At 185 Nassau St. stands an old elementary school. At first glance, it is mysterious. If you walk by at night—10 p.m., midnight, or even 3 a.m.—you'll see the lights are always on. Maybe you'll get a glimpse of a mysterious shadow through a 2nd floor window, or maybe you'll see lights flicker from the 4th floor attic. You'll hear weird sounds, too—the sound of an electric saw, maybe a pounding, vibrating beat. 

This building is the Lewis Center for the Arts, and home to many programs, including the Program in Visual Arts, also known as VIS, or as I like to put it, Princeton's best kept secret. Students enrolled in the Certificate and Program 2 are not only able to take studio courses, but are given their own individual studio spaces, funding for materials and individual advisers. In return, we get to make whatever we want to. It's a pretty good deal.

As a result, I've spent a good amount of time in my studio at 185. As I shape my senior thesis, a solo exhibition, it's become my second home. The building features: 

• a film theater 
• an acting studio
• multiple dance studios
• a ceramics studio
• a darkroom
• painting and drawing studios
• a sculpture shop
• digital studios (for film, photography and graphic design)
• a typography studio/printing press
• a printmaking studio

And, most important:

• Student visual arts studios

I'm constantly amazed by all of the work that my peers are doing. Our studios are spaces where we are free to explore and create whatever we want. We are able to paint, manipulate, tack things onto the floors and walls. They become our sanctuaries and the places where we make sense of the issues we are thinking about, and the questions we are asking. And accordingly, they are deeply personal, incredibly inspiring and sometimes bizarre spaces. And so, to give you all a glimpse into our lives, I decided to ask my peers for photos of their studios. Specifically, I told them to "send me something weird." Interpret as you will.

Jaime Ding '16

Amalya Megerman '16

Ben Denzer '15

You can find part of his senior thesis here. 

Louisa Wills '16

Me (Wendy Li '15)

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.

When I applied to college, I knew I loved physics, but I didn't know much about what being a physics major entailed. So that you are more informed, I've created a summary of the physics classes I've taken here so far.

Thursday afternoon. It was a beautiful day here at Princeton University. The leaves were changing color, the air was just breezy enough for a light jacket and there wasn’t a single cloud in sight. And there I was—huddled under dim fluorescent lights in a corner of Firestone Library, two floors underground, surrounded by stacks and stacks of books. I had finally met a fate I was dreading for three years. I was writing my thesis.

The senior thesis is a cherished (or dreaded) Princeton tradition, as previous blog posts have discussed. In my senior thesis, I’m researching how economic reforms have affected the lives and occupations of women in rural China. I chose this topic because I’m interested in how women are affected, both positively and negatively, by economic development, but also because of my own background. My father grew up in a remote village in rural China, and in the past 30 years a lot has changed. Populations have shifted. Farmland has turned into factories. Roads have been built. I go back once in a while to visit my family. My grandmother still lives on the same plot of land, while China transforms around her.

Friday afternoon. Another beautiful day. My parents were visiting campus with my grandmother, who had just arrived in the United States for the first time. As a tour guide, I’ve introduced Princeton University to visitors from around the world, from all walks of life. Yet that Friday, I was at a loss as to how I would introduce my grandmother to my Princeton life. It seemed absurd to explain having unlimited meal plans to a woman who had lived through famines, or living in Gothic castles to someone who had literally built her own house out of stone and straw.

We strolled around campus. I was proud to show my grandmother the place I call home. I pointed toward my dorm, and I showed her where I had my classes. I tried to explain some of Princeton’s history to her. I joked about the squirrels hiding in piles of leaves. She was quiet. I wasn’t sure if things were getting lost in translation, or if the institution itself confused her. And then she said something I won’t ever forget: “I’m an illiterate woman from the countryside, and I’m visiting my granddaughter at the best school in the United States.”

Something clicked for me in that moment. Just a day before, I was angsting about my research, intimidated by the blank Word document on my screen, and getting caught up on the smallest, most obscure points. But then, hearing my grandmother, everything seemed to converge. I realized something I think I had always known subconsciously: My thesis isn’t just an academic interest. It isn’t just a natural progression of the classes I’ve taken at Princeton. My thesis is a product of my own self, where the personal meets the political. When I picked my topic, I knew I wasn't just going to write about some abstract women in a country on the other side of the world, but rather I would be writing about my grandmother, my aunts and my cousins. I wanted to learn about my roots. As an immigrant growing up in the United States, I wanted to feel closer to a family history and a culture that had previously felt so far away.

I still think about what my grandmother said, every day. That revelation hasn’t resolved any of the challenges I’ve been facing in my thesis. I still have blank Word pages to fill, I still have reading to do and I still don't understand all of those econometric models, yet somehow, it doesn’t seem so dreadful anymore. Even though I'm still nervous about writing 100 pages, I know that everything I've learned these past three years, everything I've lived in the past 21 years and everything my family has been working for over the decades will inform all of it. I know there will be plenty of challenges ahead, but now,  it's more than just another grade on my transcript. This time, it's personal. 

My summer internship with the Quebec Labrador Foundation was a literal and figurative journey.

Hello, readers!

Imagine: a foreign language professor is trying to explain to you a complex grammatical point about how the endings of words change depending not only on those words’ parts of speech, but also on how they’re being used in a sentence, and that you also have to keep in mind the order of the words in that sentence, not forgetting to factor in whether or not said words are definite or indefinite, or apparently indefinite except that they’re part of a construction that arbitrarily makes them definite because grammarians say so.

Now imagine that lesson is taking place in said foreign language, that the professor is a native speaker with a native (and seemingly impenetrable) accent, and that you do not know half of the grammatical terms they’re using.

The end result looks something like this (and I swear this photo was not staged):

I’m spending my summer in the town of Ibri, Oman, at the Noor Majan Training Institute, where I’m studying Arabic courtesy of the Critical Language Scholarship Program of the U.S. Department of State. My description was, of course, a bit overblown, but there have certainly been days here where I’ve felt a bit out of my depth, whether linguistically, scholastically or culturally.

In all seriousness, the learning curve going into an Arabic immersion classroom was steep, but it improved quickly. Our instructor, Ustaadha Habiba, calibrated her teaching style to our level, and we learned the necessary classroom vocab (and got accustomed to her accent) by sheer exposure and repetition. By the third or fourth week, moments of utter confusion were few and far between, replaced by a sense of basic understanding, punctuated by moments of excitement when we reached a sort of collective “breakthrough” moment.

Four hours seems like a lot of time every day to spend on a single subject, but we mix things up. Every class starts with a 15-minute taqdiim, or presentation, from one of the students on a subject of their choosing. Then, we usually progress into a lesson of some sort about a grammar concept, or the use of a new phrase, construction, or set of vocabulary, which we follow with conversations designed to activate what we’ve just learned. We end class most days with a debate or discussion centered around something from the news media, which is also enlightening because Ustaadha Habiba will talk about Omani perceptions of the issues at hand.

Although it proved difficult at first, having a native speaker conduct the class wholly in Arabic is probably the best part of the program. Comprehension improves through exposure, and I’m exposed to 20 classroom hours every week. It’s at times mentally exhausting, but the rewards are clear now whenever I can get through a conversation with Omanis—be they teachers, taxi drivers or young people—without asking them to repeat themselves or clarify for my clunky Western ears.

Until my next post, when I’ll talk about Omani culture and our travels around the country!

A little look into my experience of Princeton in Beijing last summer. There were teachers and food, weather and adventures!

I'm a physics major, and studying that subject takes up the majority of my time. But one of the benefits of attending a liberal arts university like Princeton is that physics is never the only thing I am learning. I have taken a five-person seminar on autobiographical fiction in Latin America taught by a Mexican author and intellectual, a lecture on Grand Strategy by a prominent international relations theorist, and a class about the history of the United States' involvement in world affairs taught by an expert in U.S.-Indonesian relations.

Right now, I'm finishing up a very physics-heavy semester, but even so I've managed to explore nonscientific parts of the world. One of my favorite ways to do this is by listening to some of the many guest speakers who come to Princeton. For example, one afternoon after my condensed matter class, I ran from Jadwin Hall, home to the physics department, to Robertson Hall, home to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. That afternoon, the Woodrow Wilson School was hosting a talk by Christopher Hill, the former Ambassador to Iraq. I had read about Hill in various newspaper articles, so I was excited to see him in person.  

The subject of Hill's talk was global hotspots. He began by delivering what ended up being a rather depressing overview of current events. Syria, he thought, was a pressing, serious problem that was metastasizing across the Middle East. Ukraine was an especially concerning situation given Europe's dependence on Russian gas. North Korea's new leadership was more belligerent than the last; China was beginning to take on a dark, concerning role.  

The ambassador concluded his talk with more general reflections about diplomacy, which were not much cheerier. Diplomacy, he noted, was ultimately about asking people to do things they would rather not do. To make such requests successful, leaders must rely on personal relationships they have built with others. The alternative is to use force, but Hill says war is a horrific event that people tend to underestimate. 

Leaving Ambassador Hill's presentation, I was thinking about issues very different from the equations and graphs that usually fill my time. Though his talk was quite heavy, I was glad I went and it gave me an opportunity to learn about a field different from my own.

 

Over the past few days, I had the chance to interview members of pastoralist Maasai communities near Amboseli National Park. We arrived here late last week for the second part of our current course, "Ecology and Conservation of African Landscapes" with Paula Kahumbu, and a group of us are currently working on a project related to women’s empowerment. Specifically, we are interested in how education efforts supported by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and Kenyan government have impacted local communities, and we will have a chance to speak to representatives of the KWS as well as the U.S. ambassador to Kenya later this week about our work here. It was a wonderful experience to learn about the communities and their culture. Up to this point, we’ve been exposed mostly to the ecology and biology of animals and vegetation, which has been very informative and has taught me important ways to structure my thinking and questions, but I love the feeling of working directly with a community to evaluate the effectiveness of certain programs and to think about how to address their needs.

It’s been extremely enlightening for me. Before our visit to the communities, I thought the greatest obstacle that prevented children from getting a good education in this area would be the cost. In some ways this was true, but there seemed to be a number of cultural considerations that affect the ability of certain children to attend school as well. In one community we visited, only 22 of the roughly 50 primary school children from 2013 went on to secondary school. Of the graduating class, only nine were girls and only two of those girls went on to attend secondary school. To me, it seems critical to explore and address the reasons for this disparity, and this is the sentiment we hope to inspire in those to whom we will present our work. 

I enjoyed this experience so much—it is the kind of thing that evokes passion in me, which makes me believe that it is possible to apply things I have learned and am learning in classes to effect some change in this world. I have always felt that an education should be more than simply rote memorization or competition for grades, and I am very grateful for the chance to experience education as something more tangible and rewarding than that. 

Little did I know that at Princeton there would be a multitude of other avenues for me to express myself through fashion, even in an academic setting.