It’s a tradition for Orange Key tour guides at Princeton to end their campus tours highlighting their “Why Princeton” story: a description of what brought them to choose the University for their undergraduate experience. Everyone's story is different, and as my years on campus progress I get more emotional each time I deliver it. Without further ado, here it is:

What drew me first to Princeton was the beauty of the campus. I didn’t go on a lot of college visits, but when my dad and I saw Princeton we both knew nothing was going to top it. But other, perhaps more pragmatic, elements of campus were just as attractive: I felt safe and loved that the campus residential community would mean I’d never need to venture off or live off campus to see my friends. The libraries scattered evenly among campus meant I’d have a different place to study for each day of the month. Having Nassau Street so close meant I’d have access to a bevy of global cuisines within a stone’s throw of campus.

But more than a physical space, I knew Princeton was a community. I was drawn to the residential college system and the idea that I’d have a smaller, built-in support network the moment I stepped on campus. Additionally, the Princeton experience lasts a lifetime: our reunions are a raucous, orange-and-black celebration of everything Princeton that draws nearly 25,000 alumni annually. (Check out this old New York Times article for a description of some of the antics). Local alumni networks like Princeton in Washington (of which I’ve taken advantage through Princeton Internships in Civic Service) host events for current students and alumni. In my experiences through the alumni networks I've had the opportunity to attend events with senators and world leaders. This means that the Princeton learning experience isn’t ever really over after you graduate.

I knew the students I would go through school with would be exceptional. I was, and still am, truly excited by the idea that I’m going to school with future leaders with whom I will share a crazy, one-of-a-kind four-year experience. I knew the University’s laser focus on undergraduate students, unique among its peer institutions, would exceptionally qualify me to become one of those leaders myself. In that regard, the University has exceeded even my own lofty expectations, funding weeks of in-class travel and summers’ worth of internships to enhance what I’ll take away from my studies.

There are thousands of undergraduate institutions in the United States. It's probably true that I would've been happy at many of them. But, I’m confident that there’s no place I'd be as happy as I am at Princeton.

If you told me when I started at Princeton that just one year later I’d be an editorial contributor for a magazine, I’d say: That’s crazy! Given that I thought I was going to concentrate in molecular biology on the pre-med track, I definitely wouldn’t believe you. And yet, here I am, a soon-to-be English major, pursuing certificates in Creative Writing and Spanish. While it seems like I did a complete 180 degree turn, it’s actually pretty common for Princeton students to switch their concentration. We don’t have to declare a major until our sophomore spring, so we have lots of time to figure out what we truly enjoy learning. And for me, I realized that my passion was English.

Fast forward to the internship craze. Many students are either searching for or securing internships (or study abroad opportunities, which are also great!). I had no clue where to start. What do I do with an English degree? I decided to visit Princeton’s Center for Career Development, where my eyes were opened to the many career possibilities, most of which I never even considered or knew existed. Our career center works magic – Peer Career Advisors share their professional experiences, staff in various areas of expertise offer advising, the center hosts workshops and events throughout the year such as: resume building, LinkedIn support, panels, career fairs, drop-in hours, etc. There are plenty of networking tools to search for internships and connect with others in the industry as well. 

I left the center with a clear idea of a few outlets to pursue in my internship search and the tools to do so. Many cover letters later, I secured an editorial internship at New York Family Magazine, funded by Princeton's Program in Journalism! Over the summer, I wrote articles for the print and digital magazine, composed the monthly calendars for each NYC borough, attended press events and met an amazing team of people. Some of my favorite press events were seeing Bloomingdale's Pre-Screening of The Lion King (2019), checking out Dylan's Candy Bar's Holiday Candy Collection preview and learning about Nike's new Adventure Club for kids at the NYC Nike offices. I also pitched an idea that now runs as a column in every print magazine: New York Family’s Parent’s Book Club. I got to read books straight off the press (often advanced copies), interview authors and think of discussion questions that parents can use in their book club meetings. My creative writing professor at Princeton, Idra Novey, was our first book club feature with her novel “Those Who Knew.”

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Toward the end of the summer, I didn’t want to leave. Of course, I was super excited to return to Princeton for my second year, but I was going to miss writing for the magazine and seeing the team every day. Easy solution: freelance writing! I still write for New York Family as an editorial contributor, which means I basically do the same things I did during my internship, but away from the office. It’s certainly a challenge to balance my work for the magazine with my academics and extracurricular activities on campus, but it’s definitely worth it.

I am now much more confident to declare English this spring after having this experience. Princeton really encourages you to explore various areas of study, pursue your passion and consider a wide range of career opportunities. Check out my latest articles on newyorkfamily.com!

After winter break here at Princeton people everywhere are trying to figure out their plans for the summer.

I spent the summer after my first year interning for a nonprofit in Boston for ten weeks, and I loved it. My internship was part of a program called Princeton Internships in Civic Service, or PICS for short. PICS offers internships at a variety of nonprofits across the nation; when I came across Boston SCORES, I knew it was perfect for me. SCORES is a nonprofit that works with students from elementary to high school, integrating poetry, spoken word and soccer into its after-school curriculum. This quite literally checked all the boxes for me: I love soccer, and two of the things I was most passionate about in high school were working with kids and leading my slam poetry club.

I greatly enjoyed my summer in Boston. I stayed with a wonderful and kind host family, and worked with amazing kids every day (and also played so much soccer with them!). I was also able to apply the knowledge I learned in one of my computer sciences classes, “Computer Science: An interdisciplinary Approach (COS 126)” to create a program that streamlined a time-intensive task.

Although I missed my friends, I wasn’t lonely! Princeton organized events that brought all local Boston interns together, and the regional alumni association was constantly involved and active. I was also given an alumni mentor who met with me throughout the summer. Through PICS, I met new friends, ate ramen at niche Cambridge restaurants and biked along the Charles River. One friend and I even road-tripped to back to New Jersey on a whim to watch the Fourth of July fireworks on top of the Prudential Center.

There are countless other summer opportunities at Princeton as well: my best friends went outside the country, taking Global Seminars in Berlin; teaching high schoolers in Vietnam; and immersing themselves in Argentine culture in Buenos Aires. One of my friends spent the summer with lemurs in Madagascar as well through the Princeton Environmental Institute. Princeton also offers opportunities with startups in New York, Tel-Aviv and Shanghai. They also offer opportunities to conduct research with professors on-campus.

Whatever you choose to do, you can be sure that you’ll find the summer as rewarding and enjoyable an experience as I did, and there will be people there for you every step of the way.   

Before coming to Princeton, I didn’t really know what entrepreneurship was. Surprisingly, the first club that reached out to me during the first-year activities fair was the Entrepreneurship Club. Since then I have discovered a passion for the field and have participated in many entrepreneurial opportunities offered by the University. 

I have been able to learn about entrepreneurship through the courses offered by the Keller Center. In a course called “Creativity, Innovation and Design,” I was able to propose a solution to a major problem affecting college students: time management. My group and I thought of implementing meditation breaks during lectures in order to help with concentration. Another great course is “Foundations of Entrepreneurship,” in which we have weekly guest lectures from leaders in the field. The founder and CEO of Giphy recently came to the class and it was incredible to learn how he began his own venture.

Outside of the classroom, the Keller Center offers opportunities during the summer. I got to travel to Tel Aviv as a marketing intern at a high-tech startup. Believe it or not, I was able to use my liberal arts education to write blog posts and redesign the startup’s website. I lived with a cohort of 20 Princeton students and learned a lot about the Israeli startup culture. What’s amazing is that this summer internship was fully funded by the University!

Other opportunities made available by Princeton was the Tigers Entrepreneurs Conference 2019 in San Francisco. It was an unbelievable experience because I was able to meet with alumni who founded their own startups, as well as visit companies like Google and Salesforce.

I am incredibly grateful to Princeton for letting me discover my passion for entrepreneurship and giving me the tools and skills necessary to pursue the field after I graduate. My message to prospective students is that, while Princeton is known for its liberal arts education, it also excels in entrepreneurship! If you are creative, have innovative ideas, or want to change the world, entrepreneurship might also be for you! 

My work in the Politics department here at Princeton took on a whole new dimension during the summer. From early June to mid-August, I worked in a congressional representative’s office in the House of Representatives. I applied for the internship for perhaps obvious reasons: I was looking to get a first-hand look at the different government institutions I’ve only really read about in textbooks and newspaper articles. And, without a shadow of a doubt, my summer experience delivered!

Before starting, I wasn’t sure what to expect either from my work in the office or my life outside it. Looking back, I don’t know that I could quickly summarize the litany of different experiences and challenges I experienced at work or on my own time as I, at times. struggled to navigate life in the city. Each day I spent interning was wildly different, and invited valuable reflection on how I can best harness the top-rate education I’m getting on campus for good.

At work, I did everything from giving tours of the Capitol to writing memoranda on various bills for the Congressman to read. Some days I spent mostly at my desk, typing away and answering phone calls, while others were spent running around the halls of the House and Senate office buildings delivering notes and messages for and from higher-ranking staffers. From the very first morning of my internship, when I was tasked with combing through a 200-page budget document, staff treated me as an integral part of the office. In-between tasks, I listened to members of Congress speak as part of the Intern Lecture Series and tried my best to explore all the different nooks and crannies of the Capitol building.

Perhaps even more valuable than the actual work experience I gained were the insights I gleaned from my conversations with coworkers and Princeton alumni as part of the Princeton in Washington program (PiW). The staffers in my office had a range of different educational and professional backgrounds, and were generous with their time in speaking to interns about life on the Hill and speaking about broader career advice. The Princeton in Washington program, which connects Princeton alumni, families and current students living in the capitol region, hosted a wide variety of educational events with high-profile alumni. The roster of alumni speakers, including sitting Senators, members of the House, and high-ranking government and private-sector officials, offered a window into a variety of different Washington career paths and ways to succeed.

I’m immensely grateful for the opportunity to undertake such a life-changing experience, and even more so for the global Princeton community which offered me an incredible network of support even as I was working 200 miles away from campus. Who knows yet if I’ll be back next summer, but I love knowing that the Tiger family will follow me wherever I choose to go.

This past summer, I completed an internship at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. I applied for and accepted the internship through a program at Princeton, Princeton Internships in Civic Service, which provides students funding to complete otherwise unpaid internships in the public service sector. During my two months at the HSUS, I worked in the Public Relations department, and gained a treasure trove of valuable experience that will hopefully translate to positions I take in the future.

I’ve always been a big animal lover, so working at the Humane Society of the United States—whose central aim is to make the country a safer, more humane place for animals to coexist with humans—was a natural fit. My day-to-day work consisted largely of drafting press releases and emails, researching and interfacing with reporters, tracking news coverage of the organization and writing tweets for the HSUS Public Relations Twitter account. 

However, every single day in the office was different! There were always a bevy of miscellaneous projects I could help work on if I’d already completed my daily tasks, and across departments people were always happy to have help from an intern. There were also many dedicated intern events at the office, which served as opportunities both to learn more about the larger HSUS organization and to meet interns who worked in different fields or areas of the building. On multiple occasions, we didn’t even report to the office for work; instead, we got to travel around the D.C. area and participate in experimental food tastings (the future of college cafeterias is bright!) and professional development trainings. 

One of the coolest things I did during my experience at the HSUS was participating in my first Animal Rescue Team mission. One rainy weekend, my coworkers and I traveled to a small airport in Virginia where we helped unload approximately 100 animals off a plane they’d been loaded onto in Mississippi, where they were rescued from a severe domestic cruelty situation. Helping the animals off the plane and then sending them off to their future shelter homes (and, hopefully, forever homes after that!) was such a gratifying experience and alone would have made the internship worthwhile. 

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Prior to my work with the Humane Society of the United States, I’d not had any hands-on experience with the nonprofit sector or its inner workings. My summer in Gaithersburg, though, demonstrated to me not only valuable professional skills but also the immensely commendable physical, mental and emotional effort that goes into working for a better world.

Princeton follows a unique calendar system, where winter break is part of fall semester and students take their finals in January. Because of this set up, between the end of finals period and the start of the new semester, Princeton has a week of break formally known as Intercession. Some people take this opportunity to relax at home. Others go on trips with their friends. Regardless, it’s arguably the most carefree week in the academic year. With the burden of fall semester lifted from my shoulders and the work of the upcoming semester still unknown, I found myself with minimal obligations and time that I otherwise would never have.

During the break, I took an opportunity to delve into career exploration through the Princeternship Program. Every semester, Princeton’s Career Services offer students experiential internships with partner organizations from an assortment of fields. Most of these connections were established through the Princeton alumni network. Participants rank their top three choices and go through an interview process that is more geared towards matching students with the appropriate internship than it is about competition.

I participated in a shadowing internship along with two other students at The Cornea Laser and Eye Institute in Teaneck, New Jersey. Because I was coming from Princeton, I woke up at 5 a.m. to embark on the long three-hour commute to Teaneck. I arrived there at around 9 a.m. and the three of us proceeded to change into appropriate attire, putting on a white lab coat, hair net and surgical mask.

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Throughout the day, we were exposed to numerous aspects of the profession and met with people at various stages in their lives. In the morning, we chatted with a medical student who was at the end of his residency. He explained his reasons for going into optometry (which I thought were rather convincing) and offered us advice on the long process that is medical school.

Our host, Dr. Peter Hersh, was a Princeton alumni himself. Before the internship, I read up on his work and researched procedures he performed at the institute. I was a bit star struck to learn that Dr. Hersh was among the group of people who pioneered and published the first research paper on laser correctional procedure.

I was grateful for the opportunity to observe eight separate surgeries and learn more about the techniques that Dr. Hersh had polished. He was very patient and thorough in his explanations. Despite being extremely busy, he took the time to walk us through what he was doing every step of the way and answer any lingering questions after each procedure.

This opportunity not only made me rethink my future career path, it also demonstrated the power of the Princeton alumni network. Near the end of the day, the conversations moved to similarities and differences between his Princeton experience and ours. Experiencing this undeniable connection with Dr. Hersh that bridged over three decades was an incredible feeling.  

Whenever a school break is approaching, students start asking one another what their plans for the upcoming break are. As an international student, my reply is always met by noticeable surprise. If I say I am going home people are both shocked, because they think Spain is too far away for just a two week-long break, and extremely excited, because they think I am doing I kind of Eurorail exotic trip when, in reality, I am most probably just going to spend most of the break back in my bed sleeping way too many hours because of my ever-persistent jet lag.

Oftentimes though, when the break is really too short for me to fly back, I stay back on campus. To this news, local students almost always sympathetically react with sadness. I find this funny because, even though I would like to go home more often, many of these breaks are new traditions for me, so it is not like I am extremely homesick or yearning home. For example, most of my friends find it especially desolating that I stay back for Thanksgiving. It was unimaginable to them that I wouldn’t be eating turkey (even though I am vegetarian!) and that I wouldn’t be spending this fourth Thursday of November with my family (although I would just be going to school if I were back home). Yet, I very much enjoy my time on campus during these breaks. For the spring break, Princeton offers local internships through Career Services, group excursions into Philadelphia and New York City through the residential colleges, and on-campus writing groups for seniors who want to work on the thesis together.

One of the aspects of living abroad that I enjoy most in general is having the agency to choose in which activities and traditions you want to partake. Because one has not been brought up in that certain culture or society, it is easier to distance oneself from certain customs or practices that might be problematic without having to completely reconsider one’s national identity. Staying on campus during break is a great opportunity to reflect on one’s experience as a foreigner in a new country because normally it is mostly international students who stay back so it is a great time to reconnect with friends who we met during International Orientation and share our common experiences so far. The International Davis Center normally prepares other activities and events such as movie screenings to bring the international community dispersed across campus a bit closer together. Overall, I find breaks on campus very enjoyable because they give me time to appreciate what goes unnoticed during the busy times school is in session. I get to enjoy campus more and discover the town better. It is a great time to learn how to cook better dishes and take extra work shifts at my library! It would also be a great time to catch up on work but I take the ‘break’ part very seriously.

During the semester I had the privilege and opportunity to work as a veterinary intern at the Princeton Animal Hospital (PAH). PAH is only about ten minutes from the University and handles various medical cases for dogs and cats.

At the clinic, I see a wide range of medical cases, since you truly never know what is going to walk through the door. While at first I was mostly observing and learning the ropes, now that I’ve been there for a few months, I’m able to do much more in the lab. I help with blood samples, prepare injections, pull medications, as well as assist during physical examinations. I have learned so much from the time I have spent in the hospital. The vets are incredible and always try to explain the case to me.

While I’m not in a lecture learning material as with traditional university classes, this internship is teaching me the practical skills that will prepare me for veterinary school. I am learning by doing, which is exactly the type of preparation I need. I am verifying this is the field I want to go into, and I am so thankful that I was able to coordinate the internship with my class schedule to make it happen.

Plus, I have to admit, it’s nice being able to get off of campus twice a week and pretend I am in the real world. Oftentimes, I find myself caught up in the Orange Bubble (how we fondly refer to campus), unable to get off campus and explore the surrounding area. Though I am only traveling ten minutes from campus, it is still a nice way for me to engage with the local community.  

This internship is just one of the many examples of ways in which Princeton students are engaging with the local community. I have friends who tutor off campus, work for the hospice at the nearby hospital, babysit for professors and other townspeople, and intern at other local companies. It is definitely feasible to have an off-campus job if you are willing to put the work into it. For some, that may not be of interest, but if there is an organization or company that you really want to work with, it is possible and 100% worth it.

Most children’s first word is “mama”; mine was “book.” In preschool, as other kids scampered around Toys "R" Us, I devoured the shelves of Barnes & Noble. Some go weak in the knees at the scent of chocolate lava cake, but the new book smell has always been my aroma of choice.

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Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve dreamed of working in the publishing world. And so, standing in the entryway of Princeton’s Career Services building at last fall's Communications & Media Meetup, I was rendered a child once more. Somewhere in the crowd, I knew, was a representative from the book publisher Simon & Schuster. Straightening my nametag, I navigated my way across the room until I found myself standing before the Simon & Schuster booth.

“Welcome! You’re my first visitor!”

Later that evening, I emailed the Simon & Schuster representative, thanking her for such a fantastic conversation and mentioning that I couldn’t wait to apply to her company’s winter internship program. A few minutes later, my inbox dinged.

“Let me slip a little note along to HR…”

One week later, I was sitting in an office in midtown Manhattan, interviewing for an editorial position with Simon & Schuster.

I didn’t wind up getting the internship that day. Instead, I walked away with something even more valuable. Midway through our conversation, my interviewer cocked her head and asked me, “Have you ever considered becoming a literary agent?”

I hadn’t. In fact, I had never even heard of the job before. And so, later that evening, I typed the words “literary agent” into Google for the first time. With childlike wonder, I watched as my laptop conjured up descriptions of a dream job I hadn't known existed.

Minutes later, I was scouring the web for internships once more.

It’s now been almost a year since my Simon & Schuster interview, and I just completed my third literary agency internship. Like the others before it, this internship provided me with endless inspiration and insight. But—at its completion—it also gave me one more thing.

A job offer.