Late to Class

Today, I was late for class: I couldn’t find my second glove, I forgot my computer charger and had to run back to my room to get it, the printer was broken so I had to find another, and it started to rain on my way up campus. Today, I was late for class and it was the least important part of my day.

Because today I also woke up, read for an hour, shared breakfast with one of my closest friends, went to two classes, caught up with a close friend over coffee, gave a tour, went to precept, ran to the U-Store to pick up a notebook and whipped cream (more on this later!), caught up on readings, watched part of a film for a class, auditioned for an interdisciplinary Italian performance scheduled for later this semester, came home to Butler College and made waffles for dinner (with whipped cream, of course!) to celebrate a successful week of classes. I then met with a friend to discuss a proposal for a student-initiated seminar and spent my evening reading books in Firestone library. My arms are too tired to turn the pages of my book. My legs are exhausted from walking. My eyelids are heavy. However, at the end of this long day, I am full of passion and excitement to know I have dedicated myself to things, people and causes that I care deeply about.

As a student here, I often feel there are many different obligations competing for my attention. There are things that I have to do: coursework and assignments. Things that I want to do: extracurricular commitments, volunteer, socialize, read for pleasure. And things that I should do: go to interesting lectures, talk with my parents or support and care for my friends. All of these things are important to me, but balance is more important.

I’ll be on time for class tomorrow. Till then, onward.

Claude Monet and Andy Warhol

Over intersession this year, I spent five days with artists Claude Monet and Andy Warhol, and the mosaics from Antioch on the Orontes, an ancient Greco-Roman city, to complete training to become a guide in the Princeton University Art Museum. The Museum, established alongside the Department of Art and Archeology in 1882, has evolved from the early collection to now encompass more than 97,000 art objects in its “encyclopedic” collection.

The Museum exists as an extension of the academic boundaries of the University. It is a center of cultural life — a microcosmic collection of the shared cultural patrimony of the world, and the site of intersections of discussions and debates.

Art has been a formative force in the development of my academic interests. In the spring semester of my first year at Princeton, I took a seminar on American Realism titled “The Perils of Painting.” My professor, Rachael DeLue, challenged us to question the interactions between words and ideas and art: How do you talk about representation? How do you talk about what is “real”? Like many courses at Princeton, this course challenged me not only to understand the course material, but also to evolve new conceptual approaches to questions.

Monet’s "Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge," a painting in the European Art Gallery in the Princeton Art Museum, embodies these questions and conversations. Monet, a leading figure in the Impressionist Movement revolutionized the understanding of light and color, shifting away from traditional Neoclassical emphasis on shadow and narrative. Monet represents the intersections between tradition and innovation and between understanding and interpretation. This piece engages closely with those intersections, as Monet intertwines light with color and engages with a unique temporal dialogue between the style’s fixation with the “immediate impression” and the external permanence of the art form.

“Intersection” is one of my favorite words because it so broadly encapsulates the way that peoples, cultures and ideas interact. As a senior in high school, I was confident that I would pursue a concentration in comparative literature at Princeton because comparative literature encompasses the kinds of conversations that I am passionate about — conversations about the way different languages and cultures interact or about the way words and ideas inform and influence each other. I thrive on the kinds of questions that confront understanding and prompt connections and interactions. I thrive on the questions that both seek to examine and create intersections.

The museum has extended the intellectual boundaries of my education, providing me with the forum to continue to discuss these questions. The museum allowed me to see new forms of intersections. There is nothing predetermined about interpretation. There is nothing predetermined about art.

Club Spotlight: Conservation Society

One of Princeton’s newest clubs is the Conservation Society. The club is made up of students who are passionate about making a large difference in protecting the planet. It is involved with various projects including summer internship opportunities, bringing speakers to campus, organizing nature hikes, and most importantly, encouraging students to think about how we can work towards greater conservation of the animals and plants on this earth.

So far, the club has seen great success. In October, we held a conservation fair where more than 200 students attended. Various club members had posters highlighting some of the unique volunteer opportunities available for students. These included Projects Abroad, Round River, the National Parks Service, and even working at the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB), a penguin rehabilitation center (see my blog about penguins here.) In December, the club brought in a speaker from the New Jersey Marine Mammal Stranding Center to give a lecture about the marine mammals in the New Jersey area. Students learned what they can do to help these animals and what to do if they ever see a stranded animal. Most recently, the club partnered with the BBC Network to have a special prescreening of "Planet Earth II" at the Princeton Garden Theatre and a moderating a talk with the CEO of the World Wildlife Foundation.

In this day and age, where our environment is changing every minute, promoting conservation efforts is critical to improving our future world. Noah Mihan '19, club president, describes the impetus behind starting the Conservation Society: “When my friends and I came to Princeton, we searched so hard for a club that would focus on large-scale conservation, one that would send students on research trips in the summer, repair trails and raise awareness about conserving the massive biodiversity on our planet. We never found one. So we decided to, well, just make our own!”

The club is always growing and improving. In the near future, the Conservation Society hopes to host a talk on climate change, send students on Princeton-funded research trips to Africa and do a club-wide trip to the American Prairie Reserve in Montana.

The Start of Senior Spring

This month marks the start of my last semester at Princeton! Here are some things that happened in February:

At the start of the month, there was a huge snowstorm, blanketing the campus in snow. Fun snow activities included sledding down Whitman Residential College hill and cute snowmen sightings around campus.

Then the snow melted away, and spring semester began. I shopped for a ton of classes and finally decided to take STC (Science and Technology) 209: Transformations in Engineering and the Arts, WWS/MAE (Woodrow Wilson School/ Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) 353: Science and Global Security, and AST (Astrophysics) 203: The Universe.

Learning about nuclear explosions in WWS/MAE 353.

Typically, students take four to five classes per semester, but most seniors will take two to three classes their spring semester to have extra time to work on their senior thesis. Like most seniors, I've been spending most of time outside of class working on my thesis, which is about smart homes and the Internet of Things (IoT). My research includes interviewing people who own smart homes, and it's always fun seeing their smart home set-ups and learning about their perceptions of IoT technology.

Aside from classes and working on my thesis, I've been hanging out with friends, attending every Lunar New Year celebration on campus for yummy Chinese food, and spending lots of time outdoors thanks to the weirdly warm weather lately.

The last week of the month felt more like May than February, and the bout of warm weather made me realize that this, indeed, is the beginning of the end. My time here at Princeton is almost over! It made me excited for the future but nostalgic for the past four years. However, there are still many months and things to do before I graduate, and until then, I'm looking forward to enjoying the rest of the semester, learning, growing and spending time with all the people on this beautiful campus before I leave :)

Fantastic Books and Where to Find Them

My enthusiasm for the library system, including the enormous wealth of resources, databases and books is probably the nerdiest part of my personality. I have been an avid reader since my childhood, but the nearly unlimited access to all of the resources that Princeton offers never fails to spark my enthusiasm.

Princeton’s library system has around 13 million holdings, including 7 million printed works, which are split between the 10 libraries on campus. Check out Michelle’s descriptions of all of them. Firestone Library, the largest library on campus, contains around 73 miles of shelves and is completely open-stack, meaning that if you want a book, you have to go find it yourself. The library has several book finders who can help you find books, but I have also spent a fair amount of time hopelessly meandering through shelves, once looking for a copy of “The Adventures of Superman” by George Lowther for a paper on George Bellows’ Dempsey and Firpo for an art history seminar, “American Realism and the Perils of Painting,” and more recently searching for Herman Khan’s “On Thermonuclear War” for a paper analyzing visual rhetorical tools in the 1964 black comedy film, “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Love the Atomic Bomb” for a history class, “U.S. Foreign Relations.”

Perhaps my enthusiasm for the libraries on campus and the resources that Princeton offers are the remnants of the voracious literary appetite that drove me, as a child, to coerce my parents into buying me multiple books on every trip to a bookstore and to carry around at least three books at all times. I found purpose and immense value in learning and understanding different modes of existence. As a student here, this enthusiasm has evolved. I now split my time reading between reading for coursework — Supreme Court Cases, the Federalist Papers, Emile Zola’s “J’accuse,” or Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nevsky Prospect” — and books for pleasure. At the moment I am reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” and a book that I borrowed from Chancellor Green library, “On Women: A Great Woman Analyst’s Pioneering Studies of Women — Their Psychology, Their Sexuality, Their Conditioning” by Clara M. Thomspon.

Chancellor Green is one of my favorite libraries on campus because, as far as I know, there is no formal codified book system. Built in 1873, Chancellor Green served as the University’s main library until 1948 when Firestone Library was completed. However, nowadays, the shelves are made up of an amalgamation of actual library books, texts left by students and an odd textbook or two. From my observations, there is no system or order to the shelves: On one shelf, I found James Gleik’s “Chaos” beside a collection of Plato’s dialogues and Henry Kissinger’s “Diplomacy.”

While Firestone attracts those driven by research, niche topics and course reading lists, I am drawn more frequently to Chancellor Green, where the shelves, cast in soft light flowing through a diadem set with stained-glass windows, contain proof of the varied, diverse and strange interests of Princeton students. It is an enormously satisfying feeling to approach research questions with the confidence that should I need additional sources, I can likely find a shelf (or three) of books related to my interests in Firestone, but in Chancellor Green, I am reminded of the intellectual diversity that defines Princeton’s student body.

W: Women at Princeton, Women’s March on NY, Welcome

Princeton’s informal motto, “Princeton in the nation’s service and the service of humanity” speaks to a valued commitment to service that all Princeton students share. The motto unites part of President Woodrow Wilson’s famous “In the Nation’s Service” speech with part of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s (Class of 1976) call for a broader definition of service in her speech at the reception for the Woodrow Wilson Award on Alumni Day in 2014. In her acceptance speech, Sotomayor spoke to the lasting value of the motto: “I live with Princeton’s motto in my heart, as you do, because it was emblazoned there during our time here.”

The University’s informal motto, revised to accommodate her recommendations, imbues campus culture with important civic values including service and global involvement as citizens, voters and members of civic society. As a student, as a woman and as a citizen, on Jan. 21, I joined the ranks of thousands of others in marches across the United States and around the world, choosing to march for these values and “in the service of all humanity.”

The morning of the Jan. 21, I set an alarm for 4 a.m., strapped my wallet, water bottle and a stash of snacks to my body, stapled several prints by artists Jesus Barraza & Melanie Cervantes, emblazoned with the phrase “VIVA LA MUJER” to a poster board, and blearily marched to the Dinky train station (an NJ Transit stop) in order to meet a group of students planning to bus down to D.C. to participate in the Women’s March on Washington.

Unfortunately, due to some logistical errors, we missed our bus, and I missed several hours of sleep. So, several hours later, instead of joining my older sister, who lives in D.C., and thousands of other pink hat-wearing women, I jumped on a train to New York City with one of my roommates and several friends. In New York, the subway was a sea of pink hats. Women, men and children pushed forward, moving as a mass toward the starting point of the march. Between Penn Station and 42nd Street, every block was swarmed with citizens and people wielding signs with powerful and honest messages. Every person, empowered by the understanding of unity, chanted together. “This is what democracy looks like,” the crowd chanted. This is what democracy looks like; this is what unity looks like; this is what the power of women looks like.

Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Meg Whitman and Michelle Obama: These are but some of numerous Princeton graduates who have led and continue to guide women at this University, serving as models of both the University’s core values and its students’ commitments to curiosity, intellectual passion and ambition. These are the women that have championed unity, diversity and equality at Princeton. These are the women that I looked to as I marched in New York and will continue to look to as I attend meetings for the Princeton Students for Gender Equality Club, and as I walk through the campus of a University that has worked hard to become welcoming to all.

Princeton became a co-educational institution in 1969, admitting 171 women as full members of the undergraduate student body. The students who matriculated as first-year students in 1969 graduated with the Class of 1973, becoming the first graduating class to include women for all four years. I will graduate in 2019 as the University celebrates its 50th year as a co-educational institution, one that welcomes students not only women, but also students of every gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status.

How to Win(tersession) Princeton

It's about that time of year again: first semester finals are finished (for the most part) and now it's time to finally relax before the next one starts

How Do You Work 3 Jobs in Addition to Class?

Just how do students make money while also attending a rigorous academic institution like Princeton? Until I got here, I too had this question. How do you manage to take classes, do well, make money and sleep? It seems like those things just don’t fit together. Well rest assured, despite my initial reservations, I promise you that it is possible.

Having a job at Princeton is actually really easy to do. There are so many different types of jobs that if you are looking to make money, or if you have a work-study grant to pay back, there will be something of interest to you. Therefore, here is a list of the top 10 jobs I have found while on campus.

Working in a library – sometimes you guide people to where books are, but oftentimes, you just make sure people stay quiet and get paid to do homework.
Tutoring – for local elementary and high school students.
Working in the Dining Hall – cleaning dishes and making sure the Dining Hall is properly stocked. This job has specific shifts, so it's very good for people who want a set time in their schedule for a job.
Babysitting – for local families and professors' children.
Baking cookies at Murray Dodge – Murray Dodge, home to the Office of Religious Life, offers free cookies and tea every day from 3 p.m. - midnight.
Assisting a professor with his or her research or working in a lab – gives you research experience and you get money, so a win-win.
Orange Key Campus Tours – Tours of campus for prospective students and their families. Learn more.
Taking pictures for the Yearbook - everyone takes photos, so why not get paid to do so.
Writing Center Fellow – provide editing and brainstorming assistance to other students on their writing assignments (while fellows get paid by the University, this amazing service is 100% free for students.)
Residential College Adviser – serve as a mentor and adviser for a group of first-year students.

When I first arrived at Princeton, I started signing up for different clubs and organizations. Soon enough, I had secured three jobs for myself and didn’t even realize it. I found things that interested me and that would help pay for my shopping trips and my love of coffee. I am the editor-in-chief of the Nassau Herald Yearbook, an Orange Key tour guide and I am a writer for this blog. I love all of my jobs, and the best thing, at least for me, is that for the most part, they are not time dependent. I do have a specific tour slot every week, but I can work on the Yearbook and the blog whenever and from wherever. This fit my academic schedule really well, and I’m still able to have an income while studying for my classes. In contrast, some of my friends like having a job in their weekly schedule and have specific days for their dining hall shifts or other jobs.

There is an online resource with all of the available on-campus and nearby off-campus jobs available for students. I often find myself sorting through the availabilities to see if anything piques my interest. In short, with all the opportunities, something will pique your interest and, most importantly, fit within your schedule.

My 2016 Princeton Experience in Three Short Anecdotes

As I reflect on my experience at Princeton in 2016, I have three short anecdotes that speak to my pride and gratitude for this school ...

36 Hours of HackPrinceton

Last weekend, I participated in my very first hackathon: HackPrinceton!

For those of you who don’t know, a hackathon is marathon computer programming event where lots of people come together to build all kinds of projects.

Every fall and spring, the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club hosts HackPrinceton, a 36-hour hackathon where students from across the nation come to work on software and hardware projects.

Here’s how the 36 hours of HackPrinceton played out for me:

Friday, 9 p.m.: The hackathon begins. I arrive at the Friend Center with no specific plan or project in mind, but I definitely want to make something. I’m excited to hear some tech talks, get free swag and snacks, and play with the hardware from the sponsors. I end up taking lots of gummies and a Surface Book from the Microsoft table and spend the night doodling.

Saturday, 8:30 a.m.: I wake up with a plan of action.

I’ve spent the past week worrying, disappointed with the U.S. Presidential election results. I wanted to find a positive way to respond. I’ve have asked friends, teachers, adults, mentors: What good can come out of this? How will we move forward? What can I do?

Listen, they say. Talk to everyone, not just people like you. Be vigilant, be kind. Reach out and learn empathy.

Taking their advice to heart, I resolve to design an app that will facilitate honest, one-on-one, personal discussions about social and political issues. I’ll call it “Converse,” for people to converse about converse views. Hurrah!

10:30 a.m.: I eat brunch at my eating club, Terrace, and download trial versions of Sketch and Framer.js onto my computer. I’ve been itching to try out these two prototyping tools ever since I first heard about them this summer. This is the perfect time to experiment with them. When I open the applications on my computer, however, I realize that’s easier said than done.

Noon: Fumbling my way around Sketch. I have no idea what I’m doing, but I'm making progress, slowly but surely.

3:30 p.m.: Break for a bike ride with a friend!

4:30 p.m.: Return to working in Sketch in earnest.

6:30 p.m.: Break for a walk with a friend, then dinner.

10 p.m.: Finished creating the UI in Sketch, I move to Framer to animate them. Since I have no idea how to use Framer and want to be done with this project, I write some of the hack-iest code I’ve ever written.

Sunday, 12:30 a.m.: Submit my project and go to sleep, yay!

9AM: The hackathon ends, and it's time to demo my project at the hackathon’s Science Fair. I have a few great conversations about technology’s responsibility to resolve social problems, and I also get to see the cool projects that other participants have made.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed my hackathon experience! I loved experimenting with two new tools, learning about the design process, and building something of my own! It was a productive – a surprisingly cathartic – end to a tumultuous week.

Thanks, HackPrinceton!

See all the HackPrinceton projects here, if you'd like :)

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