My work in the Politics department here at Princeton took on a whole new dimension during the summer. From early June to mid-August, I worked in a congressional representative’s office in the House of Representatives. I applied for the internship for perhaps obvious reasons: I was looking to get a first-hand look at the different government institutions I’ve only really read about in textbooks and newspaper articles. And, without a shadow of a doubt, my summer experience delivered!

Before starting, I wasn’t sure what to expect either from my work in the office or my life outside it. Looking back, I don’t know that I could quickly summarize the litany of different experiences and challenges I experienced at work or on my own time as I, at times. struggled to navigate life in the city. Each day I spent interning was wildly different, and invited valuable reflection on how I can best harness the top-rate education I’m getting on campus for good.

At work, I did everything from giving tours of the Capitol to writing memoranda on various bills for the Congressman to read. Some days I spent mostly at my desk, typing away and answering phone calls, while others were spent running around the halls of the House and Senate office buildings delivering notes and messages for and from higher-ranking staffers. From the very first morning of my internship, when I was tasked with combing through a 200-page budget document, staff treated me as an integral part of the office. In-between tasks, I listened to members of Congress speak as part of the Intern Lecture Series and tried my best to explore all the different nooks and crannies of the Capitol building.

Perhaps even more valuable than the actual work experience I gained were the insights I gleaned from my conversations with coworkers and Princeton alumni as part of the Princeton in Washington program (PiW). The staffers in my office had a range of different educational and professional backgrounds, and were generous with their time in speaking to interns about life on the Hill and speaking about broader career advice. The Princeton in Washington program, which connects Princeton alumni, families and current students living in the capitol region, hosted a wide variety of educational events with high-profile alumni. The roster of alumni speakers, including sitting Senators, members of the House, and high-ranking government and private-sector officials, offered a window into a variety of different Washington career paths and ways to succeed.

I’m immensely grateful for the opportunity to undertake such a life-changing experience, and even more so for the global Princeton community which offered me an incredible network of support even as I was working 200 miles away from campus. Who knows yet if I’ll be back next summer, but I love knowing that the Tiger family will follow me wherever I choose to go.

Princeton University. A wonderful place filled with opportunities to take advantage of and organizations to get involved with. One of the most salient aspects of Princeton is this idea of an Orange Bubble, which shields and protects us from the outside world. For me, the Bubble was so strong my first two years that I had no clue what was happening outside FitzRandolph Gate unless I purposefully read or watched the news. Although it makes me feel safe and at home, the Orange Bubble surrounds us with privilege and has the potential to blind us from seeing other aspects of life.

The Petey Greene Program has been my temporary, weekly escape from the Orange Bubble. Petey Greene is one of my all-time favorite groups I’ve gotten involved with at Princeton so far. Each week volunteers tutor incarcerated students to help them earn their GED.

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I joined Petey Greene during my sophomore year at Princeton, and I have not yet missed a single session. I always look forward to that 25-minute van ride with people I now consider friends, and I look forward to the tutoring itself. Petey Greene has opened my eyes to experiences and people I never would have encountered elsewhere in life, and I am grateful. Volunteer work was a huge part of my life in high school, and I struggled to make time for it at Princeton. Now, for a few hours every Friday, I get to help people reach their academic goals, despite the adversity they face.

Petey Greene has also influenced me academically. As a concentrator in the Woodrow Wilson School, I am required to conduct research and write two Junior Papers (one per semester) during my junior year, in preparation for my senior thesis. I chose to write my first Junior Paper on the treatment of incarcerated pregnant women in New York prisons, and my second Junior Paper is about mass incarceration in the United States.

Although I love the homey feeling I get from the Orange Bubble, I am endlessly grateful for organizations like Petey Greene that bring me outside of Princeton’s walls and enable me to help others.

I should admit, from the very start, that I know very little, if anything, about visual arts. Beyond a hazy memory of how color wheels work (“ROY G. BIV!”) and a vague familiarity with a handful of names of the most famous artists, I can confidently say that my understanding of the visual arts is elementary at best.

For that reason, I’ve kept a respectful distance from the Princeton University Art Museum. Maybe because I found it confusing or because I found it a bit intimidating (or, more likely, a mix of both), I never stepped foot into the gallery at the Art Museum. To be totally honest, I did briefly enter the gallery in the fall of my first year, but that was during the Nassau Street Sampler, an event the Art Museum holds, when I was simply focused on trying all of the food at the event.

So, when two of my friends from Princeton Christian Fellowship, who happened to be tour guides at the Art Museum, offered to take a group of us on a tour, I hesitantly agreed. However, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend that hour walking around a silent room, looking at paintings and sculptures that I knew nothing about.

Instead, contrary to my previous ideas about art, the tour couldn’t have been more exciting. The tour guides used each piece to transport us into a different society at a different point in human history, masterfully weaving in interesting factoids about the art we were looking at into the fascinating stories about humans long ago. Rather than quietly tip-toeing around a maze of incomprehensible frames, I got to see the Art Museum for what it was—a collection of windows into a time and place past.

As we walked by the Princeton Vase, one of Claude Monet’s original "Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies" paintings, and Andy Warhol’s "Blue Marilyn," I found myself truly enjoying and appreciating the art on display and the Art Museum itself. Of course, my experience was especially enhanced by the fact that I was able to ask any and all of my “stupid” questions—“Why is that entirely black square of a painting considered art?”—but the tour guides graciously answered them all. The “entirely black square of a painting” was Ad Reinhardt’s "Abstract Painting" that actually has multiple shades of black and is a demonstration of Reinhardt’s technical ability to make typically shiny oil paints matte.

I ended up staying after the hour was up, excited to walk around the museum on my own. While I certainly am no expert after having gone on just one tour, the Princeton University Art Museum, like so many things on this campus, has opened my eyes to a whole new world that I can’t wait to explore further.

Having grown up and been born in South Brunswick, New Jersey, I’ve always been quite close geographically to Princeton. (for those of you that don’t know, South Brunswick is just one town north of Princeton). When I was considering attending Princeton during my senior year of high school, the thought of all the amazing opportunities, resources and people quickly shot Princeton to the top of my college list, but there was always a small part of me that wanted to go live in a city faraway. Even now, I still wouldn’t mind being somewhere a little warmer.

When I received my acceptance and ultimately chose to attend Princeton, I was once again elated to be going to such a prestigious university, but I envied my friends who had to take an exciting plane ride to get to their schools, rather than a short 15-minute car ride. I was worried that I would be too comfortable, that I would be too close to home and, most importantly, that I wouldn’t get to have a totally new, immersive college experience.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Aided by the fact that all first-year students have to live on campus, I quickly realized that I was definitely not home anymore—my “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in South Brunswick anymore” moment, if you will. With the rush of making new friends, finding interesting, yet challenging classes and joining a handful of the many clubs on campus, I found myself quickly swept up in campus culture before I could even start to think about complaining how close I was to home. Then, in a few weeks, when many of my friends—some of whom came from as far as the Philippines—began to feel homesick, I was the one that all my friends were envious of.

While my home away from home is truly only a few minutes away from home, Princeton has become a very distinct second home. This new home is where I have a second family—a family that I got to choose and now spend many of my waking hours with—and a place for me to explore and continue to challenge myself. I’ve grown in ways at Princeton that I would have never dreamed of, and my being close to home has meant that I’ve been able to bring my friends over for Thanksgiving and take them to my childhood stomping grounds. Before I got to Princeton, whenever anyone asked me how I felt about going to school so close to home, I’d grumble a little, saying it was the lone complaint I had with Princeton. Now, one of the first perks of Princeton that I mention is how close I am to home. Princeton, my home (not so) far from home!

One of the coolest parts of my Princeton experience has been interfacing with the dynamic, unique sports culture here on campus. When I give a campus tour, that statement is one of the things my visitors find most surprising, but it’s true nonetheless: I’ve become a fan of new sports since coming here, and have reaffirmed my lifelong love for others as a student-cheerleader (from the stands, of course).

It is no secret that the first word people associate with Princeton isn’t “sports.” Our Ivy League rivalry games don’t often make ESPN, and in revenue sports (an important distinction!) we don’t generally compete for national titles. Nevertheless, our athletic program has provided me with new opportunities to engage with disciplines I had hardly heard of before stepping on to campus.

On my dad’s most recent visit to campus, we went to watch a women’s water polo game. I wanted to show off our gorgeous aquatic center, and after reviewing the list of competitions that day my dad and I hiked down to DeNunzio Pool to watch our team take on Villanova University.

Neither of us had watched water polo before, save for perhaps a few minutes as we flipped through Summer Olympics coverage a number of years ago. However, I was quickly enthralled; as my dad and I tried to figure out the rules of the game through context, I was humbled both by the athleticism displayed by the women in the water and the opportunity to watch a competition so cool happen right in front of my eyes (for free, too!).

Since that afternoon, I’ve started scouring the Internet for water polo highlights, and I have planned other trips down to the pool with curious friends to view future games. When I woke up the morning my dad came to visit, I never would’ve guessed I’d go to bed that night a fan of a new sport.

It’s awe-inspiring to know that the same individuals I share a campus and classroom with every day can compete in such a challenging sport at such a high level. What impressed me the most about that experience, though, was the notion that there are probably hundreds of other little niches of campus I have left to explore. There’s so much going on here, all the time, and it’s probably difficult even over the span of four years to truly experience everything this campus has to offer.

One unique feature of student life at Princeton is that nearly all students at the University live on campus for four years. Unlike many other schools, there’s not an ‘apartment scene’ here, and the residential aspect of campus means that the tight-knit, community feeling among undergraduates lasts for four years and beyond. 

Students are randomly assigned a dorm and roommates their first year, and in future years are allowed to pick their roommates and their rooms through a somewhat complex process known to students as ‘room draw.’ Each April, the University housing office publishes a list of room draw times, which are weighted by class year and randomized within them. In other words (although this is slightly oversimplified), the rising seniors go before the rising juniors, but within graduating classes it’s impossible to predict before the times come out how your time will compare to that of a classmate. Rising sophomores go through a similar process, but draw in a pool of only students in their residential college. 

Room draw  is a fun time on campus: students who know they’ll be drawing into a room together for the following school year go around campus and visit the current residents of rooms into which they’d like to draw, scoping out the terrain and asking questions about the benefits and drawbacks of that particular location. Using floor plans of the dorms provided by the University, students compile a list of their favorite rooms and cross their fingers that it’ll be available on their draw day. 

The range of dorm rooms at Princeton is pretty broad: there are rooms ranging from singles to an 11-man suite (known affectionately as “the Zoo”). Accordingly, there’s a room size, layout and location that works for pretty much everyone. A quick Google search of ‘Princeton dorm room’ reveals some of the many über-cool floor plans available to undergraduates. You feel a mix of stress and exhilaration as you watch the list of available rooms whittle further down until it’s your turn to draw. 

Friends of mine at other universities across the country always ask me if I mind living in the dorms for four years, as I watch them all move into apartments off-campus. Each time, I answer a resounding no: the rooms available to Princeton students are usually a lot cooler than the typical ‘first year dorm,’ and I can visit any of my friends at school by foot in less than ten minutes!

Whether your time is at the top of the senior list, or at the bottom of your class, there’s a room waiting on campus for you to call home. 

In a previous blog, I outlined how my academic concentration has changed during my four semesters at Princeton, transitioning from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering to Politics. However, Princeton has also influenced my personal interests, including my appreciation for art.

Though I’ve always enjoyed making art and I’ve been drawing since childhood, that was the extent of my interest. I didn’t care much for art museums, art books or even talking about art. In particular, I didn’t understand what the big deal was about the Princeton University Art Museum. It amused me that all the visitors to campus seemed to want to visit the museum, possibly the place students visit the least. This began to change after I took Visual Arts (VIS204) “Painting I”  in the spring of my first year. Over the course of that semester, I visited the art museum several times for class assignments, gradually developing a greater appreciation for it.

The next semester, I resolved to go to the museum more often, with the ambitious goal of visiting once a week. This was a challenge; I still didn’t know very much about art and had a hard time appreciating all of the galleries. In late fall, however, Nature’s Nation went on exhibit (a collection of American art focused on the environment). I began to go to the museum quite often, hoping to examine everything in the exhibition before it moved to another location. While I had always enjoyed landscapes and more traditional depictions of nature, the exhibit also included styles of art I was less familiar with, which I began to grow more curious about.

When the exhibit left, I continued to visit the museum, exploring sections I had passed over before. I found a few friends who were also interested in the museum or volunteered there, and I began to visit it with them. Though I never expected it, going to the art museum is now a highlight of each month at Princeton, and I plan to continue visiting for the rest of my time here—even if it’s not always once a week.

Perhaps my favorite perk about being in a residential college community is the trips that the college council puts on. An incoming first-year student’s assignment to one of Princeton’s six residential colleges is completely random. This system was developed to encourage students to form relationships with diverse groups of people not restricted by academic interest or extracurricular involvement. Each college functions as a small community among the larger Princeton population, hosting its own events that mainly serve the students within that college. As a result, there is a lot of variety from college to college, with one of them being the sponsored trips.  

Because I live within my college, I am afforded a free first trip courtesy of Rockefeller College. Every subsequent trip costs $25. Trips range from Broadway shows to basketball games, and from escape rooms to amusement parks. As an avid theater fan, I am naturally drawn to the Broadway shows. During my time at Princeton, I’ve seen a total of five Broadway shows. Only one of which was not through Princeton (I saw Hamilton with a friend who won tickets through the lottery system!).

As a first-year, I saw the original cast of Waitress and The Color Purple. Both musicals left similarly vivid yet distinctly separate impressions on me. I had come to love them through different means.

Waitress was my first Broadway show, which made every part of the experience that much more exciting. I was introduced to Waitress through a song I didn’t know was part of this larger production. Before, I had simply known it as a song written by Sara Bareilles, an artist whose work I greatly admire, so imagine my surprise when I learned this song was only one of many quality songs pieced together to make a fantastic musical.

The Color Purple, on the other hand, is one of my all-time favorite books. This meant, unlike Waitress (which is also based on a book), I was already quite familiar with the plot. Thus, my fascination with this show lay in its transformation into the musical format. I had not listened to the soundtrack beforehand, like I did for Waitress. I was experiencing these songs for the first time in the audience. The Color Purple taught me how the powerful medium of musical performance could bring a beloved story to life, in ways different from reading the book or seeing a movie.

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This year, I saw Be More Chill during its preview runs! I did not know anything about the plotline nor had I listened to the soundtrack, which meant that this was a show I was not guaranteed to love. Instead, the musical slowly grew on me after the show. It was also a musical that featured an Asian female protagonist, which, in an industry that's working on its diversity, was very empowering and impactful to see on stage.

The most recent show I saw was Aladdin. Although I bought into the story less because of its idealistic nature, I was absolutely awestruck by the set, lighting and costume designs. The combination of these details made each scene shift very convincing. My favorite one was the magic carpet scene, which was simplistic in design yet effective in execution. The flying carpet was set against a black backdrop embellished with stars. At one time during one the songs, some cast members were rippling a large sheet on the stage. This mimicked the changing landscape and gave the illusion of movement. Aladdin involved a lot of choreography, which contributed to the energetic charm of the performance.

I’m incredibly grateful for the role Princeton has played in encouraging and fostering my passion for the arts. Onstage, Princeton has allowed me to explore a side of me I had never considered before coming to college. I never imagined myself singing or acting in public, but here I am, three years into college, involved in both the Princeton Triangle Club and VTone, an East Asian music group, while having also directed shows. Princeton offered me a space to take up my creative pursuits. Offstage, I can’t imagine how I could’ve afforded to see these shows on my own. One of the biggest barriers with attracting non-traditional audiences is accessibility. Having opportunities despite  these barriers has made me appreciate and treasure those moments when I'm sitting in the audience in front of a Broadway stage, waiting for the curtain to rise.  

Growing up I always loved baking. I loved to help my mom measure, whisk and sift. I loved when I was old enough to pick my own recipes and create my own dishes. Most of all, I loved the opportunity to enjoy the delicious sweet treats when they were finished.

As I got older, I had fewer and fewer opportunities to bake. Life got busy and baking simply wasn’t a priority. That said, I never lost my love for it. I assumed that when I got to Princeton, I would have even less time to bake or at the very least, no one to bake with — I was very wrong!

While I dabbled in some cooking and baking, it wasn’t until this past year that I really began to fully embrace my baking passion. I found a group of friends who were just as willing to crack open a good cookbook as I was.

We began by baking casually, some cookies here, some bread there. Before we knew it, we were baking multiple nights a week. As such, we decided to found our own baking club, dubbed “Thursday Night Home-Baking Group” funded by Princeton’s Center for Jewish Life (CJL) and open to all Princeton Students. We bake fully kosher (and mostly vegan) baked goods Thursday nights at 7:30 p.m. in the basement of the CJL. Past delicacies include everything from challah bread and bagels to three layer brownies and vegan cheesecake. After we bake, we distribute the goodies to our friends, in Frist Campus Center, around the CJL and of course to ourselves!

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Our efforts to create delicious treats that are kosher is an important part of the club and its values. For students at Princeton who keep strict-kosher, it is almost impossible to bake or cook in a social setting because there is no public Princeton kitchen with kosher cooking equipment. Noticing this lack and sharing a desire to be able to bake or cook with my friends, was one of the key factors that led me to acquire the supplies needed to make a baking club accessible to all.

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While students at Princeton are involved in a variety of different activities, helping to run this baking club has been one of the most rewarding leadership opportunities. It is a good reminder to take some time every week from the stresses of being a college student and make time for my friends while also doing something that I love. While in high school, I definitely struggled to find the balance between work and fun, my baking experience at Princeton has been another example of how college gives you so much more space to find balance.