Coming around the corner
At the final Senior Pub Night, it became painfully clear that I do not know a large portion of the senior class and this seemed to be the consensus among many people I spoke with that night.
At the final Senior Pub Night, it became painfully clear that I do not know a large portion of the senior class and this seemed to be the consensus among many people I spoke with that night.
At the start of this academic year, I wrote a column advising freshmen to give themselves more than a couple months to decide how they felt about Princeton and the college experience.
Google has its ball pits and nap pods, but Apple and Facebook may have taken the lead when it comes to perks — if you’re a woman, that is.
If I could sit my freshman self down at the dawn of my Princeton career, I’d have quite a few things to say.
Watching my little brother pack his belongings into the car before his freshman year of college as I did the same on the cusp of my senior year, I felt old.
Millennials have been called the "me generation," and if you were to search “selfie” on any form of social media, the claim seems well-founded.
At Princeton, it is widely professed and strongly emphasized that it is all right to be undecided during your first two years of study.
Despite the stereotype afforded to English majors, I am not terrible at math. I cannot say I enjoy the subject nor that its more complicated aspects come naturally, but I am certainly capable of basic understanding and usage.
In imagining what can only be the dramatic origins of a certain Princeton mantra, I like to think that one day a Princetonian on the cusp of graduation looked up at Blair Arch, its stones basked in a special sort of afternoon sun, and in a fit of nostalgia placed his hand on the shoulder of a passing freshman and warned, “You only get eight semesters here.” The freshman then thought of the very short eight semesters ahead of him and was struck with unease.
In late October I was averaging what I thought to be an impressive four hellos on my daily mid-morning walk from my dorm room to Italian class. They weren’t people I knew exactly, for “know” is a strong word to describe our poorly defined relationships. They were other freshmen that I’d met in passing, friends of friends or people who happened to have the same dining schedule as my own. In those early months of school, there was the idealistic possibility that each fleeting conversation of “What’s your name?” “Where are you from?” “What’s your major?” could yield some blissful friendship or, at the very least, another lonely soul to acknowledge your presence as you trudged from one class to the next.