One day, while sitting around watching a football game with my dad and his friends in his dingy apartment, I was addressed very roughly by a man with an admirably sized pile of beer cans at his feet. Asking me if I was the son who went to Princeton, his bloodshot eyes narrowed in examination.
“My whole family went to Harvard — all my brothers and my father, his father, and his father before that.” (I could very well tell his blue blood by his level of refinement, as he sat there in a stained white tee and gym shorts.)
He proceeded to ask me what kind of grades I got during my first year at school. I shamefacedly mumbled out my atrocious GPA, at which point he sat straight up, his shaggy eyebrows arched in outrage and with what appeared to me to be a look of disgust, and shouted, “Anything less than a B is unacceptable!”
Now, my first impulse was to calmly explain grade deflation, or maybe to say a few choice, critical words about how at Princeton, we aren’t allowed the convenience to hand in some cash for our grades while dropping off the tuition check. Rather, I said nothing, as the game came back on and everyone’s attention was pulled to the television screen.
Within the next few days, I began to mull over what this man had said. Overachievers from my old high school came back from UC Berkeley or UCLA, talking about how they had a 4.0 or, at the very least, a 3.5, feeling very smug as I sat there wide-eyed. Meanwhile, there I was, below the middle of my class with less than a 3.0, wondering what it was that made some of the brightest young adults in the country come out with some of the worst grades. Of course, the answer came quickly: grade deflation.
Most Princeton students have felt its effects. Even those near the top face the most difficult competition they have faced in their lives. There are those of us who come from small towns or ghetto high schools, feeling very confident until we walk through FitzRandolph Gate for the first time. There is another standard when we are here on this campus, and we almost become a separate entity here from the person we might be at home. While our work ethic, our party habits, our attitudes and personalities might all remain the same, the context has changed, and we are forced to face a word that sounds a bit like nails on a chalkboard.
I’ve come to see that word — mediocrity — as the definition of my and so many others’ existences here at Princeton, our home away from home. Here, there is a stench in the air, a lingering sense of defeat on some level, drowned joyfully in little red cups that turn the anonymity that comes with mediocrity into laughter and enjoyment. Indeed, there are those who succeed invariably, those shining beacons of genius that most of us want to occasionally tackle, but the rest of us, while still struggling to climb onto that top tier, are meanwhile basking in the light of low expectations.
This, of course, brings me into why going home for all of us Princetonians is so bitter sweet. Yes, we get to go see family, friends, and (if you’re from my town) enjoy the experience of playing beer pong while sitting astride a horse, but we do miss out on that warm, fuzzy feeling we all get when the standards are erased, because we all meet the bar just by being a Princeton student. Now, this could be taken as some weird, utopian — or maybe Communist — idea, but putting that aside, I think most can agree that coming back to Princeton is definitely not like going back to anywhere else.
Joey Barnett is a sophomore from Tulare, California. He can be reached at jbarnett@princeton.edu.
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