On the beaten path

On a recent quiz in POL 345: Qualitative Analysis and Politics, the statistics class written about last month in an article on the potential Wilson School expansion, the first question asked students to calculate the probability that students were taking the class both out of a deep love of statistics and to get into the Wilson School. The joking implication, of course, is that the two are, more often than not, mutually exclusive, that majoring in Woody Woo is for the practically minded rather than the passionate.

But ask a sophomore what they’re majoring in, and you’re likely to get a two-pronged answer: English, philosophy or another humanities department ... or Woody Woo.

When you arrive at Princeton, you are told to follow your passion, a platitude that more often than not comes from the humanities departments. “Math is boring and hard!” they proclaim. “Come learn about contemporary fiction and film and Slavic studies! Learn for the sake of learning!” With the only prerequisites often being simply a single class or two in the department, what the humanities most powerfully provide is the individual freedom to follow your heart. And that, Princeton tells us, is what college is really about.

But I’m not sure we really buy it. After all, we’re the generation that David Brooks infamously characterized as a bunch of “Organization Kids.” We’ve spent our childhoods resume-building with extracurriculars and APs. We are, as Brooks put it, professional students. We are, more pointedly, professional expectation-meeters: Figuring out what people want from us is our specialty. So while we might love the subjects we study, we also love the game of studying more generally. And what are the Wilson School prerequisites if not a series of expectations to be met, a game to be played?

For me, at least, I take comfort in the idea of academic structure. Having an external structure organize my academic plans offers a sort of security, a sort of guarantee of success rather than just crossing my fingers that my random smattering of courses will ultimately come together. But because I’m not quantitatively minded, not many such academic structures exist. Most distribution requirements are taken care of almost without thought for those with interests in the humanities and social sciences. And unlike in the natural sciences and engineering, where prerequisites and prerequisites for prerequisites abound, one often simply needs to take a course in the department before declaring a non-STEM major. In other words, just one of the of the 16 or 17 courses taken in your first four semesters at Princeton needs be in the department you ultimately end up declaring. That leaves upward of 15 classes to pick at random. For those of us without a strong math background, the Wilson School prerequisites are as good a formula as any.

Of course, academic exploration is a good thing, and it’s undoubtedly encouraged by the flexibility of humanities and social sciences majors. Moreover, such exploration is presumably the reason we’re all at Princeton rather than a more technical or pre-professional institution. I’ve dug my teeth into courses on everything ranging from Plato’s Republic to molecular biology, and most of my friends have had similarly pleasant experiences in a wide range of classes. But taking a variety of classes without some kind of plan for how they’ll all come together can be nerve-wracking, and it isn’t made easier as parents and friends’ parents and parents’ friends suddenly become very interested in your major. This past summer, for example, a friend’s mom assured me that I’d find my passion after my freshman year, then just nodded skeptically after I clarified I was already a rising sophomore. With every similar conversation that ended in me trailing off into a list of potential majors, I only became less certain I had any idea what I was doing. So, unsure of what classes to take, unsure of which department to enter, I simply decided to start fulfilling the Wilson School prerequisites.

Broad enough to be un-constraining but specific enough to feel goal-oriented, there’s something attractive about the Wilson School prerequisites: microeconomics, statistics, history and politics, sociology or psychology. They just seem like good things to know. When I told my father, a practically minded man who graduated college with an economics degree and a medical school acceptance, that I was taking a statistics course, he beamed with genuine pride for the first time since I arrived at Princeton. And it made me feel good too, like I was finally doing something useful. Even though I wasn’t sure public policy was my life’s passion, moving toward something — anything — was fortifying. It gave me a sense of accomplishment; it gave me purpose.

Ultimately, for me, those classes were just stand-ins as I gained confidence in my own academic interests: politics (and French and creative writing and ... ). I imagine many of my fellow sophomores will have similar experiences — after all, the major can’t double or triple in enrollment in the same way the prerequisites have — traditionally the school accepted 90 students out of twice as many applicants — but the increase in enrollment in the prerequisite classes suggests that other students also find the structure offered by a predefined path reassuring.