The role of a role model: Inspiring girls in school from a younger age

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I saw little representation of women in STEM fields. The inspirational autobiographies I read while growing up mostly consisted of women politicians or writers. The shelves of our libraries were always lined with books written by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, or Beverly Cleary. Once in a while,…

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Writing Never Gets Easier — That’s the Point

You’re sitting in Bobst Library between classes, being the responsible student that you are and actually using your only break of the day to start that essay due at 8 a.m. tomorrow. But almost immediately, you find that your brain decides to fry itself and forget the entire English lexicon. You end up staring at…

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When the dust settles

one way or another road signs

I guess I can start by telling you I graduated from college a few weeks ago, which is a pretty big accomplishment considering I got rejected from every university I applied to out of high school. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I had originally been accepted to San Jose State as a music major, and…

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 The Finale, for Now

We had four hours on the road before we had to officially call ourselves final semester seniors. The road was a safe haven — if you didn’t look at the hills of snow everywhere, spindly trees and the depressingly gray sky. Still, we were safe. “Would your freshman year self have thought you would be…

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Rigor is not value

Taking a course at Princeton, conventional wisdom would have it, requires a commitment to intellectual life and academic output. Yet it seems evident that our institution prioritizes rigor — or perceived rigor — over other considerations. This isn’t because rigor is required for understanding, nor because difficulty-for-the sake-of-difficulty is a pedagogical necessity. Rather, the point…

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Why I’m happy with my useless majors

Impracticality matters much less than you’d think when the alternative is a practical field of study that’ll lead to lackluster and underwhelming performances and interests.   I have a useless major — two of them if you ask some people. As a cinema and political-science major, with a creative-writing interest, I feel as if I’ve…

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