Talking to professors

It was my worst nightmare. I was composing an email to a professor, choosing each word painstakingly, struggling with the correct tone, how friendly and familiar to be. I eventually worked up to my real point, but I needed to finesse some of the transitions so that my opus seemed as effortless as it obviously was not. After leaving it on my laptop screen all day, I clicked on it, and in some hellish moment of brain failure, accidentally pressed send. I gasped, horrified, staring at my computer as the awkwardly worded message was whisked through cyberspace to the inbox of my favorite professor, who also happens to be my idol and a national award-winning scholar.

She still hasn’t responded.

In a section called “What’s Distinctive About Princeton,” the Princeton website brags that “Princeton undergraduates have direct access to many of the best minds in the world, including Nobel laureates, MacArthur Fellows and Pulitzer Prize winners.” Yeah, dude. Totally. We have the ability to contact them whenever we wish. We have their email addresses, their phone numbers, their office hours. The sheer brainpower available to us is one of the most amazing things about this University. It’s also absolutely terrifying.

I’m a pretty neurotic person in the first place, so crippling social anxiety isn’t really that uncommon of a feeling for me, and I know for a fact that I’m not alone in finding emailing professors frightening and overwhelming. But then there are those who are able to form strong and serious bonds with these alarmingly intelligent professors — even the ones with Socrates-esque beards, a feat I find more impressive than completing the Prospect 11. My mother, for example, is still friends with several of her college and graduate school professors, well-respected individuals who I’d have been too intimidated to make eye contact with. I know students at this school who have gone over to their professor’s houses and had meals with their families, who have actually spent an hour with them at office hours and who probably get Christmas cards every December.

Even when a professor tries, when he says over and over again he’s open and available for visiting during office hours, that he loves dealing with students, I stay away because his office is probably like Dumbledore’s, full of snarky portraits of professors past who will scare me too. It’s especially bad with the ones I find brilliant and fascinating, the ones with whom I most want to communicate clearly that I am unable to.

I have never been graceful with adults. Where it is easy for me to befriend my peers, I struggle to keep a conversation going with those over the age of 30. It’s a deadly cocktail of self-doubt and politeness, though I’m not sure it’s politeness as much as a refusal to take risks. I don’t want to overreach any boundaries or do anything inappropriate; I also am pretty sure I’ve created these arbitrary boundaries entirely in my own mind. I wish I knew how to break out of my own insecurities, but every time I get the nerve to do something, like, say, send an email to a professor I worship, I do something like send it accidentally and undo every self-confidence pep talk I’ve ever given myself.

These are my personal issues, and always have been, but I think a lot of Princeton students are happy to just take a class with a famous person; to say, “Yes, I learned that from this famous scholar” or “I got this grade from this Nobel Prize laureate.” We are forced into the opportunity to cull wisdom from some of the most powerful minds in the world, and we think that’s enough. It’s easy to rest on going to lecture, to think “Well, I had this opportunity that no one else outside this school could ever get as easily as I had it, and I’m going to content myself with that,” instead of taking a risk that could end in a relationship that means more than a grade or a recommendation.

It’s not only the professors. From scholarships to travel, Princeton creates amazing opportunities and the opportunity to create amazing opportunities, and I keep being too chicken to take advantage of them. And as I talk to my friends here, my friends at other schools and my friends worried about applying to other schools, something becomes very obvious. It’s not where you go, but how bravely — which is something I need to remember the next time I agonize over whether to use an exclamation point or period.