But when I arrived, I encountered many students who came to campus not as intrepid campers in an academic wilderness but as apprentice physicists or engineers-in-training, students who had come to a training ground for a vocation.
Many of these students, I think not coincidentally, came from high schools in Asia where students are set off early on humanities or science tracks. The Princeton admissions office seems to select many more from the latter category, or perhaps more Asian math and science students apply. Once here, there are obvious and practical reasons for them to stick with the sciences. My friend Zeshan Javed ’11 says of his high school in Pakistan: “We studied physics, chemistry, math, calculus … This is true for all the people coming [to Princeton] from my country, so it was kind of pre-decided that I would major in physics or mechanical engineering because I knew about that stuff.”
Of my friends who hit the Princeton grounds running full-tilt toward prospective employment, all of them have taken pause to do a little wandering around the course catalog, Javed included. Another friend of mine who is from Brunei, Kok Hou Chia ’11, never made it back out to the E-Quad after he took a seminar on the Book of Genesis. He is now a religion major.
The University tells us that changing academic concentrations after taking a few courses is part of the natural flow of undergraduate life. Distribution requirements force us to make chance forays into other departments. Some of us, in oscillating between familiar subjects and the novelty of introductory courses, may be drawn from the humanities to the sciences. For Asian international students, however, it seems the opposite pull is more common.
Chia nonetheless feels like an anomaly, he says, because “most international students are pretty stubborn about their majors.”
He speculates that shifting to a less practical major is a more loaded decision for international students for reasons that don’t weigh as heavily on their American peers. International students must obtain work visas to stay in the United States, and Javed points out that they must also arrange their courses carefully around considerations for their careers. “In Pakistan, a major is something you need to make a career out of, and it is much easier for me to get a job back home as an engineer than it would be as a sociologist or an anthropologist,” he says.
Majoring in religion, then, could be seen as taking a reckless plunge into the depths of job insecurity, and Chia does worry that this may be the path to which he has submitted himself. He’s still taking all of the pre-med requirements just in case, and he still hasn’t told his parents about choosing to be a religion major.
Chia’s reluctance to reveal his true academic colors at home is also rooted in another general anxiety for international students from Asia, where “most students who can’t major in science do humanities,” he says. Students like Chia who concentrate in the humanities at Princeton do so in the shadow of the perception back home that the humanities are for second-tier academics. It’s also easy for incoming Asian students to graft this same image onto the departments at Princeton.
The image the school conjures in the minds of its prospective students shapes their experience on campus to a certain degree. It hurts individual students and the academic departments at Princeton to have a number of students arrive on campus already feeling precluded from certain concentrations. Some, but not all, of this sentiment is a reflection of realities beyond the University’s control. Post-graduation job markets in the United States and abroad are undeniably different for international students, but the Princeton humanities departments certainly aren’t for failed scientists.
My friends, after some fumbling, are now more or less content with how they have managed their academic interests. But they agree that it would be valuable to tailor a message to incoming international students to be open about how they pursue a full measure of inquiry and development at Princeton. This could happen through introducing Major Choices programming during international pre-orientation.
The University could also help aspiring humanities majors deal with perceptions back home. The Major Choices publication does a great job reassuring parents who read it that there is occupational hope after graduation for their child concentrating in, say, religion. But some of the parents most in need of reassurance are not English speakers. Princeton should do more to reach out to those parents, perhaps by creating an edition of Major Choices featuring international students or even just sending copies of the original in the students’ native languages. If there is some parental open-mindedness to be found in translation, this could help students like Chia make their academic choices more acceptable back home.
Sophie Jin is a sophomore from Salt Lake City. She can be reached at sjin@princeton.edu.
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