I don’t remember how I joined the rugby team. I probably met an upperclass woman who told me to come to practice, or I put my name on a signup sheet, or something. I don’t remember.

I wish I did, though, so I could point to that memory and say that it was the best decision I've made at Princeton.

Joining the rugby team changed my life. I am a stronger person, both physically and mentally. I have learned so much from the game and from my teammates, who are among the most diverse, inspiring people I have met on campus. I have learned to love my body through a sport that values all body types. I have made lifelong friends on and off the field. I live with them, I eat with them, I study with them and I play rugby with them.

It’s been a long journey, both physically and metaphorically, since my first days as a freshman, and I’ve been so fortunate to have my teammates with me. We’ve traveled everywhere, including:

All up and down the East Coast

New York, New Haven, Cambridge, Hanover, Philly, Pittsburgh, Charlottesville, you name it. If we can get there on a bus, we'll be there. Our bus rides have been infamous. While some are more tame—people will do their reading, some will sleep, maybe we'll watch a movie—all sorts of shenanigans have happened on the bus rides, including, but not limited to: impromptu dance parties and deep conversations about the meaning of life.

California

For the past two years, PUWRFC (Princeton University Women's Rugby Football Club) has traveled to California over spring break. Last year, we went to San Francisco, and the year before, San Diego. Now, for those of you who are from California, you might not be so impressed. But after a long chilly winter in New Jersey spent poring over books, the chance to bask in the sun is welcome.

In California, we've played against university teams, club teams, and premier teams. We've visited Chula Vista, where the national rugby team trains (along with many other Olympic teams). We've played rugby and eaten our way through the state. 

England

My freshman year, our team went to London and Cambridge, England, for spring break. We played against two teams, the Cambridge Women's Rugby team and the Thurrock RFC, one of the top teams in England.

In between, we were everywhere from the rivers of Cambridge to the typical London tourist sights.

Princeton

Now, this probably goes without saying. But the old adage holds true: There's no place like home. Although we've had adventures around the world, every day with the rugby team at Princeton still feels like an adventure. It's crazy to think about all that has happened here. When I arrived, I had no idea what a rugby ball even looked like. A couple weeks ago, a bunch of senior ruggers got together over bubble tea, and we began to reminisce about everything that has happened since. That time a squirrel got into our room sophomore year. Our horrible haircuts over the years. The all-nighters we've pulled to write papers (bad idea). The all-nighters we pulled, just because we loved hanging out with each other (great idea). Even though the mood was nostalgic and bittersweet, I couldn't help but feel happy. After graduating, we may be in different corners of the world, but we'll always have Princeton to come back to. These are women that I'm going to remember when I think about my college experience. When I come back for reunions, these are the women I'm going to be looking for first. It's been a long journey, but it's certainly not over. 

 

Tentatively, I step into the classroom. Momentarily blinded by the stark fluorescent lighting, I blink to see staring back at me the nine faces of the students I will be teaching for the next semester. They are about my age, they are interested in philosophy, and they are inmates in a New Jersey state prison.

Never had I imagined that I would see the inside of an American jail—much less interact so closely with those on the inside. But here at Princeton, through a program supported by Pace Center for Civic Engagement, I have found myself doing exactly that.

Over the coming months, these 15 prisoners will become my interlocutors in candid and often surprising discussions about ethics, epistemology and the nuances of contemporary thought. Together, we learn to separate premises from conclusions, to reject fallacious reasoning, and to read, write and think like a philosopher. There are no papers or homework, and our readings are done together. Here, answers are far less important than the questions.

Our conversation topics are broad, but more often than not they will come to bear on deeply intractable issues—problems to which I frequently have no better solutions than my students.  

In these moments, a surprising thing happens. Against the backdrop of history’s most difficult challenges, there is no longer teacher and student, Princetonian and prisoner. Grappling together with these obscure questions, what remains is a group of equals, in a sphere where reason, thoughtfulness and critical thinking are all that matters. In prison, a context where opportunities for egalitarian dialogue can sometimes be sparse, our work provides unique avenues for self-expression, personal growth, and the development of broadly transferable skills in reading, writing and oral communication. The prisoners leave intellectually enriched, better prepared for re-entry, and perhaps most important, endowed with a genuine passion for learning and a healthy sense of critical skepticism. 

Numerous things have surprised me over the course of the past few months, but nothing has been more striking than the transformations we have witnessed in students. Many who were initially reticent to engage in discussion have become some of the most active participants—challenging their classmates, pushing back on unsatisfying conclusions and perpetually asking the hard questions.

The benefits of this experience, however, have not only accrued to the prisoners. Indeed, I have come away with a profoundly transformed view of the criminal justice system—aware of its failings, cognizant of its challenges and deeply moved to continue working with those behind bars.

For me, this experience has been deeply emblematic of Princeton’s informal motto: in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations. Service opportunities at the University abound, and whatever your passion, you will inevitably find either an existing program to join or broad support for starting something new. While it’s often difficult to find time for service amidst life here, it is infinitely worth doing. You may well be changing someone’s life in the process, and perhaps your very own in turn.

I started ballroom my very first semester at Princeton, mainly because I once took an Argentine tango lesson before coming to Princeton, and was surprised at how fun it was.

I remember my first gut impulse to do something like this came this summer, when I got the same email I had been receiving for the past two years about the Princeton half, which I usually ignored. But this time it was different.

Intramural sports at Princeton are characterized by a general feeling of fun, adventure and good spirit.

I went out to brunch with two of my freshman-year roommates a few days ago. It had been a long time since I had seen one of them—she had studied abroad during the fall, and I had studied abroad during the spring, so I hadn’t seen her for almost two years. We talked about our time abroad, our summers and our families. We reflected on stories from freshman year and told funny stories about this fall.

At one point, I was telling them about how the recent renovations in Firestone Library had almost caused a disaster for me. As they knew well from freshman year, I have always had a terrible sense of navigation and have gotten lost many times in the five stories of Princeton’s main library. Combine this with renovations and consider the fact that when I’m studying, I tend to ignore any distraction (including the need to use the bathroom!)... and you have certain disaster. I was telling them—theatrically—about how I had recently been ignoring the need to use the bathroom until I finished a long essay that I was working on, and then ran to where the bathroom had been only to find that it no longer existed, and spent the next five minutes in quiet desperation trying to find the new location.

My old roommate laughed and said, “You know, that could be a good title for a book about your time at Princeton: ‘Running through Firestone.’”

We laughed, and talked about how many times we’ve felt this way at Princeton—how many times we’ve felt that we’re rushing last-minute to submit an assignment, how we’re trying to balance too many things at once, how we’re racing from place to place with no time to think. We talked about how, paradoxically, the Princeton overload forces you to simplify, and that for us, this was the first time in our lives that we couldn’t do everything anymore. We couldn’t be involved in three sports and be editors of two magazines and leaders of five student organizations and straight A students like we could in high school. For the first time in our lives, we had pushed ourselves beyond our limitations—a painful experience, but one that allows you to recognize what is most important to you, to prioritize and to focus on the things that matter.

Before coming to Princeton, I had often heard, “Be ready for the fact that you won’t be the smartest kid anymore.” I was ready for that; that didn’t bother me. What bothered me was not that I wasn’t able to do more than my classmates; what bothered me was that I could no longer do everything that I wanted to do. I was overwhelmed by that feeling. This is an experience that I believe every college student will go through at some point or another, more or less acutely. It is a painful experience; like any loss, there are the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. At first, it’s hard not to feel like a failure.

But it’s also liberating.

When you come to the other side, you find that your world is focused. Everything that you do has meaning to you, and you come to cherish it. I reflected on this change as I talked with my former roommates at that brunch. I could see it in them; there was a sense of calmness about them, a sense of meaning and purpose. We were all doing fewer things, but we were focused on what mattered to us.

I thought back to the hardest moments of freshman year—the moments when we felt as if the world were ending because of our terrible midterms grades, the times when we cried because we couldn’t make a team, the days we asked each other whether we could do this—and compared these moments to the conversation we were having about our futures now. One had accepted an offer at Goldman Sachs; the other was still in the process of interviewing for an engineering job at Universal Studios (which she later got!). There was a sense of assurance, a sense of belief in ourselves and in what we could do. 

Princeton will show you that you cannot do everything, but it will also show you how strong you are and will help you understand what matters most to you. 

Oh Disney, what tales you spun! Where I live, animals do not rest in my lap or gather round affectionately. The Princeton deer are flighty, raccoons gluttonous, cats indifferent, squirrels deranged, and not even singing to them can help. If I were Snow White, I would choose somewhere far, far away to make my woodland home.

In a previous post, I described my geological field work during June and July in Namibia. I helped a graduate student in the Department of Geosciences, Akshay Mehra, with his research, which focuses on studying the first bio-mineralizing organisms about half a billion years ago. These organisms are especially interesting because they immediately precede the earliest known animals, so they could be the direct ancestors of the first animals. Nobody really knows much about them, though, so our field work focused mainly on collecting samples of rock containing the fossilized shells of one particularly abundant species, Cloudina. We eventually collected almost 1,600 pounds of samples, which miraculously made it to Princeton. Now, with field work done, we're about to start actually getting a glimpse of these tiny, tubular creatures that lived in those half-billion year-old reefs.

But how much can you learn about a 540 million-year-old, tube-shaped organism when all you can see in the surface of a rock are cross-sections through its often poorly preserved shell? Other types of fossils are easy to extract, but in the case of Cloudina, the fossils are actually the same exact material as the rock surrounding them; there's no way to dissolve them out or anything like that. All that actually makes the fossil recognizable from the rock around it is a slight color difference resulting from mild chemical change that only affected the shells.

 

This piece of equipment is basically a machining grinder with several additions, including an 80 megapixel imaging sensor and controllers that interface it with a computer. The basic idea is that you take troublesome samples, like the ones we collected, and grind tiny layers off the sample. With each layer, you take an insanely high resolution photo of the surface, then grind again, then take another picture, and so on until the entire sample has been ground to dust. Yes, the sample is totally and literally pulverized, but what you have instead is hundreds of cross-sections through it, which you can then connect in three dimensions to create a 3D model of the sample. The magic of this technique is that you can see how the fossils look on the inside of the rock, and with a little bit of computer learning, you could even train the computer to recognize individual fossils and compute statistics about fossil density and orientation.

[embed]http://vimeo.com/72207631[/embed]

Honestly, just a year ago, I would never have guessed that I'd be looking at fossils of some of the earliest life-forms. Even beyond that, my work in the lab has taught me skills I've always wanted to know: how to interface different types of electric equipment with serial communication, all-purpose coding, and image analysis, to name a few. In just a few days we're going to attempt our first fully automated grind, which has never been done before, and it makes me proud to know I've contributed to something new in the scientific world.

 

Two weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the First Generation Freshman Dinner, which was hosted by the Hidden Minority Council, Dean Valerie Smith and Vice President Cynthia Cherrey. My role at this dinner was to join a group of freshmen and a faculty member, listen to their conversation, and take notes on any interesting comments on the experience of being first generation at Princeton or suggestions that these students had about how Princeton might do a better job serving the first-generation or low-income community.  

It was a powerful experience to listen to the stories of these nine freshmen. They were incredibly perceptive and inquisitive, and their conversation encouraged me to reflect on my own experience as a first-generation, low-income student.

Being first generation comes with its own unique set of questions and challenges. Where do I stay over breaks when I can’t afford to fly home? Will I fit in with people who come from much wealthier backgrounds? How do I explain a liberal arts education to my family when they ask why college is important? 

(Answers: 1. The dorms remain open for students over every break. Additionally, one dining hall will remain open over every break except winter break. 2. You’ll be amazed to find out that it’s almost impossible to discern who comes from what kind of background at Princeton. When I attended a Princeton Quest Scholars function for the first time, I was shocked to find out that some classmates I had known for years were first generation or came from low-income families. If you don’t tell anyone that you are first generation, no one will know and no one will assume. 3. Explaining a liberal arts education is trickier and I leave that up to you. You know your families best!)

There is one question, however, which I believe is the hardest: Do I belong here?

I come from a tiny town in Wisconsin, where I was raised in a tight-knit community that emphasized the good Midwestern values of hard work, honesty and family. From kindergarten, I attended classes with the same 35 classmates. We went to the same church every Sunday. We all played sports together. Every few years, one of my friends might leave; every few years, a new student might enroll. We were all of modest backgrounds. My father was a welder. My mother is a cashier. Neither attended college. There is very little that distinguishes me from anyone else from Rio, Wisconsin, and that is something which has haunted me for years. I asked myself, Why me? when I came to Princeton for my freshman year. I don’t deserve this.

I think it is natural for any student who walks through Princeton’s gates to question whether he or she belongs at this school. I think it is particularly easy for a low-income, first-generation student to believe that he or she does not belong here. But the truth is you do belong here. No matter what your background, you are not a mistake. For me to feel comfortable at Princeton, I had to recognize I was not here despite my background, nor was I here because of my background. My background is simply a part of me.

Certainly there are moments when it is difficult to be a low-income or first-generation student at Princeton. As I mentioned above, there might be times when you might not be able to afford to fly home for the holidays, or when your family questions why you’re bothering going to college anyway. But there are so, so many people at Princeton who will accept you for who you are and who will be willing to help you through these moments. Princeton does its best to ensure that you will never miss out or be discriminated against for being first-generation or low-income (just look at the incredible financial aid programs and the slew of Princeton-funded internships and trips), and that is something for which I am incredibly grateful.

Life is starting to settle back into routine here at Princeton, and I am finally beginning to readjust after my recent semester abroad.