The problems started during orientation week, which happened to coincide with reading period in Princeton. We were traveling around Andalucia, and, though I’d had three weeks of winter break in which to get all my papers done, I was still adding the finishing touches, by which I mean I was still at least 20 pages of essay away from freedom. Instead of going out at night, I was pulling all-nighters in the bathrooms of hotel rooms, so that I could have the lights on and not wake up my roommate, to write papers for Dean’s Date.
Now it’s not like it’s abnormal to be writing until the deadline on Dean’s Date. I’m not sure there’s ever actually been a Dean’s Date when I’ve finished with time to spare. And had I been doing this at Princeton, minus the bathroom bit, it still would have sucked, but it wouldn’t have been anything exceptional. But in Sevilla and Ronda, it was a novelty, and it was made far worse by the sense of injustice that everyone felt at my still having work for Princeton when I was abroad in Spain. “Well it’s just that our semester is still going. Everyone at Princeton is still writing papers too,” I tried to explain. But there is no one else here from Princeton, and no one could quite get past the unfairness of the situation. Which forced me to acknowledge that though I will defend Princeton’s perfection until my dying day, this whole finals-after-winter-break thing does, in fact, kind of suck.
The general indignation mounted when I happened to mention that while in Madrid this semester, I have to write a 30-page junior paper for Princeton. It’s not like my schoolwork here is exactly strenuous. Sometimes we get homework. Most of the time we don’t. But the fact that I might not be able to keep going out five nights a week and might once in a while have to pass up staying out at a seven-story discoteca until 6 a.m. so that I can do work for Princeton, well, that’s clearly impinging quite seriously on my cultural experience.
Again, this whole JP thing is normal in Princeton. But at the end of the day it does mean that instead of traveling to Segovia on weekends, I am getting to know all of Madrid’s approximately 32 Starbucks very intimately. A few weeks in, I am even figuring out how to order properly; the complication is that the sizes are still Tall, Grande and Venti, but in Spanish “grande” also means big, which can lead to a fair amount of confusion. I’ve discovered the solution, which is: When in doubt, point.
Now obviously Princeton shouldn’t rearrange its schedule and completely overhaul its system just so that a small number of us can go abroad more easily. But the University should sponsor more study abroad programs so that it’s easier for people to go abroad. If the 30 some-odd e-mails I get every semester about study abroad information meetings is any indication, Princeton has good intentions about sending people abroad. But somehow these efforts to educate us about the possibilities for studying abroad don’t extend as far as trying to make the experience actually viable.
Concentrators in the Wilson School and ecology and evolutionary biology make up a large portion of the people studying abroad this semester, according to the list the study abroad office sent us, and they’re all studying on Princeton-sponsored programs. It’s easier because these programs run more or less on Princeton’s schedule and are arranged so that satisfying Princeton commitments from abroad isn’t such a pain. Princeton should run programs like this in more places, for other majors. We should also make an effort to run immersion programs, so that for people who want to go abroad and learn another language on a Princeton timetable, it’s not as if they just took a bunch of Princeton kids and changed the scenery a little.
Obviously the most important part of Princeton is making sure that the experience we have while we are at Princeton is incredible. But for those of us who want to wander a little bit, Princeton should make an effort to fulfill the last part of the motto and make it easier for students to act “in the service of all nations.”
Alexis Levinson is a comparative literature major from Santa Monica, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu.
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