Somewhere to belong

Yes, this message is for you.

Welcome. Congrats on your acceptance. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy your weekend here. Let’s get down to business: Some of you will fall in love with Princeton quickly. Some of you will not. Princeton will be throwing a lot of information at you, with the hopes that you accept a place here. Here’s my advice to you, prefrosh: Figure out if you feel like you’ll belong, and accept a place here if you do. Princeton gives people a chance to define for themselves a unique college experience, an experience which can share very little overlap with someone of different interests.

The Princeton experience can be defined by some overarching commonalities. We have Lawnparties and the dodgeball tournament. The Wa — the most profitable WaWa of them all — the Dinky and Hoagie Haven. It seems that everyone has a story about chatting with a famous professor, and everyone has answered “What college do you go to?” with some variant of “One in New Jersey.” They now expect on-campus Public Safety alerts to consist of the water guns provoking another gun scare and public masterbation — currently the crime of the year within the safety of the Orange Bubble. But there exists a non-trivial number of Princetonians who do not experience some or all of those events and places. The University likes to spin the thesis process as “Quintessentially Princeton,” the shared experience we all have. That’s a little misleading. Not everyone writes a thesis, senior theses are not unique to Princeton, and there’s much more to the Princeton experience than the thesis.

So I asked friends what they thought of as being quintessentially Princeton. Their answers were divergent. Some named people like Smits and Nash, and others Blinder and Rosen. Some mentioned casually discussing programming with Kernighan, who helped shape the C programming language and the famous “Hello World” program, and others learning creative writing from author Joyce Carol Oates. Some reminisce about victories in broomball, and others in flag football. Some said eating clubs, but with 11 different clubs, six residential colleges, three co-ops and many more students in none of the above, there’s no universally common experience there either.

Maybe, then, the quintessential Princeton experience is the strong alumni network. Maybe it’s the interaction with brilliant professors who have helped define and shape their fields. Maybe it’s the amazing people you’ll meet here who become friends for life. I’ve seen that alumni network translate into free cookies, from one Tiger to another, while waiting in line at airport security. I’ve seen that professor-student interaction translate into classmates getting together to eat dinner with their professor. But it’s difficult to generalize interaction with other undergraduates, alumni or professors because so much will vary from person to person and setting to setting. Those interactions really do not manifest themselves until after someone begins to belong as quintessentially Princetonian.

When I arrived on campus freshman year, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I didn’t understand the eating clubs or the Street. I had never heard of professors like Ashenfelter or Gleason or Comer or Kasdin. I knew how to get here, I knew some of the extracurriculars I could participate in here, I knew the classes would be challenging here, and I was certain that I could belong here. I couldn’t fly across the Atlantic for Preview Weekend, so I had to make a bit of a gamble on what Princeton truly was. After talking to alumni and other accepted students, I knew that at least I could fit in.

Princeton isn’t a monolithic institution: That’s what I love about being here. It’s a place for settling in and creating a niche for oneself. Based on how much alumni give back, and how they come back for Reunions every year, there’s clearly something that made a large and diverse group of people fall in love with this University. The University has a lot of resources and individuals available letting individuals to try to forge their own paths intellectually, and alumni seem to have responded quite positively to the University as a result of that.

So ask yourself if you feel as if you could belong here. I think that answer is most definitely a yes for most, if not all, accepted students. If you can make something here your own, whether that’s a team or organization or club, you will be happy. It may take some time to find something to get excited about. You may miss out on swathes of opportunities you didn’t even know existed. I don’t think there’s a set experience for which one can define as universally Princetonian, but for each person here, there’s a different definition of what’s made their Princeton experience unique and exceptional.