After I got into Princeton this past spring, I spent a lot of time fantasizing about discussing literature over coffee with Toni Morrison, chatting with Cornel West GS '80 as I saunter to class and eating breakfast, lunch and dinner with Joyce Carol Oates. In fact, one of the reasons I chose Princeton was the unrealistic hope that such fantasies would become reality once I became a student. The Admission Office does not explicitly advertise such intimacy with the faculty, but I interpreted the emphasis on what makes Princeton distinct - the attention paid to undergraduates - to mean that each and every faculty member would go to every possible length to get to know me.
When in the first week of school the master of Mathey College invited the freshmen in my RCA group to have dinner at his house, I thought that it was the beginning of my companionship with Princeton faculty. In the following days and weeks, though, that dinner was the only one of its kind. As I got sucked into course work, social life and sleep, time moved by too quickly for me to realize that my dream of familiarity with the faculty had not come true.
Certainly there are avenues, like office hours and professor-led precepts, designed specifically for getting to know professors. College is all about finding independence, and the same is true for meeting and interacting with professors. For freshmen, this is an especially difficult concept to grasp because we are still trying to figure out when and how to take advantage of our opportunities and to take the initiative. And, to be honest, I think most of us are too intimidated to meet our professors.
The fact of the matter is that I do want to be confident enough to ask my professor questions and start a conversation, but, as a freshman, I'm not assertive enough. The idea of college has yet to settle in, and much of the time I feel like I'm just a high school student visiting college. Everybody around me seems so accomplished that I feel like sometimes I can't compete. Right now, my classmates and I have such high hopes for our Princeton careers that we are terrified of failure, and this is true in the case of meeting professors, too. We are afraid that they may not like us or worse, like us but fail us anyway.
I'd like to prove to my professors that there's more to me than my tests or the times that I accidentally sleep in; I'd like to hope that professors feel the same way about their students. I'm sure all of my professors have interesting life experiences and insights they can't cover in a lecture or in class. It is these kinds of extra experiences that might inspire me to pursue my own interests.
Now here I am, the week before midterms, contemplating how to make up for lost time and improve my standings with my professor. It's unlikely that my newfound diligence in taking notes is going to be noticed, but I'm still too timid to go to office hours to introduce myself. I will probably hold off until next semester on really making an effort to get to know my professors, but I know that when I've fully acclimated to my drastic change in environment, I'll take the next step. Despite the excuses I make to myself for not befriending my professors - I'm still trying to find time to make friends and keep up with my work, etc. - I don't want it to be something I put off forever. Hopefully, the moment I become comfortable enough at Princeton to stop putting this off comes sooner rather than later.
Simone Hill is a freshman from Atlanta, Ga., and can be reached at simoneh@princeton.edu.
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