Come to Princeton (or Don?t)

Listening to prefrosh mill around in my classes this past weekend, talking about how they were “definitely econ, but still deciding between certificates in finance and French” but “torn between here, Stanford, Yale and maybe Duke” brought me back to senior year. It’s really exciting to make a decision like that. Leaving the world of highly structured schedules and hallway lockers for the endless grassy courtyards and 300-person lectures of college is a huge step. It’s easy to tease the prefrosh as they walk around with their lanyards and backpacks, awestruck by every gothic building and weirdly suggestive statue they see, but they’re on the brink of making a huge decision.

Except, they really aren’t. Students accepted to Princeton are probably juggling several top-tier schools. In the end, it doesn’t make a difference whether they choose Yale or Princeton or Duke or Stanford. College is college. It’s something I, like many other prefrosh, didn’t understand when I was a senior, but whether you’re a Tiger or a Crimson, college will always boil down to just being a place to take classes and live in a dorm and get a degree.

It was interesting how many kids I met at Preview Weekend who didn’t really understand that. My own prefrosh had already committed to Princeton, and thus I had redirected my efforts on a friend’s. “I’m visiting Yale and Columbia and Harvard after this,” she had said to me. I paused for a moment.

“Well, you really can’t go wrong there.”

“I … what?” she said. “Aren’t you going to tell me to come to Princeton?”

“Well, yes,” I responded. “Come to Princeton. But realistically, don’t sweat it. Everyone finds their place at college. Princeton is great and you should come here, but you’ll find a way to be happy anywhere.”

As school-spirited as we are when it comes to making it clear that we are the best school in the country, I think it’s important to remind prefrosh and ourselves that our admission to this school was never guaranteed. It’s scary to think that this is the only place that we could truly ever belong when there was statistically a 93 percent chance we would have never even had the opportunity to come here.

I’ve sat in bed on a lazy Sunday, envisioning an alternate universe where I am at another school — maybe my Saturday night involves exploring the city rather than trekking down the well-worn path to Prospect Avenue. Maybe I’m P/D/F-ing all my classes. Maybe I’m not checking my weather app everyday and rejoicing when the temperature spikes above 60. I’m happy at Princeton, but I really think I would have been happy anywhere else. College is the people you meet and the things you do. College is what you make of it.

It’s true that I constantly revel at this school, at the stone archways with seemingly divine acoustics and professors who have Pulitzers and teach my 10-person seminars. There are things Princeton has that no other place in the world has. It makes Princeton unique, but other places have other things with their own appeal.

So to all the prefrosh who somehow manage to get this issue of the ‘Prince’: It’s going to be okay. Whether you decide at 11:55 p.m. on May 1 to enroll here, or whether you decide to take yourself somewhere else for the next four years, it will be fine. You will find your niche anywhere you go, as long as you put in some amount of effort to find the proverbial birds of your feather. You will be happy (at times) and stressed (for relatively more times), and sometimes you’ll casually fantasize about a parallel universe where things turned out differently. But at the end of the day, as you slip into your twin XL bed, you will be just as happy with your decision, with the classes you’ve taken and the people you’ve met, as the freshman three states and 400 miles away who chose something completely different.

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