Not knowing everyone

Unlike Lea, however, I am not nostalgic for it.

Maybe it really is a fundamental ideological difference between the icy cold North and the warm, warm South, but I found coming to Princeton refreshing. The thing about small town America is that it’s only cute in indie movies and worn-out romance novellas. In real life, it can be stifling. In my town, there was a 24-hour turnaround before the embarrassing thing you thought you did in private becomes common knowledge, fodder for cafeteria gossip. Your best friend’s neighbor wants to know how your job interview went, only you didn’t get the job, and now that you mention it, you can’t even remember telling her that you were interviewing for it in the first place. My friends and I joked about the divine rule of the corner Starbucks: “Thou shalt not leave without eyeing 10 thousand people that you know.”

There’s something nice about not knowing everyone. Princeton is a great size school. It’s not so large that your freshman class is large enough to populate a small suburb three times over, but is it so small that you can name every person on your freshman seminar roster without scouring the Residential College Facebook first. There is something freeing about not knowing the life story of every person you walk past — about always being able to meet new people, whether in class, or in a meeting for a club, or at Frist at 3 a.m. on a Saturday night. You never feel like you know everything there is to know about a certain place.

Going to a school with over a thousand people in one class precludes being defined by one thing. At a small school, there’s pressure to know something about everyone, so too often, people are compressed and reduced to their one most defining characteristic. That’s why high school is seemingly rife with stereotypes, with the archetypal jocks, bookworms and stoners, while college isn’t (or at least, isn’t to a comparable degree). Here, in a more populous environment, it’s easier to be multifaceted. There’s no reason to have a defining characteristic, because people either know you or they don’t. There’s no reason to let someone hang out in the periphery of your acquaintanceship, because in a school of 6,000 people, it’s not a horrifying social blunder to forget one semi-stranger’s name.

The thing about eye contact — at least as someone who grew up 15 minutes from New York City, arguably the brusquest city in the world — is that it’s usually contingent on a common denominator that is unique in comparison to others around you. On campus, everyone is a Princeton student, so that becomes irrelevant. The people you smile and wave at are your friends: the people who live in your hall, the people who wake up with you at 8:30 for Mol lecture, the people who you sing or dance or write with. This is the same thing in small towns — you smile and wave and the people you know in some capacity. It just feels more significant because in a small town, there is a higher percentage of people you know than people you don’t. To smile and wave at every person who walks by just because they’re Princeton students, on the other hand, would be tiring and impractical.

However, if you relocate this scene to another locale, perhaps New York City, the context changes dramatically. Here, it would be fine to nod knowingly at someone else donning a neon orange Princeton sweatshirt who you might only know tangentially, even though the only common denominator between the two of you is your alma mater, because not everyone else milling down Broadway shares that. It’s a unique connection.

So yes, campus can sometimes come off as harsh when people stride past you stony-eyed and blank-faced, but it’s nice to see that facade break for someone that you’re actually friends with.

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