Our Favorite Classes

The bloggers share their favorite classes they've taken at Princeton!

Intellectual Roots

I owe my intellectual curiosity to my parents, who patiently waited as I waded through books in the now-defunct Borders bookstore that I considered my own.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Potter, who encouraged (and required) each of us to engage in “Super Quiet Uninterrupted Reading Time,” (affectionately called “SQUIRT”) every single day.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to Homer's "The Odyssey." I read it for the first time in 9th grade and have read it four times since.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to Gabriel García Márquez and "One Hundred Years of Solitude." It is a book that transformed my values and challenged my perceptions. I read it every year, and it changes me every time I read it.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to Leo Tolstoy — "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace" were my solace in the spring semester of my senior year in high school.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to my home — Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, I saw so many different remnants of history and culture and diversity. There, I saw socioeconomic inequality, an ever-growing achievement gap and intolerance. Even living thousands of miles away, Santa Fe continues to ground me and remind me how I should understand my values.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to “Ethics and Public Policy,” taught by Professor Stephen Macedo, which challenged me to confront entirely unfamiliar questions and decisions. It made me uncomfortable; it made me feel nervous, and it made me grow, adapt and learn.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to the Humanities Sequence, a double-credit intensive survey course of the Western cannon, which introduced me to a brief glimpse of the expansive oeuvre of Western literature. I saw passion in every professor who taught the course. I saw passion in every student who gladly read 26 books each semester.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to “American Realism and the Perils of Painting” with Professor Rachael DeLue, where I was exposed to bodies of knowledge and conceptual approaches to questions completely new to me.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to Professor Christian Wildberg and to Athens, Greece, where I participated in a PIIRS Princeton Global Seminar. Our sole obligation was to learn and observe and question.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to "Constitutional Interpretation." I toiled and groaned as I carried my heavy law-school-like textbook like a security blanket. I cried in frustration when I received poor grades on pieces of work to which I had dedicated immense time, energy and heart, and I called my dad in triumph to discuss good feedback on one of my last assignments. My dad congratulated me, and I told him I will not be going to law school.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to the students that I teach as an English as a Second Language (ESL) tutor. Our students dedicate the time to come to class every week in order to improve their grasp of a language and a culture that so often declares that they are unwelcome. Every week, I am humbled by their incredible ambition and genuine care.

I owe my intellectual curiosity to Professor Dennis Feeney and Professor Alberto Rigolio, who guided me, along with a group of twelve peers to Pompei and Rome in pursuit of knowledge and truth. (I also owe my intellectual curiosity to my 9th grade World History teacher, Coco Rae, who introduced me to the Roman world.)

I owe my intellectual curiosity to the courses that I’ve loved, to those that I’ve abhorred and to those that have challenged my knowledge, values,and beliefs. I owe my intellectual curiosity to the teachers and professors who helped implant and foster pieces of knowledge in me, to the teachers and professors that I could not communicate with effectively and to the professors that I hope to get to know.

I owe my intellectual curiosity, in many ways, to Princeton.

What's It Like Being a COS Major?

To answer the most frequently asked question I get from prospective students: It's super cool!

Basically, being a Computer Science (COS) major means that I have to take eight departmental classes, which are COS classes that are 300-level or higher. COS courses are typically lecture-style classes, and the coursework involves programming assignments, problem sets and final projects. There's no one course that all COS majors are required to take, and it's nice having so many options for classes. (See listing of COS classes here.)

Because I'm pursing an A.B. degree (as opposed to B.S.E. - read about the differences here), I have to do four semesters of independent work, which means I get to work on projects of my choosing, learn about whatever I want to learn about, and then write a report about it. For my junior fall, I wanted to learn how to make a mobile app, so I built an Android app that uses geofencing to deliver push notifications about public events happening in nearby parks. In my junior spring, I wanted to brush up on my web development skills, so I made a website that made URLs human-readable and then conducted a user study. For my senior year, I wanted to engage more with people, so I'm interviewing people and writing my thesis about it! If you're curious, my thesis is about smart homes, privacy and the Internet of Things. :)

Since declaring COS as my major sophomore spring, I've taken two COS classes each semester, plus independent work. About half of my studies are dedicated to COS, and the other half is filled with whatever else I want to study--English, French, Chinese, dance, music and anything that strikes my fancy to round out my liberal arts education.

The reading list for ENG 369: Contemporary Science Fiction.

Additionally, I'm super grateful for the fact that being a COS major has, quite literally, taken me places: I've gotten to work in San Francisco and Seattle the past two summers, and I spent my junior spring studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. This spring break, I also got to travel to Berlin for the Fung Global Forum: "Can Liberty Survive a Digital Age?"

I'm so happy to be a Computer Science major and have certainly enjoyed my Princeton academic experience. Hopefully you've gotten a good taste of what it's like to be a Computer Science major here at Princeton, as well!

The Pursuit of Passion

Last spring, midway through the second lecture of an introductory molecular biology course, I found myself fighting in vain to stifle a smile.

No, I had not just been struck by the sudden revelation that my life’s purpose was to don a lab coat and map genomes (as an English major, the only lab you’ll ever find me mapping my way back to is that of a man named Victor Frankenstein). In all honesty, I hadn’t anticipated enjoying MOL 101. Yet here I was, grinning from ear to ear—all thanks to the passion that filled the stage before me.

There, in front of a class of 50 students, was my professor—white mustache wiggling, eyes gleaming behind his glasses—literally bouncing in his soles while describing the function of DNA ligase.

Later that night, I typed my professor’s name into Google’s search bar. A snippet from Wikipedia immediately appeared in the screen’s upper right-hand corner, presenting a life condensed into a 2.5 x 5 inch box.

He is almost 70 years old.

He is a Nobel Laureate.

And yet, after 15 years of teaching introductory molecular biology, he still gets giddy when introducing enzymes to a room full of college students. In that moment, I told myself with absolute certainty: If I’m anything like him when I’m older, I’ll have done something right.

I love watching people fall in love with education. Hearing a chemistry concentrator describe protein crystallization as “art” and a dancer call ballet her “science.” Catching children staying up late to read “just one more chapter” by flashlight. Watching strangers pore over books on every topic from Faraday to crème brûlée, Mozart to modern art, Alaskan fly-fishing to Musca domestica, your common housefly.

As someone who has always had a case of unshakeable curiosity, there is nothing better than greeting a new day with the knowledge that I will learn something—anything—new before sundown. Waking up is easy when you’re eager to get out and discover more about the earth beneath your feet. I would never exchange this gift of education.

I love the shoes I’m in.

Do It For the Data

This semester, I am studying abroad in Panama as part of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) department. This program is wonderful in that it is designed specifically for EEB students at Princeton. I don’t have to worry about credits transferring, figuring out travel logistics, and nearly all of my classes count as departmental. However, the best part of this experience is that I am learning what it means to do real scientific research. Our first class, was about tropical ecology. For this class, we went into the rainforest every day and collected data for an independent project that we designed. At first it was quite daunting. How was I going to come up with a project that would be intriguing but also doable in a short time frame? I had never done anything like this before and didn’t have a clue as to where to begin. However, after some guidance from our wonderful professor and TA, I figured things out and came up with a really cool experiment.

For my project, I looked at something called the resource concentration hypothesis. This hypothesis predicts that with greater resource abundance (in my case more flowers on a plant), the greater the rate of insect visitation. To determine if the rainforests in Panama supported this idea, I sat in front of flowers all day and counted the number of insects that visited them. It was long and oftentimes hard (especially when there were bugs crawling all over me), but the occasional monkey and sloth sightings always kept me entertained and in high spirits.

After collecting data in the field, I went back to the lab and analyzed my results. Compared to other classes at Princeton where I’ve done statistical analysis on data sets professors have provided me, for the first time, I did analysis on my own research. It was really exciting, and it gave me a chance to see how complicated research actually is.

Since I am considering graduate school after graduating from Princeton, this was a wonderful opportunity to get a taste for what the research life is like. Plus, the hands-on field experience taught me so much more than I ever thought possible in just a few weeks.

Whether biology is your thing or not, Princeton has many great study abroad opportunities. Spending time in a foreign country and doing non-traditional schooling is an incredible opportunity that I believe everyone should take advantage of.

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.

Pursuing Passion at Princeton

In my senior year of high school, I went on a Russian literature kick, devouring Tolstoy’s "Anna Karenina," and "War and Peace," and Mikhail Bulgakov’s "The Master and Margarita" all in the last month of school. Paired with a fascinating Russian History class I took in the Spring and a research project on Russian ballet, I was hooked on Russian and gladly joked that at Princeton, I would study Russian and major in Slavic Languages and Literatures. I was particularly interested in a Freshman Seminar titled Cold War in the USSR: The Life and Times of Nikita Khrushchev. Freshman seminars are small, discussion-based classes on a huge range of topics, and only first-year students can take them. I was infatuated with Russian history and language and culture.

However, through the quick and new transitions of moving away from home, taking classes in completely new and unfamiliar fields (Ethics! Art History! Religion!), and finding new friends, my passions grew and then changed.

A year and a half later, I am a Politics major, I am getting certificates in Hellenic Studies (after spending an amazing summer in Athens, participating in a Princeton PIIRS Global Seminar) and History and Practice of Diplomacy. And I am not taking Russian, but Italian. However, these changes speak to the beautiful power of transition, growth, and the amazing resources at Princeton that help foster individual and academic passion.

I do not speak about passion lightly. Princeton is a place for incredible growth — I have changed and grown. But behind those changes are the people I’ve met, including those from Hong Kong, Greece and Hawaii; the classes I’ve taken—from an Art History seminar called “The Perils of Painting” to the Humanities Sequence; and the professors that I have had the pleasure to listen to and learn from. As a place where you will simultaneously study, socialize, volunteer and lead, Princeton will shape you and your passions. These changes are good and special and scary and important. Although I won’t major in Slavic Languages and Literatures, I still read Russian novels in my free time, and I now devote my energy to pursuing new passions and new interests.

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 ...

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