- You’re just a freshman, so it’s totally fine if you don’t know your major yet. That said, you should know my major. It’s Classics.
- A few years ago, some rowdy Princeton students started playing The Floor Is Lava, and never got around to officially declaring the game over, so technically all floors on campus are still lava. Watch out!
- One thing I wish someone had told me is that you don’t have to be best friends with everyone in your zee group. To be honest, my zee group and I never really clicked. Our senses of humor didn’t match, they had very little in common with me, and a lot of them spent the better part of fall semester trying to kill my dad. Finding your group of friends on campus can take time!
- Here’s the thing about dining in college: you may think you can survive on an all-ramen diet, but frankly you’re unlikely to survive Princeton on any diet. You will die here.
- Salmon-colored shorts are a pretty big thing here, but an even bigger thing is painting elephant ears onto your groin so that your crotch looks like an elephant. To clarify: your dick is the trunk. Anyway, you can buy salmon shorts at J. Crew or Jack Wills if you want a pair.
- One of the best things about Princeton is how accessible and down-to-earth professors are. Many Princeton faculty are the foremost scholarly authority in the world on their topics, but that doesn’t mean they won’t tremble with fear when they find out who your dad is.
- Princeton has eleven eating clubs, each of which has its own distinct identity. For instance, Terrace is the one all the hipsters join. Cottage is the one where they eat napkins. TI is the one where they eat even more napkins. Cap is the one with minorities in it, and Cloister is another one where they do the napkins thing (eating them).
- Here’s a cold, hard, truth all Princeton freshman come to terms with: you’re not as special as you were in high school. In high school, you were “the girl who got into Princeton”, but now you’re just “the girl who all evidence suggests may have had a hand in organizing the Jonestown Massacre”.
- One of the hardest parts of freshman year is learning how to set your own schedule. Many freshmen make the mistake of watching Ice Age: Continental Drift two or three times per day, which can really eat up your spare time! Try to limit yourself to one viewing per week.
- If you’re having trouble starting up conversations, try pouring maple syrup in your pants and then telling people “My pants are full of maple syrup”.
- Princeton doesn’t allow you to double major, unless of course you enter the cheat code “2GUD41MAJOR” and then beat all seventeen levels of the tower defense minigame on the registrar website.
- Don’t be fooled. “Introduction to fingerpainting” is really a weed-out course for the notoriously cutthroat fingerpainting track.
MF‘19
AG‘18
CS‘18
illustrated by CM‘18
