Admissions Story from an '08 Frosh

Colleges & Universities Princeton University
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<p>Hey guys,</p>

<p>I’m sure that most of you are on pins and needles right now – for those of you on the East Coast, I think this the last night before you’ll find out your ED decisions. I’m a member of the Class of 2008 living in Wilson College, in “The Kitchen Suite,” an epic nine-man suite in 1939 Hall. Right now, however, I’m back at home in California, enjoying the milder weather and working on some final papers due for the classes I’m taking (HUM 216-217, HIS 373, and SPA 207 for the curious). </p>

<p>Anyway, I’ll bet that a lot of you are going to run across problems in the next couple of days – and I don’t mean problems that come in the form of thin envelopes. Here I’m referring to the infamous stories of the mailman that got away, the parent who misplaced an envelope without remembering what it looked like, and so on. While some of you <em>will</em> encounter these problems prior to finding out your admissions decision, let me assure you that no admissions story that I’ve heard compares to mine from last year:</p>

<p>Like I said, I live in California, so I was expecting the admissions package (or letter) to arrive on a Monday – some people in New Jersey had gotten their responses on the previous Friday and Saturday, so this seemed reasonable. On Monday after school, I raced home to my house, slid my car in the driveway at a 45-degree angle, and dashed to the mailbox. I opened it to find . . . a fat package! I felt exhilarated for a moment. Upon further inspection, however, the package turned out to be only a Haverford prospectus. I then flipped nerviously through the envelopes, but found nothing from Princeton. Heading back inside, I checked this College Confidential board and found that several people in Southern California had gotten their decisions (acceptances, deferrals, and rejections), so I figured my decision – whatever it was – had been delayed a day or so.</p>

<p>The next day, Tuesday, I again quickly drove home. Friends at school had been hearing from school upon school: Monday was marked by a Dartmouth acceptance, Tuesday a batch of Harvard rejections. Pulling up to the mailbox again, I opened the hatch to find only a sheaf of envelopes. Gulping, I riffiled through them – nothing! I headed back inside, checked the discussion boards again (finding that literally everyone who lived in my general vicinity had gotten decisions) and sighed. Acceptances <em>did</em> come by priority mail, after all, and it was getting pretty late.</p>

<p>Wednesday was worse. I stewed through school, waiting to head home. When I finally got home again, I paced slowly towards the mailbox, awaiting a rejection. Opening the hood, though, I found nothing. Walking inside, I asked my mother if she had gotten the mail: no luck. I went upstairs to “work” on my schoolwork, instead dashing to the window at every sound of a mailtruck or a UPS van. The hours passed and passed, and no mail came. I was shocked – couldn’t they just give me my well-earned rejection? I went to the Princeton website, looking for a recourse, and noted that the following morning I could call the admissions office for a decision. Call them!!! It sounded dashing. But I couldn’t wait to know.</p>

<p>The next morning, I called precisely at 6 o’clock PST, corresponding with the admissions office’s opening time. A 20-something admssions assistant answered.</p>

<p>“Hello?”</p>

<p>“Hey - I’m calling in for freshman admissions decisions.”</p>

<p>“All right.”</p>

<p>He asked me for a litany of information – name, address, parents’ names, and social security number. After a few minutes of accessing records, he asked me, “Ready?”</p>

<p>I took a deep breath and responded, “yeah.”</p>

<p>My acceptance package arrived the following Saturday; we never found out why it took so long.</p>

<p>–</p>

<p>The moral of this is not to give up hope if it seems to be taking forever for your decision to arrive. I’m sure a lot of you will be thinking it’s over, that you’re just waiting for your rejection, when your decision doesn’t arrive tomorrow, but try to keep your hopes up and keep in mind that a lack of a decision isn’t always tantamount to a rejection. Good luck!</p>

<p>TN</p>

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<p>Interesting story! Hey-for Spanish 207-what was your background in Spanish to get placed in that level (if you took the SAT II or AP test, how many years of spanish?)</p>

<p>How is that class? and how do you like HUM?</p>

<p>Your story made me kind of nervous though.</p>

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<p>oh wow tunanfish… i live in california too!
i hope i meet your same fate (getting accepted)… I might be willing to go through the same experience if i means i can get in. :)</p>

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<p>That was a great story, tunanfish. Thanks :)</p>

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<p>HUM is pretty difficult – we’ve had a lot of reading, obviously, and you essentially have a five-page paper due every other week, which is graded very critically. If you are in the slightest not comfortable with writing, do not take the course. We also had to read Homer (Iliad + Odyssey) and the Hebrew Bible over the summer. On the other hand, the professors are great and it counts as two courses.</p>

<p>For Spanish 207, you have to have passed the language requirement. This can be done by getting an acceptable score on the Princeton-administered language test or getting a 5 on either Spanish AP – I did the latter. Spanish 207 is pretty easy (although I must note I did foreign exchange in Argentina for a summer), but I wouldn’t recommend it as a class; it’s not that great.</p>

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<p>tunanfish - thank you for the great story, it was really a suspense-cliff hanger that left me smiling at your good fortune! Nice to know we have 08’ers looking out for us :). Thanks for the inspiration, and enjoy the holiday!</p>

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<p>Very cool story… of course now I am going to associate any delays with delayed acceptanced >.< False hope perhaps? nooooo! lol</p>

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<p>Some guy in NYC also received his decision two days later than everyone else… so don’t give up hope, people.</p>

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<p>Thanks, tunanfish–I was fully expecting to get my letter today, but there was no mail from Princeton. I hope my delay isn’t as long as yours was, but it’s heartening to see that acceptances don’t always arrive promptly. I really wish Princeton used online notification…so much simpler…</p>

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<p>i didn’t get mine either…:(</p>

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<p>You may have seen my post in the other forum, but also if you guys have any course questions I am in:
PHY 105: Advanced Mechanics
MAT 201: Multi-variable Calculus
ECO 100: Microeconomics
and FRS 103, Freshman Seminar: Tragedy, the Example of Hamlet</p>

<p>Hit me back with any questions, next semester I will be taking ART 212: impressionism through neoclassicism, ECO 101: macroeconomics, CHE (chemical engineering) 199: innovations that changed our world, MAT 202: linear algebra, and a writing seminar.</p>

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<p>I’ll also add that next semester I’m taking:</p>

<p>HUM 218
HUM 219
AST 203 – The Universe
ENV 402 – Darwin in Our Time
and a Writing Seminar</p>

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<p>rdb9986:</p>

<p>How’s Micro Econ? </p>

<p>My school offers absolutely nothing in the way of economics, and that’s the major I’m most interested in. Will someone with no previous econ experience be over their heads?</p>

<p>Thanks</p>

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<p>no. ECO 101 and 100 (Macro and Micro) are intro level courses.</p>

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<p>I’m an 08er too who was formerly addicted to this website. I have my own admissions story…</p>

<p>I didnt start researching colleges until October, being the ultimate procrastinator that I am. So despite my having wanted to go to Princeton for a long time, I was unable to commit ED. I instead went EA Harvard, got torn apart by the interviewer (he called me shallow ha.), and deferred. I then did the Princeton app normal, knowing my chances were slim. The last decision to arrive was the only one I cared about…alas I was waitlisted. I sadly sent my deposit to Duke. A month later, some guy from Princeton calls and asks me if i still want to go. And now, here I am. So don’t give up hope! </p>

<p>If you want to know about classes, I’m taking Eco101 Macroecon, Mat214 Number Theory, Soc101 Intro to Sociology, and Eeb211 Evolutionary Bio. I would recommend all four courses, except for maybe number theory if you dont want to take an insanely hard class first semester. Also, for those considering econ, it is much better to go macro then micro (101 then 100) because of the teachers. Bogan only teaches macro 1st sem and Reinhardt micro 2nd, and those are the marquee intro econ profs.</p>

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<p>Touky- where can i go to get princeton teacher evals? never too early to start lookin…</p>

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<p>well, the student course guide is the most helpful review source, but you need a Princeton ID/password to get on I believe. If you have specific questions about teachers i could cut/paste parts of it. </p>

<p>maybe <a href=“http://www.ratemyprofessors.com%5B/url%5D”>www.ratemyprofessors.com</a> would have stuff?</p>

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<p>Thanks toucky7. Ratemyprofs. is subscription based, but it only has about 2 Princeton Professors listed. Would you please paste a sample from the course catalog - from an econ course, for example. (since many of us seem to be interested in Ecomomics)</p>

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<p>Here are a couple of course reviews. Make sure to note the professor!</p>

<h2>ECO 101 (Macroeconomics)</h2>

<p>I took ECO 101 in Fall 2002 with Alan Blinder. This was a great course; everyone I know in the class walked out feeling that they had learned something useful, interesting, and important.</p>

<p>Professor Blinder started the first lecture by promising the class that at the end of the 12 weeks, we’d know more about macroeconomics than even most of the people who write articles debating tax plans, and he kept that promise: at the end of the course, we were given an article from a recent Wall Street Journal, written by its former editor-in-chief, and told to critique it. It was amazing to see how many of the arguments about free trade or tax cuts that sound very appealing on intuition alone are revealed as just plain wrong with just a little bit of knowledge of economics, and at this point we all realized how valuable this course had been.</p>

<p>Despite the course’s deceptively-short 12-week span, you’ll learn a great deal from this course. Most students entered with little or no knowledge of economics as an academic discipline, but by the end of the course you should thoroughly understand most of the issues that guide the Federal Reserve Board in setting the economic policy for the nation.</p>

<p>We were extremely privileged to have Alan Blinder as our lecturer. His lectures were taught with a style and clarity that made them a pleasure to attend, even though most students could sail through this course just by reading the textbook and skipping lectures. The concepts are hardly common knowledge and usually wouldn’t seem intuitive at first, but by the time Blinder finished explaining them, they just seemed obvious. It was also great to take this course knowing Blinder’s prestige; he served several years as vice chairman of the Fed during the economic boom of the 90’s, serving directly under Alan Greenspan. Despite the fact that he was appointed to the post by Clinton, he didn’t seem biased, and pointed out the ignorant mistakes of politicians of both parties evenly. It was great to be lectured about macroeconomic policies in the 1990’s by someone who was so instrumental in deciding that policy, and he clearly knew his facts. At the end of the last class, the long standing ovation given by the students was one of the most impressive displays of respect I’ve ever seen.</p>

<p>Precepts, on the other hand, were practically useless, unless you had Blinder as your preceptor. Most students only attended precepts to hand in problem sets and pick up new ones. The material covered is mostly a rehash of what was already adequately covered in both lecture and the textbook.</p>

<p>Weekly problem sets were fairly simple; most all problems were math-based, but they just required massaging some formulas and plugging in numbers. The answers all came out to nice, round numbers, so it was easy to tell when you made a mistake, and working with friends is encouraged if you’re having difficulty. The math covered is all high school algebra, and shouldn’t be difficult for most students. This course went to great lengths to minimize the amount of math required; it’s far less math intensive than ECO 102/100 (microeconomics). Problem sets took a few hours at most, and occasionally less than an hour for some students.</p>

<p>The textbook - also co-authored by Blinder - teaches concepts on a very basic level; it feels almost tediously simplistic and verbose at times, but at least every concept is explained well enough for you to understand it using the textbook alone.</p>

<p>Overall, ECO 101 is a relatively easy course with a great payoff that I would recommend to any student. It doesn’t require much of a time commitment, is extremely enjoyable, and at the end it’s amazing to realize how much you’ve learned in such a short amount of time.</p>

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<h2>HUM 216 (I’m in this right now)</h2>

<p>HUM 216-217 is the first semester of the famed 216-219 sequence. To sum it up in a sentence, you need to take this course. Not because it’s always the most fun, not because you’re going to be an English major, but because these are the seminal texts of Western literature, and without them, cultural literacy is impossible.</p>

<p>The course is double-credit and meets for three lectures and three precepts per week - six hours in total. All attendance is mandatory. Weekly reading assignments range from 300 to >500 pages; one particularly painful week encompasses Plato’s Republic (all of it), the Symposium, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, and Herodotus, and the final week of the spring semester is Dostoevsky’s 1000-page Brothers Karamazov. In the fall semester, you will write six four-page close analyses of passages, two each from a historical, literary, and philosophical perspective. There is also one longer fifteen-page comparison of two texts from different cultures. Especially if you have been assigned a fall writing seminar (as I was), that means there’s a lot of writing to be done. I took five courses that term, however, and I promise you that the workload is manageable under most circumstances. No particular prerequisites are necessary; good knowledge of any or all areas will be of some but not tremendous help. You need to be able to read a specific passage closely and write well about it; do this and you will be rewarded. Be warned, however, that when Professor Rabb says, “start with the text,” he really means that you will not get above a C if you actually have a thesis. Read this carefully and understand it: NO THESIS. Instead, start your paper with a general hint as to the direction you’re going to take, and then develop that idea into a thesis that you actually state in your conclusion. This organization is, conveniently, exactly the opposite of what is taught in writing seminars, but it is not overly difficult and can be gotten over. The final consists of passage IDs and several essays, and I found it to be, though certainly not easy, not impossible, either.</p>

<p>Lectures are meant introduce the historical and intellectual context of a work and to give you as good a discussion of the text as can be compressed into 50 minutes. All in all, they did quite a good job. The professors in 2002 were Sitney, Rabb, Meserve, Prado-Vilar, and Sugrue.</p>

<p>Sitney, the literature reader, though occasionally very good, gives disorganized lectures. More striking is that he seems to think that every work on the syllabus (and thus his precepts and lectures) must revolve around sex. Thus we spent our precept on the Symposium discussing not the philosophies of love in the text but rather the various positions preferred by ancient Greek lovers. Sitney is a Film Studies professor and was, long ago, a Classics major; unfortunately, he seems to have forgotten whatever he once knew about the classics. I found him neither to seriously take student work nor to seriously take it apart, and though he was in some cases helpful during office hours, he added little overall to the course experience.</p>

<p>Rabb, one of the two history readers, is ancient. I’m amazed that the man is still teaching, but his lectures make you glad that he is. He is a masterly historian and supremely helpful in office hours, and, despite his craggy senior-professor appearance, he is very accessible. Precepts were sometimes lifeless, though; he begins each with, “All right, question? Problems?”, and it will help if you have something to say. His grading was fair, though from none of the professors should you expect extensive commentary.</p>

<p>Meserve is Rabb’s polar opposite and the person for whom you will write your philosophy papers. She’s a young lecturer in the history department and is probably the most immediately approachable of all the professors. Unlike Sitney, her commentary on the classical world is quite insightful, though she seemed rather nervous during her first lectures. In a room full of senior professors, however, I can understand why. Her precepts were generally good, although sometimes I felt that she was a bit too willing to say, “Yes, it’s difficult to get a grasp on precisely what [author] is doing,” and move on. The HUM sequence is obviously not going to give you an in-depth understanding of any one text, but sometimes more leadership during precepts and a willingness to come to a basic distillation of a particular author would have been nice. Obviously, that can only be done so much, and part of the HUM sequence’s goal is to acquaint you with the original texts so that you have practice doing that yourself, but nonetheless some further refinement of our ideas would have been nice.</p>

<p>Prado-Vilar is, as far as I could tell, a post-doc fellow. He is the other history reader and will lecture to you only on art history. Here, you will find that AP art history will give you an advantage in following him, as he tends, like Sitney, to make jumps that are difficult for someone without a knowledge of art history to follow. I actually felt that my high-school art history teacher was better than Prado-Vilar, though that’s somewhat like saying that someone isn’t quite as good as Michelangelo - it’s hardly damning him. He’s enjoyable all in all, and the art history component lends a broader component to the course that is very nice to have.</p>

<p>Unlike some courses, though, the real core of the HUM sequence is the readings. These texts are the peak of the Western literary canon, and they speak for themselves. If you don’t believe that there is or should be such thing as a canon, you may find this course very frustrating. If you read the Bible or Koran as the literal word of God, this course will likely be infuriating. Aside from those caveats, these texts must be read - you won’t know any one of them in excruciating detail, but by the end you will have a solid framework on which to hang all the rest of your humanities knowledge. Do the readings; strive to read much quickly rather than little in-depth. It’s frustrating to have to do so, but it’s the nature of the course. You have time to do close reading for the papers and in upper-level courses. One interesting though component was various field trips; these vary from year to year but are generally culturally enlightening and fun. To study for the final, I found it very helpful to make an outline of each book (especially Greek philosophy and the Bible) to organize the ideas. Another tactic is to go back and read all of the introductions in the weeks leading up to the exam. You must study and study well, though - HUM books filled my entire shelf this fall, and it’s tough to keep that much material straight.</p>

<p>HUM attracts a wide variety of students. Several, like myself, are mol bio and/or pre-meds, so whatever your AB major, you really don’t have an excuse. About the only group understandably lacking is BSE students. By and large, the course has two types of people - postmodernists and classicists. Being one of the latter, the first semester of this course was supremely interesting (though more work than the second semester). Regardless of your preferences, though, you owe it to yourself and to whoever’s paying your tuition to take this course. Your education will by no means be complete after it, but it will never be complete without it.</p>