Dropping the (balancing) act
It is an easy enough question.I am sitting in a bakery in my hometown, digging into a salted caramel brownie, when a friend asks me.
It is an easy enough question.I am sitting in a bakery in my hometown, digging into a salted caramel brownie, when a friend asks me.
This past week marked a transition in the USG?s administration from Bruce Easop ?13 to Shawon Jackson ?15.
The blogosphere is alive with the sound, not of music, but of fury. Everywhere from ?The Chronicle of Higher Education? to the blog ?100 Reasons,? the digerati insist that you have to be insane to enter a doctoral program in the humanities.Doctorates in the humanities take too long too finish: The median time has passed nine years, during which degree candidates live on a pittance and often postpone important life decisions (such as having children). Around 50 percent drop out.
Since coming to Princeton, I?ve become an expert at that game where you name a country, then the next person names a country that starts with the last letter of the first country and so on.
Beneath the foreclosures, layoffs and market crashes of 2008 and beyond, a moral bankruptcy festers on Wall Street.
Last week, one of Princeton?s most controversial traditions consumed the campus as students signed into or bickered one or more of our 11 eating clubs.
As a sophomore, I?ve just experienced the most intimate contact I?ll have with the process of joining an eating club in my time here at Princeton.
In early February, I met with a dozen students over a dinner organized by Princelink.com, a new forum for student debate.
?Got so drunk last night man ? Dude, he was booting all over the club ? Bro, I don?t even remember who I was hooking up with ? You see her totally wasted last weekend??
To my freshman self, here is a list of some things that I would like to have known three years ago:
The pennants flew in the wind as we crossed the pathway lined with alumni keeping tempo with their ?rahs? and ?sisses? while we marched, our parents sending us off into the distance with a teary wave.Thus began freshman week, when every night was a chance to have an unforgettable moment.
Until a few weeks ago, terms like ?Bicker? and ?hosing? were vague, shadowy elements of a college experience that I neither understood nor cared about.
The Princeton Alcohol and Drug Alliance announced in a meeting on Thursday that it will form a task force to review an ordinance that would prohibit underage drinking on private property. Among other implications, this new ordinance would enable Borough police officers to search the eating clubs, as long as they have probable cause.
Why stop at a center devoted to the Persian Gulf when one could have a whole campus there? What is Princeton’s international strategy? The new president must face these questions as he or she articulates what it means for a university in suburban New Jersey to declare itself “in the service of all nations.”
One of the reasons we come to the University is to accumulate knowledge, but a more important aspect is the building of our capacity to understand how that knowledge is useful. Perhaps, since any factoid can be unearthed immediately, the new frontier of not knowing exists exclusively in the realm of sophisticated problem solving — Princeton teaching us how to think.
Today, instead of taking a stance on an issue, we would like to explain the editorial process and invite interested freshmen, sophomores and juniors to apply to join the Board.
But every time I log into TigerTracks, it feels like a hassle. Will I find something useful, or won’t I? How often do I have to log in to find a relevant position — every day, week, month? Do I need to upload an updated resume? Was I automatically logged out again? For what it’s worth, I do find TigerTracks to be pretty good. Pretty, pretty, pretty … pretty good. However, I would suggest a few updates.
It’s hard to deny that, at its core, Bicker is elitist, demeaning and sometimes shockingly cruel. Saying that Bicker is a necessary evil is one thing (though I disagree), but claiming that it’s not problematic is another.