Cutting weeds

“Looks good.” And then she chuckled. “I bet you’re going to love that 8:30 Orgo.”

“I heard that that’s a weeding technique,” I said, recalling something my Princeton Preview host had told me, verbatim, several months before. “So people who aren’t serious about being pre-med just drop out of that.”

She nodded. “Sounds about right.”

I honestly didn’t think too much of it. In high school, I had gotten up five times a week at 6 a.m. Surely I could do twice a week at 8 a.m. But as I quickly realized, seemingly endless late labs that are scheduled perfectly the night before lead to doing work far into the single-digit hours. Orgo had quickly become the bane of my existence. I was trudging through a class that seemed hard enough, even without the additional “weeder” element of it being early in the morning.

Complaining about an 8:30 Orgo class might seem petty, but I think it’s reflective of a bigger problem. The idea that there has to be a filter between 18- and 19-year-olds who absolutely know they want to go to medical school and 18- and 19-year-olds who are just open to the possibility is a little disheartening. Orgo is a difficult class as it is, and classes in the morning are arguably the least conducive to staying awake and paying attention. Indeed, when I walked into McCosh 50 on Tuesday mornings last semester and slipped into my cold, wooden seat, more people were asleep than awake before lecture had even started.

I don’t think the concept of “weeders” is warranted. I’m speaking specifically of additional measures taken so that, presumably, a particular class is as inconvenient as possible and only the most serious decide to embark on the endeavor. There shouldn’t be an established idea that people who aren’t serious about being pre-med, for example, shouldn’t dabble in the required course load because of how unforgiving the curve is or how inconvenient the classes are.

The fact of the matter is: Who is serious about anything at the age of 18? Colleges, and Princeton in particular, encourage you to explore your interests, expand your horizons and do things out of your comfort zone. However, there seems to be an unsaid rule that there are only some things that can be explored outside of your comfort zone. You often hear of people dabbling in French literature or creative writing, but never in chemistry or ORFE. The latter two are among those courses saddled with an unforgiving reputation. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone studying Orgo out of his sheer love for benzene rings and acetone. Discouraging students from embarking on a particular career path by making the career path as difficult as possible runs the very obvious risk of boxing out students who may actually be talented in the field but never got the opportunity to develop their passion because they were dissuaded in the beginning.

The problem seems to be at its apex in the sciences, engineering and the pre-med track. It seems that every issue of Newsweek, US News or The Huffington Post decries America’s inability to keep up in the ever-growing and ever-globalizing realm of STEM. Why, then, is it so important to weed out students who think they might be interested in these fields? Manipulating the variables so that Orgo is as unaccommodating as possible seems counterproductive. These factors are the reason that STEM has such an unfavorable reputation among young students. By weeding, colleges are only reinforcing preexisting negative stereotypes that dissuade people from so much as trying it out.

I understand that classes are difficult so that students who would never realistically make it through medical school, for instance, will get the hint sooner rather than later. But additional weeding techniques, like scheduling difficult classes early in the day or encouraging a reputation of absurdly difficult grading, deny students the opportunity to do the best they possibly can. Princeton should be nurturing toward students embarking on difficult paths, not cold and unforgiving.

Shruthi Deivasigamani is a freshman from Creskill, N.J. She can be reached at shruthid@princeton.edu.