There is an unspoken question posed by our situation that is hard to formulate explicitly, but that virtually every student has to some extent answered subconsciously in order to be able to find themselves at Princeton: What is opportunity, and since there is so much of it here, do I just need to breathe in deeply to get my fill?
As best as I have come to understand the question, it seems that an opportunity should be described as a path leading somewhere a person wants to go. More opportunities mean more paths laid before one’s feet, and a “place of opportunity” is just another way of describing a point from which many, many paths sprout forth. Taken like this, Princeton is indeed a place of immense opportunity: Former students have gone on to do practically anything and everything over the years.
So that is established. Great. Fantastic.
But this brings up an entirely different problem that every single student faces: Which path is the one that you really want, and if you are not sure, should you just choose one and stick with it?
This is a predicament that many students are in. They are waiting for an epiphany, a sign or maybe a billboard that will show them what they really want to spend the rest of their life doing. They are waiting for their ship to come in, an amazing opportunity that also has “Destiny” written all over the side of it. Looking toward their future, many are not content to follow in the footsteps of a parent or friend, just as they are not content to select a future based merely on the arbitrariness of their specific abilities. The fact that your mother is a doctor does not seem like a real reason to want to become one, and being extremely number savvy is not a reason to want to be an investment banker. It is often said that a nudge is as good as a wink to a blind bat, but when you are teetering on the edge of the precipice that is “life after college,” a nudge can feel more like a shove.
The sensible, self-interested option seems to be to wait for the perfect opportunity that both clearly points to what will give one the happiest future and provides the means to achieve that. But the caveat of it all is that if you’ve never seen what a perfect-opportunity ship looks like, you may very well miss it when it does finally come in. That puts you in the unenviable situation of having taken the prudent course of not committing to an uncertain path, but having to watch many of the paths disappear from before your eyes as the four-year Princeton experience slowly draws to a close with no ship in sight. If everything falls into place, then there are no regrets, but even a small amount of dissatisfaction might leave you wondering “what if” you had just taken that job in the lab or gone on that archaeological dig in Namibia sophomore year.
This seems to present a bit of a conundrum, doesn’t it? Committing to one of the paths of opportunity early on increases the chance of success along that particular path but simultaneously increases the chances that it will be a path that is not what you were looking for after all. Waiting to commit does not pigeonhole a person into anything in particular but leaves you with a lot fewer opportunities if your ship does not come in on time. Should you commit early and hope for the best, or wait around and hope to be lucky enough that your ship comes in instead of leaving you stranded and with no ties to anything substantial?
The best option seems to be active waiting: taking yourself down as many paths simultaneously as you can while leaving yourself numerous options to change what you are doing at any given moment. If you are interested in economics, push yourself further into mathematics than you might think necessary. Policy is your forte? Try your hand at hashing out some creative writing under the tutelage of many of our nation’s preeminent writers. Whatever it is that you do, vary it, test the waters and put yourself out there. By stationing eyes and ears at all the “ports” that you can, you are both more likely to see your ship coming in and more likely to recognize it for what it is. So, take just a seat, or many seats, and wait for your opportunity to say, “Hop aboard.”
Andy Hawley is a sophomore from Irwin, Pa. He can be reached at ahawley@princeton.edu.
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