Senior year brings an amalgam of intense feelings, confusions and apprehensions. It is a year of transition where independent work becomes significantly more serious and the prospect of leaving the academy for the first time is daunting.
In imagining what can only be the dramatic origins of a certain Princeton mantra, I like to think that one day a Princetonian on the cusp of graduation looked up at Blair Arch, its stones basked in a special sort of afternoon sun, and in a fit of nostalgia placed his hand on the shoulder of a passing freshman and warned, “You only get eight semesters here.” The freshman then thought of the very short eight semesters ahead of him and was struck with unease.
Over intersession, I spent three days in the living room of a cozy barn house on a retreat with the Princeton’s Women’s Mentorship Program.
My brother recently sent me a photo of a bathroom stall at his school, the University of California at Berkeley, and over the toilet seat dispenser, someone had attached a sign that read “Stanford diplomas, take one.” Naturally, I was tempted to replicate the idea at Princeton, replacing the school name of Stanford with the name Harvard, of course. Yet at the same time, I questioned the ultimate role that rivalries play in academia.
If I told you I’m on a varsity team, you could probably guess that I spend almost equal amounts of time in class and in practice or that I stress more over big races than big exams.
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.
In the fall of 1919, the Reserve Officers Training Corps was established at the University. Following on the heels of the “war to end all wars,” the new program struggled to gain enrollment, but, after a push by this very newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, and the University President, John Hibben, participation in ROTC surged.
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.
Recently, I think I’ve finally come to terms with the exclusive nature of just about every part of this campus.
One of the psychology classes I took last semester had a reputation for being a pass/D/fail hotspot that caters to half-asleep seniors trying to get their last Social Analysis distribution requirement done before graduation.
Over the past semester, the unsigned editorials featured on this page have discussed issues such as the creation of a university bike share program, reforming distribution requirements to reflect the growing importance of big data and President Obama’s higher education reforms.
Since I took a year off, I openly tell my friends that I struggle with anxiety and depression, and talk without shame about my regular sessions with a therapist.
Look closely, and you will see how often things fail. Take, for example, the failing of tree boughs under snow.
By Jason Adleberg From the late-night U-Store shopping sprees to the angry Princetonian op-eds, it seems to be that time of year again: Bicker is clearly on our minds, and it seems to have been for a while.
You, the reader, will never see the litany of corrections that went into this article before it made its way to publication, because it was composed entirely upon a computer screen — I say “composed” instead of “written” because there is an important distinction to be made between “writing” and “typing.” Almost all essays and papers college students submit are now started and finished digitally — in many cases, one submits the paper by email and receives an electronically submitted grade in return, an exchange that occurs completely within the virtual realm.
It’s time for a large number of Americans to hear what might seem like a harsh message: A degree from a four-year university might not be for you.
