Princeton 2013 Parents

ALmed
Sat, 17 Apr 2010 03:32:26 +0000

Our S is currently a junior at Princeton. Here is our perspective after nearly three years.

Academically, Princeton is a real challenge. Like a lot of “bright” kids, S was able to make very good grades in high school without trying very hard. Not the case at Princeton, at least in his freshman math and science classes. He felt some pain, learned that he was not going to coast his way to success, and made some adjustments.

He is a much different student today than he was coming out of high school. To his credit, he decided it was more important to learn what he wanted to learn than to earn the highest possible grades, so he pursued a challenging Engineering program. I must say I am impressed by the caliber of work he is doing, and the ways that he has been inspired by his professors. He shows a deep commitment that wasn’t there a few years ago, and he is one tough-minded young man when it comes to his academic work.

Socially, I think any college transition is a challenge. We took him away from his family and friends, and sent him to live thousands of miles away in a place where he knew no one. That’s tough for anyone. He was assigned a single room freshman year, which is nice, but I think it presented further challenges to finding his social niche. He was lonely, and he had to learn to cope with that.

S participates in an extracurricular activity that demands significant time and effort, which was his path to finding a group of friends. He is not a party kid, but he is a social animal - he bickered and joined an eating club. But his roommate and very-good-friend was “hosed”. So I think he is in a very good place socially today – he has some close friends, a peer group he likes, and involvement with a broader circle of acquaintances, but he is not much caught up with social climbing because he thinks popularity isn’t a good measure of that character or quality of a man (or woman).

I think a lot of people would be surprised by the quality of his social environment at Princeton – I am. It’s not the snobby rich-kid environment that some people might expect. Or perhaps it is, in part, but there are 5,000+ uniquely different undergrads at Princeton, so it’s not hard to find a peer group that shares your own personal values and interests. “birds of a feather…”

I asked S this past summer to tell me, seriously and for real, what he really thought about his college experience. The first thing he said was, “well, I love my major”, which he then elaborated upon. The second thing he said was “I love my team”, and told me about that. The third thing he said was “I love my club”, with similar color commentary. And this is from a kid who isn’t given to hyperbole, and a kid whose freshman year included some tough challenges.

So if you are asking because you are wondering about sending your high school senior off to Princeton, I’d say do it.