Reimagining our extracurricular culture
At a holiday party over winter break, I asked a high school friend, who had entered Yale as a freshman in the fall, about her college experiences.
At a holiday party over winter break, I asked a high school friend, who had entered Yale as a freshman in the fall, about her college experiences.
With course selection fast approaching, I am reminded that, as a sophomore, I am left with the inadequate time frame of one more semester to come to terms with the limitations of my skill set, the scope of my academic passions and the professional realities a certain degree might produce for me.
“My professor doesn’t respect my athletic commitments at all,” a student-athlete ranted to me during a study session sometime last week, referring to a specific incident in which her professor had responded with frustration when she informed him of an athletic conflict three days before a quiz.
Upon reading a recent article by guest columnist Luis Ramos ’13, in which he recalls his journey from cultural negation to cultural promotion and ultimately urges Princeton students to use their educational equipment to “help dismantle racism and prejudice,” I came away feeling both mildly inspired and mostly skeptical.
Last week, out of the hundreds of surveys for senior theses and university-sponsored initiatives that flooded my inbox (already filled with 1,915 unread messages and counting), I chose to complete the Pace Center Survey. Having participated in a student organization under the Pace Center for Civic Engagement last semester, I felt some small inclination to voice my grievances regarding the systematic lack of organization and general communal apathy toward strengthening Pace programs.
Apparently, some 24-hour bug has been going around for the past few weeks. I unfortunately know this firsthand, not because I have the stomach flu (yet), but because I recently had to stomach the effects of someone else’s flu. At the end of my seminar class one recent evening, as I casually started toward the door, I looked up just in time to see one of my classmates lurching towards the landfill section of the classroom garbage bin.