Food makes people happy, and access to good food makes people very happy. There is a little, low-ceilinged room where students go to play board games and drink tea and where some students bake fresh cookies for the other students. This is, of course, Murray-Dodge. Murray-Dodge is free and even hosts weekly sing-along events. For freshmen and sophomores, built into their University meal plans, are two opportunities to snack at the Frist Campus Center — late meal. Food after lunch and then again after dinner sounds a bit gluttonous, but late meal serves as a social venue as much as it does an opportunity to eat.
I have not yet formulated a coherent opinion on whether the residential college system is a successful model for lower-classman living, though I can say that the frequent study breaks and food-oriented social venues are good. As a student gets older, the residential college provides her with a different set of entertainment, usually in the form of a wine or beer night.
The University also cares that we are constantly entertained, that no moment is left too dull. Throughout the campus, there are ubiquitous pool tables, pianos, television sets and computers peppering the University’s public spaces, and all of these elements combine to provide students with the opportunity of endless engagement.
Princeton makes sure that the practical aspects of living an organized school-life are in place. The TigerApps application series is very well-done. ICE is a very powerful tool for logging and organizing classes of interest and disseminates important information about those classes. The housing one was also very helpful, though not fully up-to-date, in navigating the room draw process. The map application becomes less relevant as students become more acquainted with the Princeton campus but is very useful in looking up the office locations of professors. Laundry is free and never too far of a walk away.
These aspects are generally overlooked by prospective students and prefrosh, as they are less important than the education itself, but in considering Princeton, it is important to remember that the attention to detail is tremendous and makes the experience all the more fun. Princeton really does have its students' best interests in mind and bends over backwards to make us comfortable.
The University is not perfect, however. There is, of course, a flip-side to this. In paying hyper-attention to the small details of student life, the University administration can get a bit paternalistic in overextending itself into the lives of the student body. The ban on freshman Greek life is an example of this. When the University pays too much attention, it ends up trying to engineer things that, perhaps, ought to be left alone, to the natural order of social interactions.
In other respects, Princeton pays too little attention to crucial details and can improve. There are some perplexing oversights that could certainly be remedied and would make a tremendous difference. The first one that comes to mind is the undergraduate advising system. I love the classes I have taken here, but that was the product of scouring the course guide, reading hundreds of descriptions and a painstaking week or two of class-shopping each semester. An advising system that clearly lays out the requirements, prerequisites and must-take-professors would be very helpful. The University assigns professors to do this job — it is always wonderful to get one-on-one time with professors — but are they the most qualified people to advise students on administrative requirements?
Another detail that the University can pay more attention to, related to the first, is the SCORE website. I have always found it difficult to use and unpredictable. Surely there is another secure platform the University can look into.
What makes this place so special, in addition to the traditional brochure-enforced aspects, is that it really cares. The University is on the same team as the students. Princeton invests in our daily happiness and comfort in addition to spending tremendous amounts of money sending us to remote places to conduct senior thesis research. The little things in aggregate enhance the Princeton experience and never get the limelight for doing so.
Aaron Applbaum is a Wilson School major from Oakland, Calif. He can be reached at applbaum@princeton.edu.
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