Try telling that to a group of Type-A high school juniors with their hearts set on the Ivy League and see how well they take it.
I tried to remember these words as I sat in McCosh Health Center last night, having already botched my plans for the perfect senior year by eating a cookie with nuts in it, starting to go into anaphylactic shock and knowing that once the epi wore off, I was going to spend my first day of senior year in a Benadryl-induced haze.
This was not the way I planned it. Senior year was going to be the year when I finally got it together. I was going to write a great thesis, ace all my classes, get a great job, do laundry instead of just buying more underwear and socks, and generally just be a functional human being. But if I was already behaving like this much of an idiot before school even started, it was going to be a long year.
But then I thought of what that AP Bio teacher would have said: In the grand scheme of things, the fact that you’re going to sleepwalk through the first day of senior year really doesn’t matter.
Of course, this was the guy who first introduced to me the concept of natural selection. In that grand scheme of things, my inability to read ingredient lists clearly kind of does matter. Back in high school, one bad grade, one rejection to anything, one teacher telling me I was wrong — each would have seemed like end of the world. And to some degree, they still do. But after three years at Princeton, all those moments of total idiocy just get added to the pile of problems that need to be fixed. Evolution to go through. As far as I can tell, how I do in college really will affect who will hire me and what grad schools may one day accept me.
And, more importantly, I think those crushing moments matter for me. Perhaps the more appropriate maxim is what a dear friend recently told me as we made our now semesterly resolutions to get our lives together. “Princeton,” she said, “is really good at beating you down and then teaching you how to build yourself back up.” Truer words may have never been spoken.
Princeton is hard. It’s hard academically, it’s hard socially, and, as people are fond of pointing out, it’s one of the most exclusive places on the planet, even if you’ve somehow managed to beat the odds to become one of the ever-decreasing percent of students to be accepted. Princeton is the home of grade deflation, where your A paper might be given a B, and of Bicker, where you may be told by a jury of your peers that you’re just not cool enough to have lunch with them. Though once upon a time I thought I had it together, in the course of three years, Princeton has made me doubt everything I held dear, question my abilities, my future, what I want and whether there’s any chance I can get it. Some mornings I wake up feeling like my world has crashed down around my ears.
Those days are crushing, but contrary to what my high school biology teacher would have said, in the grand scheme of life, they not only matter, they are the most useful things that will probably ever happen to me. We bitch and moan about the exclusivity at Princeton, but the exact same things happen in the real world: Jobs and grad schools reject us, something seniors especially will get a taste of pretty soon. And even once you’ve got the job, employers fire you.
So having had those experiences before — having hit the bottom and scraped your way back up out of the rubble that was once your life — means that when it happens to you out in the real world, you can stop and say that in the grand scheme of things, it just doesn’t matter. Not because it isn’t important, but because you’ve been through it before, and you know how to build yourself back up again.
Alexis Levinson is a comparative literature major from Santa Monica, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu.
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