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.

In a typical English course, my grade is made up of two papers, a test and class participation. The two papers come at midterms and finals, and they can range from five to 15 pages. Here’s the gist of a regular prompt in the English department— “Choose a passage from one of the books we’ve read and use it to create an argument.”  Depending on your comfort level, this prompt can be either awesome or terrifying. I’ve found that it’s usually awesome, albeit rather stressful. So here’s the process I use to write one of these free-wielding papers. Hope it’s helpful.

1) Choosing a topic

This first step necessitates the actual first step—reading the book. While reading, I always have a pen in hand. Mostly, I underline sentences I find odd. Weirdness is a great measure for a good paper topic—tonal shifts, alien metaphors, words that don’t seem to fit etc. After reading, I go back and find a passage that I didn’t understand. I read that passage over and over and over again. Next, I see if I can get anywhere with it. Usually the answer is no, sometimes it’s yes.

2) Coming up with an argument

My best (and perhaps only) piece of real advice is that you should check out the Oxford English Dictionary (oed.com.) It’s beautiful. It’s so much better than any other dictionary, like MLB to your little league team. If I’m writing about a poem, I’ll look up nearly every word in the OED. This is an awesome way to detect possible puns, which facilitates detecting possible interpretations. What is the word doing, what weight is it carrying, what is it referring to, is it sarcastic or sincere… become obsessed with the language the author is using. English arguments need to come from the language of the piece, not from your intuition or past experience.

3) Organizing.

My mind is a total mess, so developing prose that makes any sense whatsoever is a challenge. I start by typing up anything interesting in a word document: words that mean two things, interesting punctuation, symbols, allusions to other pieces of work. I then try to create some sort of order by dragging and dropping my paragraphs into another word document. The second word doc is organized by various themes. I drag and drop again—the third word doc is organized in some sort of argumentative order. This theme kinda proves this point that kinda proves this etc. Then I drag and drop again—the fourth word doc is hopefully my outline.

4) Writing

I write anywhere from three to five drafts before the final. I write pretty quickly. When I can’t think of how to phrase something well, I phrase it poorly and move on. Computers are great, because words can be deleted. Don’t worry about sounding like an idiot. If I want to write five good pages, I try to write 10 okay pages, and then I delete the worst half and keep the better half. My “editing” process is pretty much a glorified “deleting” process.

I know it’s not much—but after 2 1/2 years at Princeton, this is the best I could come up with. I’ll let you know when I get better, and maybe I can revise this post. 

I lead a Scholar Lifestyle because of my passion for learning. But this passion didn’t exist at all until I came to Princeton.

Before entering Princeton, my motivation to learn was simple: to obtain the knowledge to get better grades. Working hard was just a means to raise my GPA.

But eventually my old preconceptions about learning died away. The rigor of Princeton’s courses demanded more from me than working hard for the sake of getting high grades. I realized there needed to be a higher purpose behind my hours of struggling to write analytical papers and straining to absorb thousands of words into my brain.

After my first semester, a thought came to me: I mentor, write and run because I’m truly passionate about each Lifestyle. If I could apply the same passion to learning, then maybe I could endure large amounts of it, just like how I push myself in other areas of my life.

I began to evaluate why I enjoyed reading literature in the first place. I remembered how my life changed when I picked up a tattered copy of "The Sea-Wolf" by Jack London in the 7th grade. The book turned me into an avid reader after years of shunning books as modes of storytelling. Jack London's prose really captivated me, and he changed my perspective on reading. To this day I attribute my decision to become an English major to Jack London.

At the start of my second semester, I began reading literature with a renewed purpose: to gain something from everything I read like I unexpectedly did with "The Sea-Wolf." Eventually the hard work didn’t feel like work anymore. I felt like I was truly gaining something other than a means to obtain a good grade. I was gaining awareness about the history, philosophy, religion and politics of the past. Regardless of my final grade on a paper or assignment, I always walked away with an invaluable gift that couldn’t be dampened by red ink.

As my junior year approaches, I actually feel excited about conducting research on Jack London. I feel an obligation to continue his scholarship so more students may feel inspired by his writing. A few years ago, I would have never imagined doing research for sheer enjoyment. But now I enjoy learning, which I view as a type of self-development, and I have Princeton's rigor to thank for that.

This semester, in order to spice up my schedule a bit, I decided to enroll in a visual arts class. 

Day 4 continued: My team was closest to camp, so we could see the water creeping toward our tents, probably an inch every few seconds. We ran back just as the first few tents were inundated, and we began dragging the tents onto the highest ground possible.

The red-eye flight to Fort Lauderdale blinked by, and after stretching our legs and filling out the entry forms, the 16 of us piled into three charter planes bound for Andros International Airport, a glorified landing strip in The Bahamas.

PTL. Wherever I looked, that acronym seemed to be scribbled, from chalk on the sidewalk to Facebook status updates. According to UrbanDictionary.com, "Post-Thesis Life" (or PTL for short) is “the beautiful time when a college senior is finally finished with their senior thesis and can enjoy senior spring like a normal human being.” The Princeton Senior Thesis is a yearlong academic project, usually around 100 pages, required of all Princeton students (though engineers are given the option to pursue a semester-long independent project instead).

I love to read, but I don't always carry a book under my arm or automatically analyze everything. I have favorite books, but I don't know the ins-and-outs of literature. And that'd always been fine to me. But somewhere in my early time at Princeton, this idea of a true, very best English major crept over my thoughts towards the concentration. I realized the good English major Aliisa is a literary buff who reads 24/7, and who loves to quote and speak extensively about a broad range of authors and niches of literature. And I realized I wasn't her.

Princeton physics classes are hard. In a typical week of lectures, a professor will cover around a chapter of material from the textbook. To accompany these lectures, the professor will assign a problem set meant to solidify our understanding of the material and encourage us to apply it in adept, creative ways. These problem sets require a lot of work. An "easy" problem set may take four hours, a difficult one 20 hours or more.  

Luckily, students are not alone in facing these challenges. Professors are always available at office hours, and it is very common for students to work together on mastering the material. Most physics classes run problem sessions once a week to facilitate this collaboration.  

Problem sessions are run by TAs, graduate students who assist the professor of a course. Usually, the TA will start the session by reviewing the material the class has covered in the past week. This can be quite helpful, because as graduate students, TAs have learned the material more recently than the professor, and therefore remember which topics they found confusing at first, and how they resolved that confusion.  

After this review, students will work together on solving that week's problem set. The TA will stay for a few hours, and we can ask her or him questions when we have trouble. The work is quite collaborative and very enthusiastic. This part of problem sessions is in fact one of my favorite parts of being a physics major. As I talk with other students about the week's problems, concepts that were previously unclear gradually come into focus.  

We also love to work problems on blackboards. There's something about drawing and doing math on a blackboard while talking with others that makes one feel like a real physicist. These blackboards can become quite messy, however, as we realize what we've done wrong and write corrections nearby. I've included some images of problem session work so that you can get a sense of what we do.

 

 

 

There are two kinds of classes at Princeton—lectures and seminars. Seminars are small classes with lots of professor-student interaction. For example, I’m taking a Woodrow Wilson School seminar on federal and state budgeting, and in class I always feel free to raise my hand whenever I have a question or wish the professor to further elaborate on something. In lectures, however, professors have a set amount of materials that they wish to cover, so they typically don’t answer questions during class. Students are encouraged to ask questions after class or go to office hours, and to enhance interactive learning, for every lecture class at Princeton students also enroll in a precept. Precepts are small discussion groups led by either a professor or a graduate student and are capped at 15 students.

Last semester I took "Practical Ethics" with renowned Australian philosopher Peter Singer, and the class had about 450 students—one of the largest classes at Princeton. As you could imagine, the professor rarely took questions in a class of this size. However, my preceptor, a Rhodes scholar who also did his undergraduate studies at Princeton, did an excellent job integrating lecture materials into our precept. For every precept, we had one student do a five-minute presentation on that week’s readings, and the student would also throw out a few questions to get the discussion started. We would then debate back and forth, voicing our own opinions and commenting on others’ with regard to the lectures and the readings.

In my precept we had a good mix of junior and senior philosophy majors (intimidating!) and underclassmen who knew nothing about philosophy before that class (a.k.a. me). Also, because this class was about contemporary ethical issues, such as abortion and euthanasia, it was controversial in nature. But regardless of our backgrounds and personal inclinations, everyone was respectful, open-minded and inquisitive during the discussions. Our preceptor acted more as a panel moderator than as a lecturer, as he let us direct the flow of the discussion, but pulled us back on track when we got too bogged down in details. Speaking out in the precept really helped me gain a deeper understanding of the materials in a way that I never could by just attending lectures.