I sat down in McCosh 10 Wednesday night ready to get owned by the ECO 100: Intro to Microeconomics final I didn't study much for. I had pulled an all-nighter the night before Dean's Date and just wasn't feeling it, but I figured half the class went out Tuesday night so I still might do OK.
As the final was about to start, a TA came to the front to write out corrections on the blackboard to mistakes printed in the final. As soon as she began to explain, complaints about the size of the text and demands that she read the changes out loud rang out from all corners of the room. Later in the test, another TA walked in to correct another mistake discovered in the test booklet and started writing it out on the blackboard, but before he finished writing the first equation, a student rudely interjected something like, "Before you bother to even write it out, could you just say it to us?" I agreed that it would probably be impossible for people sitting in the back and in the balcony to read what he wrote, but I was appalled by the lack of respect this student had shown the TA.
I believe that at Princeton, we generally don't attempt to fully respect the graduate student body. It seems easy for people to generalize and form stereotypes about graduate students, even going so far as to give those two words a negative connotation per se. Of course Princeton undergraduates have expectations that all their classes, including precepts led by TAs, should be of the highest caliber. While we have some great TAs, there are some who fail to effectively transfer knowledge to the undergrads, and eventually those TAs come to stand for all graduate students. Other complaints I've heard about grad students are that their spoken English is too heavily accented and they're incredibly socially awkward. I'm sure most of us here have at least one graduate student we've befriended, but we seem stuck in the mentality that the rest of the grad students just suck.
We like to make jokes about how they fail to shower and fail to shave their facial hair. Anytime they try to fit in, we say they're just really sketchy. We don't see them as part of the teaching staff and we don't see them as fellow students. I've witnessed an undergraduate and his TA have a conversation during class and then heard the undergrad talk behind the grad's back after the chat and wonder why the graduate student was trying to socialize with him. Is he serious? I hate to say it this way, but graduate students are people too. There may be two separate student worlds at Princeton, the undergraduate and the graduate, but they don't have to be completely shut off from each other. A lot of us find it awkward to find our TA chilling and enjoying a drink at an eating club on a Saturday night, but they just want to have a good time too.
Princeton is really a university primarily dedicated to its undergraduates, and the undergraduate population outnumbers the graduate population two to one. I'm sure that my peers' "undergraduate is better than graduate" mentality isn't restricted to our Orange Bubble, but the reasons just listed above are enough to perpetuate such a strong mentality on this campus.
I'd like to see some collaboration between the USG and the GSG occur. While it's important to maintain a cohesive undergraduate student body that gets to live the Princeton experience, I feel that getting some undergraduate-graduate mingling would help drop the stereotypes and mitigate the effects of our us vs. them mentality. There are already programs set up to improve the gap between undergrads and grads; one allows graduate students from outside the United States to work on their spoken English by conversing with undergrads.
I don't believe we have to merge our two worlds, but an exchange of sorts is necessary. So next time you see one of your TAs, ask him what's up, maybe ask him whether he loves or hates the Patriots or if he's seen "Superbad." You don't have to try to be buddy-buddy with them, but at least do a little reaching out. Ben Chen is a mechanical and aerospace engineering major from Los Altos, Calif. He can be reached at bc@princeton.edu
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