
A few weeks ago, I went to a law school admission presentation hosted by four of the top programs in the country. As a sophomore who still hasn’t fully decided what I want to major in, let alone what exactly I want to do after Princeton, I felt a bit awkward going. This was, of course, exacerbated by the fact that I assumed I’d be the youngest person there and that I really didn’t need to be thinking that far ahead yet anyway. But, nevertheless, I found myself a seat in the back of Frist Campus Center 302 less than two years after opening my acceptance letter from Princeton to hear about the law school equivalent of the Common Application and application process I feel like I just finished getting through.
(09/28/14 5:54pm)
In a recent opinion post in The New York Times, Anna Altman continues a recent trend, though certainly not a new phenomenon, of decrying tourists and tourism in general. Rather than seeing travel as a “bucket list … of places to check off,” she writes, we should actively embrace the Grand Tour model of tourism among young, upper-class men in the 17th through 19th centuries, in which we travel abroad (for months on end, if possible), seeking “cross-cultural experiences” and avoiding tourist traps like the Vatican and the Eiffel Tower as though they were the bubonic plague.
(09/22/14 6:23pm)
A pretty standard question that I am asked on Orange Key tours, especially by parents of prospective students, is what the living situation will be like for students at the University. Although they’re inevitably impressed when we walk by Witherspoon and Blair Halls, I find it tough to answer when they ask why there simply aren’t many apartment-style housing options for students, especially compared to other schools.
(09/17/14 11:19pm)
n any institution as large and complex as the University, a network of departments, offices, councils, organizations, programs, and commissions are needed to carry out essential functions. Such an intricate bureaucracy is by nature hard to navigate, and I wouldn’t hesitate to wager that almost no one here at the University could name all or even most of these organizations. For example, Conference and Events Services is different from Meetings and Convention Services, there are at least 3 separate University websites for International travel, and student funding (though now under the umbrella site of the Student Activities Funding Engine) still involves a patchwork of different offices, commissions, funds, departments and programs. Arguing that we should streamline these services is not my point here, and would require a degree of specificity not likely to be achieved in 800 words. But streamlining access to these services can indeed be done and ought to be. The most direct way in which we can do this is by creating a more efficient system for navigating the insane number of University and university-affiliated websites. Currently, the University’s homepage maintains an “A to Z” list of websites which can be filtered according to 5 categories (Academics, Administration, Arts, Research, and Sports). On the A section alone, there are 66 websites referenced, linking to services as different from each other as Accounts Payable and Acción Puertorriqueña. This system is hard to navigate unless you already know the specific site you need (in which case you probably don’t use the A to Z list anyways), and if you don’t know where to go on the site, scrolling through the A to Z list involves scanning hundreds of individual sites, which is simply impractical. Instead, I propose the University should organize its site hierarchically, similar to the folder systems on everyone’s computer. This would allow visitors to browse for the site they’re looking for for a given service (e.g. “Where do I go to register an event with ODUS?”), instead of relying on Google or the archaic A to Z list. For example, the site map could start with the categories used and others (Academic, Administration, Extracurricular, Athletic, etc.), and then upon clicking on one of these categories, a flow-chart style listing of websites would appear which the user could further refine through sub-categories. This change may not seem important, but in fact it is one of the most basic steps the University could take to ensure students and others can take full advantage of all the services and opportunities available to them here. Especially for new freshmen, who don’t come in knowing about SAFE, the Integrated Course Engine, easyPCE and the myriad other useful sites like them, providing a more top-down, hierarchical organization to University websites makes ease of access more universal. For instance, before selecting their first courses in the fall, instead of relying on the chance they hear about easyPCE from an upperclassman friend or discover the residential colleges’ “Favorite Courses” sites, freshmen would be able to navigate through a hierarchical listing. This could include perhaps, Academics to Courses to Course Selection, which would list several sites like the Registrar’s Course Offerings page, easyPCE, the college “Favorite Courses” listings, the academic advising program sites and the sites of the college academic deans, among others. This would mean in practice that the full range of resources available to students would be utilized right out of the gate in freshman year and would help students make better decisions about their first classes to take by taking advantage of the full slate of opinions, reviews, etc. that could affect their decision. Presumably, these offices and services are there for a reason, and if they have a website they probably do some kind of public interfacing, serve “customers” (i.e. students, faculty, and visitors), or at least provide information useful to readers of the site. Thus the aim of having publicly available information and services is better achieved not by maintaining a loose, disorganized apparatus of sites across the University’s domain, but by having an easy-to-navigate folder-like system in which users can find the office whose service they need without having to already know it. This isn’t a column in which I’ll argue for a controversial or sweeping change to a fundamental way in which the University conducts itself. This simply is a recommendation for a simple fix to a small problem, that would make everyday life that much easier for students, faculty, and others without requiring much in the way of resources to solve. But small problems are worth fixing, because in this case it has an outsized practical effect in the lives of students. Many of the columns I and others write propose changes that simply will never come. This is not that type of column, but instead a moderate, legitimately-feasible proposal that would make life for students easier at minimal cost.
(04/22/14 6:20pm)
When the time comes to pick classes at the end of each semester, we all find ourselves going through some stage of the same basic process: We consider how we’re going to fill our distribution requirements, what prerequisites or departmentals we need, which classes fill another class’s prereqs or how we’ll take classes around our independent work. Inevitably, the process becomes even more complicated when we factor in the afterthought of which classes we’d really like to take, which ones have the best professors or which ones have the most interesting topics. I believe that currently, the University’s distribution requirements —while much less restrictive than those of other schools —are still unnecessarily restrictive and that by eliminating or reducing some regulations concerning these requirements, Princeton can better achieve its goals.
(04/03/14 5:39pm)
In light of recent coverage of the administration’s decision to eliminate the overnight component of Princeton Preview and shorten it to two one-day events, I think it’s necessary we remind ourselves of the framework in which this decision was made. Even though we at Princeton love to joke about and downplay the importance of the meningitis outbreak, in reality it’s a serious enough issue to warrant this decision.
(03/23/14 7:05pm)
A few weeks ago, The Daily Princetonian reported that the University administration was considering overturning its current policy banning transfer students. Factors such as increased access for low-income students, community college students and military veterans were described as the motives for the possible shift. Even though shifting the policy such that transfer students could enter after freshman fall would most likely accomplish these goals, I believe that certain aspects of the University experience would make this plan as it stands infeasible, and enacting it without changing other policies would not be in the best interest of the students who would transfer here.
(02/25/14 7:06pm)
This past Friday, Ted Nugent issued a half-hearted, half-assed (though existent) apology for calling President Obama a “subhuman mongrel” while at a rally for Greg Abbott, attorney general of Texas and candidate for governor. This incident made me remember something I hadn’t thought of in a while: the flagrant and pervasive disrespect for the office of the presidency that has existed on an unprecedented level in the political sphere since, say, Jan. 20, 2009 (what a coincidence).
(02/11/14 8:40pm)
One of the legacies 2013 will leave behind, as Andrea Peterson wrote recently in The Washington Post, is that it was “the year that proved your paranoid friend right.” Since January of last year, we’ve learned that the National Security Agency is collecting massive amounts of phone call metadata, emails, location information of cell phones and is even listening to Xbox Live. Shocking as this obviously was to me, as a citizen of the country of “We the People,” one founded on civil liberties, what was perhaps more shocking was how mild the reaction of many Americans was. While polls showed that a small majority of U.S. citizens opposed the NSA’s collection of phone and Internet usage data, after months of reassurances by the President that the programs would be reformed and used responsibly, the numbers seem to have changed (or at least, the story seems to be dying down).
(12/11/13 10:26pm)
Staffing a historical committee at PMUNC, Princeton’s high school Model United Nations tournament, this past weekend, I inevitably got asked some pretty weird questions by the delegates of my 14-person Berlin Conference simulation. “Can the delegation of Belgium stage a democratic revolution to overthrow the King so that I don’t have to vote for this treaty?” “Can you look up some stats on the weapons manufacturing industry in Denmark in the 1880s for me?” “Is it OK for me to reference 'Heart of Darkness' even though it wasn’t written until 50 years after this conference?”
(11/21/13 12:09am)
When he walked out on stage, I could hardly have missed him. How could I, when he’s six-foot-six? But moreso because a feeling of incongruence immediately came over me. Standing on stage in a tailcoat, white bowtie and borrowed vintage Yale snapback was one of my best friends from high school, now a member of the Yale Glee Club.
(11/12/13 10:10pm)
Whenever today's college students tell people back home (especially of older generations) about what they’re majoring in, the inevitable response (either direct or implied by snide facial expressions) is usually either “good for you; that’ll really put you on the fast track” or “what are you going to do with that after you graduate?”
(10/16/13 8:50pm)
In the wake of the announcement that a committee was being created to review grade deflation, another presidential proposal — that of expanding the undergraduate student body — was largely overshadowed in campus discussion. As a possible means of enlarging the University, President Eisgruber '83 floated the idea of adding a seventh residential college or expanding Forbes College, currently the University’s smallest. Such an expansion, in either form, would be detrimental to both the student body and to the image of Princeton in comparison with its peer institutions.
(10/01/13 9:50pm)
One of the things I was most uncertain about as an incoming freshman was the Street. I never drank in high school, and my friend group didn’t party much, so I didn’t really know what to expect when I arrived on campus. My assumption was that I would be lost amid a sea of people much more at ease than me, and that I would head to the Street each weekend to find myself out of place and out of my element. And really, that’s all I had to go off of: assumptions. Because the fact of the matter is that until you reach freshman year, no one talks about the Street in any official capacity. Tours — even ones where parents aren’t present — dodge all questions related to Princeton nightlife. The Street closes for the entire weekend of Preview, so even if you stay an extra night with a friend, you don’t get to see what actually goes on at Princeton on Saturday nights.