Princeton’s campus looks fundamentally different at Princeton Preview than when you return on the Dinky for sophomore year. Novel were the shapes of sidewalks, grandiosity of buildings, and historically rooted landmark names; the complex and at times confusing dining hall swipe rules, eating clubs, and workings of Frist’s mail system; the short semesters, intimate precepts, and independent nature of academic inquiry.
One year in, Princeton is still beautiful but it is also just home. I order coffee from the same shop each morning, grab the same sushi at Late Meal in the afternoon, and return to the same residential college at night. What do you mean, like Nick Carraway said in The Great Gatsby, we just beat on boats against the current? Perhaps it was unrealistic to expect a daily transcendental revelation. Perhaps it’s my fault for thinking all I needed was to be splattered with orange paint. But I like new, shiny, unfamiliar things. Where to look? One might call this the sophomore slump.
Sophomore slump (noun): A sophomore’s dwindling motivation as college loses its perceived grandiosity and palpable novelty.
The starry-eyed condition of my freshman year was an incongruent prediction for how my four years would feel. College burnout is real! My romanticized view of college as an endless cycle of new friends, new ideas, new heights of achievement proves to be an illusion as my first sophomore semester soars by. Intermittently, I think NOOOOO where did my weeks and months go!?!?! What did I even accomplish in September and October?!?! Am I failing to be a true Princetonian?!?! Sometimes I feel that I am a nondescript creature floating in the primordial ooze, accountable to no one and spiraling to academic paths eroding in employability by the second. Certainly taking a class to read War and Peace and keeping a journal pretending to be a character on the home front will fix this all.
What happened to the infinite four years I so desperately anticipated? You look around each campus destination and alright, this is what it is. All you’ve got. All you are. Like a limerence-fueled relationship losing its spark. Lamentably, you realize the problem might be you. Damn.
While I’ve painted a picture that is more blue than orange, despair not, some relationships just require a bit of soul-searching. Whether you switch majors after getting bored like me, reboot old artistic hobbies, or discover an unfamiliar direction to pursue, the sophomore slump is the universe’s (or this primordial ooze in which you float) invitation to breathe new life into your relationship with your beloved prince. Maybe your Big Bang is just ahead, don’t relent! The slump lets you rest until you uncover the effervescence of your youth anew.