It is often easy to stay on campus for long periods of time without stepping out of FitzRandolph gates. Students at Princeton are busy with classes, extracurriculars and a social life. However, there are many things to do in the town of Princeton that I encourage current and future Tigers to make time for and enjoy.

The most common reasons to venture through the gates and onto Nassau Street involve a craving for food and drinks. Princeton has four ice cream shops in a very small vicinity. My personal ranking is Halo Pub, Kilwin’s, Bent Spoon and Thomas Sweets. Everyone has their own personal preferences for where they go to satisfy their sweet tooth.

The town of Princeton also has a variety of coffee options. Regardless of if you’re a Starbucks person or a Dunkin’ Donuts fan, you can get your favorite coffee. If you want a coffee that doesn’t come from a chain, I would recommend Small World Coffee, a local brand with two locations, one on Nassau Street and one on Witherspoon Street.

The Princeton Public Library on Witherspoon Street has a great selection of books available to students for free. I got a library card pretty soon after coming to campus. With that card comes access to the library’s collections, as well as free tickets to museums in New York City and Philadelphia.

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Princeton Garden Theater offers multiple movies per week at a discounted price for students. Princeton Undergraduate Student Government (USG) screens movies at the Garden Theater every weekend for no cost at all if you’re willing to wait in line for the free tickets.

While all the activities I described above are in walking distance from campus, there are also some fun destinations within driving distance. TigerTransit has a Weekend Shopper shuttle that takes students to shopping locations, such as Wegmans grocery store, Walmart and Trader Joe’s. The shuttles often get crowded as students refill their rooms with snacks and cleaning supplies.

If you’re willing to take a car share service and go a little farther from the campus, there are multiple malls in the area. I’ve seen a couple movies at an AMC movie theater at the MarketFair Mall and Quakerbridge Mall is also quite popular with students.

We have our own train station on campus with a one-car train called the "Dinky" to take us to the Princeton Junction station. From there, it’s an easy ride to New York City and Philadelphia. My friends and I have taken several fun trips to New York City to explore the museums and see shows on Broadway. 

The Princeton campus is often described as the “Orange Bubble,” but I do my best to get off campus every so often. Princeton is a great town with lots of fun activities. Pretty soon, you’ll have your own list of favorite spots off campus.

New Jersey can be one of the most weather-confused states. Whether it's 60 degrees in January or 35 degrees in April, New Jersey has some interesting weather patterns. Season-relevant attire is important because Princeton is a walking campus and I don’t know about you but who wants to be caught in the rain with socks and slides? Here are some tips I find helpful to have throughout the school year.

• Coat with a hood: Any hat plus coat combo is fine, but a hood keeps you warm, is easy to put on and can’t really be forgotten. No worries if your coat doesn’t have one. Water Resistant Shoes: Rain is a pretty common forecast on campus. Rain boots work perfectly. Snow boots would also fall into this category for the colder months.
• Gloves: Gloves are also necessary for a cold winter breeze or an autumn downpour! Your fingers can get cold holding up your multipurpose umbrella or sometimes your pockets are full and your hands can’t fit into your jacket pocket. Regardless of the reason, gloves are pretty handy. No pun intended.
• Warm Socks: I thought ankle socks would be fine, but turns out fuzzy socks and crew socks keep you warmer. Fuzzy or thicker socks are great for comfortable walking sneakers because your feet can get cold from walking everywhere. New Jersey often has some vicious winter winds.
• Umbrella: This works not only in the rain, but also in the snow. A raincoat is an alternative, but an umbrella can also protect your bookbag. 
• Scarf: Scarves are a nice touch to your look. They can be repurposed as a head covering to warm your ears or cover your face during windy, cold days.
• Stay Hydrated: This includes your skin and hair. Many people find the winter months to be dehydrating, so make sure you keep some moisturizer, water bottles and hair products close.
• Short & Sandals: Although New Jersey can be a pretty cold state, when it's warm, its WARM. I would highly recommend bringing some clothes for warm weather in the early fall, because it can be notoriously hot and humid.
• Sun____: Sunglasses, sunscreen and other sun-related items like hats are also nice to have in the fall for protection from the sun's harsh rays.

This is an opinion-based article and none of these items are an absolute necessity. These are just a few useful tips I find helpful to keeping warm, dry and comfortable during the school year. I hope these tips help to prepare you for your time at Princeton.

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.   

In the fall of my first year, I took my soccer ball to Poe Field one afternoon looking to get some practice in. A wide concourse of grass curving around one corner of campus, Poe Field is wedded between the colorful gates of Butler College’s Bloomberg Hall and the glass walls of Carl Icahn Labs.

That afternoon, I’d anticipated only some solitary practice with the all-weather-worn goal posts. But to my surprise, there were already a dozen or more people in the middle of a pickup game. I recognized none of them but took a gamble and asked if I could join. Within minutes, I was right in the thick of it.

Writing this provokes another memory: The first day of my time at Princeton, I wandered by the gentle slopes in front of Whitman College where some other first-years were playing an improvised game of soccer with their shoes marking the goals. To this day one pair of my socks are still stained faintly green.

In high school, I’d never found a soccer community. With the exception of my best friend, very few people were as invested in the game as I was, and when he moved away after sophomore year, I no longer had anyone to talk to about one of my greatest passions.

I now play games of pickup at Poe Field nearly every Saturday. With a few friends I met during these games, we also formed an intramural team called the Poe Fielders. When the weather gets too cold, I have one-on-one training sessions with one of my best friends in the squash courts of Dillon Gym, an improvised location that we’ve found highly rewarding, nonetheless.

It seems like such a small thing – people who treat soccer as more than just an after-school sport but, instead, as a lifestyle; people who I can watch games and play FIFA video games to unwind. Soccer may be big where you come from, and this may seem unremarkable to you. But I guarantee that if you have a passion that you’ve been aching to share with those around you, you’ll find that community here at Princeton. There are so many clubs here; more than that, it’s impossible not to find groups of people who share your interests.

For me, it was as simple as wandering past a soccer scrimmage, asking if I could join, and having the ball at my feet seconds later.      

Some of you reading this may attend high schools where many seniors go off to attend Princeton and other similar colleges every single year. Others might not know anyone from their school who’s ever attended Princeton before. I’m very proud of the fact that I’m the first student from my high school ever to be admitted to Princeton and I think it’s given me a unique perspective on campus life.

I won’t lie — deciding to come to Princeton was a touch nerve-wracking because I had no idea what to expect and didn’t have any past graduates from my school that I could ask. Unlike many of my high school friends, who were all attending local colleges together, I didn’t have anyone to ‘twin’ shirts with on College Decision Day or to discuss first-year orientation with. Looking back, however, I wouldn’t have done it any other way — coming to college without the friend groups from high school allowed me to grow more as an individual from the moment I stepped on campus.

My worries about not having built-in support here were unfounded too. The first-year experience at Princeton is loaded with opportunities to meet and ask questions of upperclass students and professional University staff, who oftentimes are absolutely overjoyed to meet you! Every first-year is assigned a Residential College Advisor (RCA) and a Peer Academic Advisor (PAA), two junior or senior students in your residential college who can offer student-to-student advice on everything from course selection to social troubles. Each student also gets a faculty advisor in their area of study and has access to their college’s director of studies for a second opinion.

There are also several resources on campus meant specifically for students who come to Princeton from underrepresented or otherwise unique backgrounds. One that comes to mind is the Scholars Institute Fellows Program (SIFP), whose website notes that SIFP “offers mentorship, academic enrichment, and a welcoming scholarly community to students hailing from backgrounds historically underrepresented at Princeton.” Another is the First-Generation Low Income Council (FLiC), which also offers similar resources.

What I’ve found is that there’s no “right way” to come to Princeton. For maybe my first week of classes, I was afraid I wouldn’t have a network of juniors and seniors to turn to for mentorship.  Pretty soon, though, I had carved out my own place on campus. The diversity at Princeton has given me the experiences to meet hundreds if not thousands of other students with whom I share much more crucial interests and values. There’s nothing to fear in blazing your own trail!

Packing up and moving to campus is not easy for anyone. It typically involves the painstaking process of deciding which sweater comes and which stays behind, an overstuffed suitcase and leaving behind friends, family and home. Yet, when it finally comes time to move onto campus, some of my peers will hop in a car or on a train with their families in tow, but I will hop on a flight traveling across the country from Portland, Oregon. 

I am not complaining. I know that many students at Princeton travel even longer distances to receive the incredible education we are all so lucky to have. If anything, I like the fact that I am from a place so unique on Princeton’s campus. That said, it also means that my Princeton experience is different. I go home for fewer breaks. Move-in and move-out days are a little more stressful. When I forget to bring my graphing calculator, my parents can’t just pop over and deliver it on the weekend. 

While I may not be from the Northeast, over my time here, I have learned to lean into my difference. When I tell people where I am from, I usually get excited follow-up questions and inquiries. On breaks that I haven’t been able to go home, I have been welcomed into the homes of the incredible friends I have made over the course of my time here. So, while I occasionally wish my parents lived just a tad closer to campus, I will always be a proud Oregonian at Princeton, living far from home.

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One of the first classes I took at Princeton was a freshman seminar called “Ethics in Finance.” Taking the class was one of the best decisions I made at Princeton.

I learned about ethics in the financial industry by analyzing case studies and past scandals. The professor really cared about us, and I was able to form a meaningful bond with him. I also grew close to my classmates; because it was a seminar, there were only 15 students. Through this seminar, I learned how to participate and contribute to class conversations. It made me question my own morals and think about the ethics behind my career choice.

The highlight of the seminar was our trip to New York City. We visited Acumen, an impact investment firm, and Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Ronald Regan administration. The trip was an amazing experience as we got to meet people at the forefront of the financial industry, and we ended the day with a nice dinner at one of my professor’s favorite restaurants.

Taking a freshman seminar was one of the highlights of my first year at Princeton. I got to meet other first-year students and travel to NYC. I encourage prospective students to visit the Program of Freshman Seminars website and learn about one of the many ways Princeton helps us in the transition to college level course work.

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I still remember the day my roommates and I moved into our quad our first year here, with bustling containers filled to the brim with clothes and supplies and frothy introductions in voices two octaves too high. I had already spent three nights in our room because International Orientation (IO) had started a few days before regular Orientation (a blur that was no match for jetlag).

My first weeks here were strung together by the theme of being lost but not wanting to pull out the color-coded map Princeton kindly provided for fear of appearing like (gasp) a first-year. Also memorable was the constant flux of confusion present in any audience when I told them my name in introduction.

“How do you spell that?”, they’d ask, politely.

“Zet, Ee, X-…”

“…Zet?”

It took a few weeks to extract stray weeds of Malaysian slang from my English. The International Orientation leaders had warned us of the American tendency to ask “how are you?” before walking off just as you conjure up a good summary of your day. (I’ll keep you updated on whether I ever respond to “what’s up?” with anything but “…the ceiling?”).

I’m sure there must have been a time when I doubted if I would ever feel like this campus had a place for me, too — but that time is as long gone as the color-coded map I once stole looks at when I thought no one was looking. There’s hardly room for feeling like you don’t belong when you’re shoulder-to-shoulder with an assignment partner in the trenches of a problem set, or in the cavern of bugs present in code written too late at night.

When I look back on my first year here, all I see is awkward small talk quickly dissolving into a chorus of Disney songs managed while juggling balloons, trips to New York stolen between papers, and study breaks spent arguing over what a biscuit should look like.

(A biscuit is nearly exactly like a cookie.)

Alice fell down a rabbit hole to get into Wonderland. Dorothy rode a tornado to Oz. I took a Writing Seminar to discover the world of academia. When you think about it, we share the same journey: an innocent protagonist (that would be me) is transported to a strange land where excitement, adventures and danger await and, eventually, returns to the real world relatively unscathed and hopefully wiser.

I took my Writing Seminar, or Writing Sem as we call it, in the spring of my first year, which gave me ample opportunity to hear the entire range of praises sung and groans issued by my peers who took it in the fall. When it came time for my first seminar meeting, I collected the required materials, printed out the readings and entered with both hope and misgiving.

As it turned out, I enjoyed the class greatly. The instructor was captivating, commuted in from New York twice a week and he taught an equally captivating class with great enthusiasm for the material. Through conferences with him and my classmates, chalkboard dissections of various arguments and positions and fruitful harvests of academic articles to challenge and defend, I developed the skills needed to engage in scholarly work. If you’ll permit one more reference to children’s literature, consider the Pevensie children, who were transported by wardrobe to the snowy country of Narnia. In the middle of their adventure, they are met by Father Christmas, who presents them with personal gifts to aid them in their journey. Like Father Christmas, my Writing Sem provided me with tools -- tools I needed to thrive as a new university student beginning to engage with the voluminous and curious world of academia.

While I have learned more about academic writing since taking the course, Writing Sem set the foundation for my written work at Princeton. Coming to the University, I didn’t expect to feel comfortable writing about Locke’s view of the wage-labor relationship (for Writing Sem), defenses of pacifism (an ethics course) and the American executive branch as a policy maker (a politics course), but I have done all of those things now. And more than that, I’ve enjoyed them, too.