To my prospective grad colleagues

You are now facing a dilemma, however. No student ever gets Princeton as their sole grad school offer. The fact that you are good enough to be admitted to Princeton — one of the best of the best — means that you will likely receive offers from many other schools. You will have to weigh many different factors to make a decision that will define the next five or six years of your life, and will affect your future well beyond that.

During your visit, you will experience much hospitality from Princeton. But beyond the free dinners on Nassau Street and (for some departments) the revelry at the D-Bar, you will be meeting the faculty here, some of the brightest minds in the world, who want to work with you, teach you, learn from you.

The Princeton faculty is the biggest reason to choose to come here. Every day you will interact with scholars and researchers who have made valuable contributions to your field of study. You will knock on their office doors and ask questions, learn from them in classes with a small number of fellow students and carry out research that builds on their seminal work.

If you choose Princeton, you will also join an intimate yet diverse graduate student community. Over dinner, you may find yourself talking to a Quebecois physicist, Romanian aerospace engineer and Texan English student. At the D-Bar, you will get drunk with an applied mathematician from rural Pennsylvania and a Mexican chemical engineer. You will have conversations that will expand your mind. You will learn about things like the sociology of the Mongolian mining industry and sphere-packing in 20-dimensions. After Princeton, your friends will become the great thinkers and leaders of their field in the best universities of the world, and will win Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals and MacArthur Awards.

You will have to lead precepts and problem sessions and grade homework and papers, helping to educate some of the smartest and most promising young undergraduates of the country, and some of them will become cherished friends. But know that your teaching load will be lighter than in any other grad school. This will allow you ample time to carry out your research and enable you to finish your Ph.D. in an average of about five years, the fastest time for any multi-faculty university in this country.

But be warned: Things will not be easy as a grad student in Princeton. Graduate school will involve a monumental amount of work, and you will work harder than you ever have. You will have to learn many things in order to carry out original research worthy of a Princeton Ph.D. There will be moments when, faced with the ocean of knowledge you have to explore, you will feel like the most ignorant and stupid person on Earth. Working at the frontiers of knowledge, you will face uncertainty and doubt: Will this line of investigation work out? Is this anything more than a middling piece of scholarship? Do I have a single brain cell worth of original ideas?

You will be faced with the biggest challenge of your life thus far, and you will question whether you belong here. But rest assured that Princeton only accepts students that it believes have the ability and capacity to finish the graduate program. Unlike some other institutions, Princeton does not “overbook” its graduate admissions. An offer of admission is not only a promise of full financial and academic support, but also a vote of confidence from the University in the student’s ability to succeed. The general or candidacy exams here are designed to challenge and educate, not to weed out the weak, for there are no weak here.

Over the next few weeks, you will probably visit many campuses, meet many professors who want to work with you, and receive phone calls and e-mails from others. You will be flattered and cajoled by various schools. There will be many factors to consider, and in the end you will have to decide what is best for you.

I had to make the same decision almost four years ago, and there were moments since then when I wondered if I would have been happier at another school, perhaps in a bigger city with more nightlife and entertainment options. But even in the most difficult of times, I remember that I came to Princeton because of the wonderful academy of scholars that I had encountered in my initial visit, and I never doubted that I had made the right choice.

Khee-Gan Lee is an astrophysics graduate student. He can be reached at lee@astro.princeton.edu.