Brendan Carroll joins Michael Medeiros for this week's PrinceCast to discuss Elena Kagan and the Supreme Court, the lack of a culture of conversation at Princeton and Newman's day.
Whereas the undergrad admission process explicitly selects candidates who would fit well into the undergrad community, graduate admission is based solely on academic criteria. It is probably impossible to try to do otherwise, but it does mean the average international grad students are less well-equipped than their undergrad counterparts to deal with the issues involved.
I would like to highlight two worthy service opportunities for juniors and underclassmen thinking about next year. In addition to directly affecting the Princeton community in a positive way, both activities can be found within a five-minute walk from Nassau Hall.
While I and other Princetonians with the opportunity to study abroad on one of the major post-graduate fellowships must first give thanks to our parents and teachers, the countless Sunday mornings drowned in Texas French toast, yellow Powerade and debate over The New York Times with friends in the Terrace Club “smoking room” prepared me well for the combative, but intellectual, atmosphere of fellowship interviews.
To some of us, Princeton financial aid is generous. It is time, however, to reevaluate the criteria for the distribution of that generosity.
If you knew that the health of half our campus and our state was at stake, wouldn’t you be alarmed?
While incentivizing more people to run for open positions is a good thing, this should not occur at a cost to students who submitted their statements before the initial deadline.
The list of climate-change-related numbers is endless. But people don’t relate to numbers. People relate to people. We connect to feelings. It’s much harder to be moved by abstract concepts of danger with consequences 50 or 100 years down the line.
The question is, how much does one year of school increase a student’s employability? For engineers, this difference could be great: Engineers only take “engineering” their sophomore year. However, this distinction doesn’t exist to nearly the same extent for A.B. students.
I was tricked by websites like College Confidential (admit it, you looked at it too) into believing that I would visit a school and suddenly feel a deep, undeniable connection to it while walking around campus. Alas, this love affair never happened. I liked all of the schools to which I was admitted just fine.
McGinley seems to press us, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great, and wouldn’t we be embracing some fundamental aspects of our humanity, if we paid far greater attention to and wrestled with the moral consequences of our actions?” But the answer to that is no. Not if it means a concern with “touchstone” moral values to the exclusion of other deeply-held and fundamental human values. Much of what is great about life is valuable in spite of the moral consequences.
With little understanding of the inner workings and processes of the Honor Committee, students often feel concerned that the committee is not truly a group of their peers or representatives but is a body intent on convicting students. In considering these concerns and looking to make the process both more transparent and more representative, the creation of a jury system within the current honor system would address many student objections.
To win in the interview game — so I have seen over the years — candidates need not only the knowledge and skills that courses and officially sanctioned activities provide, but also a much wider sense of what matters in the world and a honed ability to carry on discussion. But Princeton, as I have known it for 35 years, doesn’t foster this kind of conversation as effectively as many of its sister institutions.
It strikes me as probable that Kagan shares Obama’s constitutional vision, and her reputation among her fellow lawyers is high. But the question of whether she would add to the diversity of the court requires further interpretation.
Sophia LeMaire, Kelsey Zimmerman and Michael Medeiros discuss meal plan options.
