Love letter (sort of)

These are all important topics, but instead of adding yet another constructive complaint to the mix, I am going to wallow in some gloriously unconstructive, adulatory positivity. Consider this a thank-you-bordering-on-love letter to Princeton from someone with too many reservations to just say love letter and be done with it. Dear Princeton: I do not (yet) love you, but I appreciate and admire you with all the sincerity my icy skeptical heart can muster. Here’s why:

1. You accepted me for who I am. Well, not exactly who I am, but who my college application said I was. That is to say, you accepted my excellent self-packaging job and almost recompensed me for all those pointless hours spent second-guessing the kind of role model an ideal Princeton student would write their application essay about. (Applicants: Don’t do this.)

2. You are beautiful. Stunningly beautiful. It helps that you look like Hogwarts. Every time I return to campus, I am struck anew by how ugly the rest of the world is. Standing over a glittering, pristine Lake Carnegie, watching crew disappear and reappear from the sides of the bridge, I realize this campus has something that Hogwarts doesn’t: Athletic boatmen. Unfortunately, Durmstrang has plenty of these, so we can’t quite escape the Harry Potter comparison. Even (especially?) if the University’s beauty is purely Potterian, it’s more than enough for me.

3. The amount of personal attention that students receive from professors, administrators and the dining hall staff is empowering and flattering. The woman who swipes my card for Sunday dinner is still doing her best to learn my name. I’m thinking about temporarily changing it to “Taylor” just for her pronunciation convenience. Last month I walked into my preceptor’s office to talk about a politics paper and ended up sharing my life story. Not because I’m a life-story-sharing kind of gal but because he was genuinely interested. I hope.

4. The travel opportunities are endless. My freshman seminar came with a free trip to Bermuda, snorkeling gear included. I am now planning an eventual summer odyssey with friends which begins somewhere in Spain and ends somewhere in Qatar. We hit up South America and Thailand in between. Over the course of our discussions, I have concluded that the University will finance anything and that my friends have a terrible sense of geography.

5. You take care of me, sometimes to an absurd degree. The innumerable services and resources I take for granted here include catered meals, spacious housing, a comprehensive neon-orange wardrobe pieced together from several dozen ‘Princeton gear’ giveaways and Wi-Fi as free, smooth and ubiquitous as air. This is a good opportunity to thank the people who take my trash out every week. You make me feel uncomfortable, because you remind me that the University doesn’t trust me to handle my own garbage.

At the beginning of the year, upperclassmen warned me that Princeton is a cult. Students graduate with an exaggerated sense of college identity that is reinforced and exploited every decade or so at Reunions. It is unclear why post-graduation identification with Princeton is so strong, but the phenomenon is loosely attributable to the many memories and cultural affiliations that alumni share. Cult members spent four years working their tailbones off together. They survived grade deflation. They joined too many clubs. Their feelings for their school were, are and will probably always be irrational and fanatical.

I have not matriculated into the cult. I hope I never do. Cultishness is intellectually repellent. The idea of being so enamored with a university that I could lose sight of its many flaws and foibles strikes me as singularly undesirable. However, when family friends back home ask me what I think of school, I look forward to honestly replying that it is a sanctuary, an adventure and a generally excellent institution.