Week One: Princeton 1, Delia 0
Hola a todos y todas.
Week one at Princeton is officially over, but somehow it feels like it’s been the longest week of my life. Not in a bad way—just… slow. It’s funny how Spain already feels like a distant memory, almost like a dream I woke up from.
Being the first week, and also experiencing this new type of coursework for the semester, I’ve found myself with a good amount of free time, and I have been quite bored. While I had plans on how to fill this time—like with a job, a research position, and playing on the soccer team—all of those haven’t come together yet for various reasons.
While I have applied for numerous jobs (I think I’m at 5 or 6 now), I haven’t gotten any interviews, which is fair considering one of them was looking for an intermediate level of French, and as you all know, je ne parle pas français (I don’t speak French). Finding a research assistant position has been harder than I imagined as well—especially since all these jobs I applied for were research assistant roles. So yeah, that’s not going well either.
Now, I know what you are thinking: Delia, you shouldn’t expect to be paid when you have no research experience. Yes, I know! But one—if you can call it a problem—with the undergraduate research website at Princeton is that on the “Getting Started” page, the first step it suggests is applying for these “job” positions. The next step is randomly emailing professors, which, to be totally honest, I am not looking forward to. It feels kind of desperate and weird, considering I either don’t know these people (or I know of them and they don’t know me) or I do know them, but it still feels awkward. Too bad Princeton can’t just give everyone an RA role.
Another problem I’ve run into in the job hunt is that a lot of places aren’t hiring this year due to budget cuts. For example, I read an article this morning about how the libraries were cutting student hours this year and not looking to hire more people. Departments are also supposed to be making significant cuts. Outside of the job hunt, I’ve seen these cuts firsthand. One that bugs me the most is that the size of the cups at Late Meal is smaller now, and they have a different fountain machine that doesn’t have lemonade (and overall, there are just fewer options). If I were the one making cuts, I can tell you the first thing I would cut would be the event that actually was this weekend, Lawnparties—or as I like to call it, “Take Your Alcohol on a Walk Day.” Basically, it’s a giant concert with someone famous, a huge stage, and free food.
Second thing I’d cut would be the security guards in Firestone. Let’s face it, through all the bag searches they do each day (everyone who exits has to have their bag checked), have they ever found someone stealing something? Maybe they could just put one guard down at Special Collections, call it a day, and put some of those alarms on the books like they have at stores that go crazy if the tags aren’t removed. Problem solved, right?
Anyway, part of my week was dedicated to job hunting and applying, which has still yielded no luck. I even went to the student employment fair, where there were basically three tables of people hiring. One was for the dining halls, and I refuse to work there—mostly due to my disdain for them and for washing dishes.
That leaves soccer. So I went to day one of tryouts and decided it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. While I certainly miss playing soccer, club soccer was just a little too intense for what I wanted. I just kind of wanted to play soccer casually and make some friends. That was not what club soccer was offering. While I can definitely play rough, now that I’m nearly 20 years old, being constantly shoved to the ground and getting turf burns has become less appealing. I woke up the next morning barely able to walk, lol.
Which led me to my next initiative: the Princeton Triathlon Team—a new program that I just invented and am now the president of. While we may not be an officially recognized Princeton club (yet), nor have I set up the info session (that’s a next-week problem), we are officially registered with USA Triathlon and have joined the league, so there’s that.
Once again, it’s a lesson in the power of connections—my mom’s and mine—with USA Triathlon, and my lack of connections at Princeton. One main issue is that the University doesn’t want to let us be a club sport because apparently 40 sports is the max they’re willing to allow. Which is dumb because some of the sports they do have shouldn’t even be club sports, while triathlon actually has a league and a national competition.
Take the cycling team, which I was part of last year. They only met once a week (if that… unless you were invited into a secret group chat if they liked you). They said they did races, but I never got any information about them, so I never got to participate. And come on—even curling, Taekwondo, and spikeball are club sports! Perhaps they could combine the men’s and mixed ultimate teams? Why is there no women’s ultimate team? Or they could merge women’s and men’s wrestling. I’m not even asking for separate men’s and women’s triathlon teams—just one. And don’t even get me started on ski and snowboard; they never met once. I know because I really wanted to join.
That leaves me to do all the heavy lifting—oh, and also participate. Which will be rough, considering I’m on year two of retirement and definitely not ready to do a triathlon anytime soon. I’m not even entirely sure what being a club sport would get us, but I imagine easier access to the pool. Right now, our “access” means taking over free lap swim. Maybe if we disrupt the schedule enough, they’ll give us our own time slot.
One great part of registering our team with USA Triathlon is that I got the pleasure of completing SafeSport training—aka all the mandated reporter material, with some hazing and bullying content thrown in. Of course, all of this is important, but it feels like every organization has their own version of it, so I end up doing this training like ten times a year. For example, in order to be able to add and drop my classes this fall, I had to complete the mandated hazing training.
I find these trainings kind of ridiculous because the quizzes are so easy. To be totally honest, like most of the world, I just skip through them as quickly as I can because all the answers are just common sense (or at least I hope they are for most people). Who knows—maybe the trainings are doing what they’re supposed to, because I heard someone outside my dorm window the other night (my dorm is on the first floor of a main campus road) say, “Everything is hazing whether it’s consensual or not.” Maybe they were joking, or maybe they stopped an act of hazing in progress or got someone to submit the hazing report form. Who knows, but clearly someone learned something.
I don’t even have my road bike on campus because I thought I was going to be playing soccer, so I’m trying to delay our practices at least another week to give time for it to get here. Next week will be the info session, and then I hope to get us all going the following week.
Speaking of bikes, the one I do have on campus (to get to class) is a ridiculous kids’ bike. I think it’s fine, especially since I have no other option after my nice bike was stolen last year. That hasn’t stopped my mom from teasing me about it, though. Jokes on her, because every Tuesday and Thursday when I have my research seminar, there’s another person with the exact same bike as mine parked right next to it. Clearly, they also had their nice bike stolen and their grandma was kind enough to pick one up for them at a yard sale.
While I’ve been bored, I’ve tried to keep myself as entertained as possible. In fact, this weekend I did something I’ve never done before: taken the bus! I told my family one of my goals for the semester was to take the bus to the store, something I was absolutely terrified of last year. However, post-Spain—where I took the bus basically every day—this trip was an absolute breeze. Did I really need anything at Target? Not really. But sometimes I just feel claustrophobic on Princeton’s campus and need to get out, so the Target trip was a good little reminder of reality.
Sometimes Princeton feels like a distant planet in our galaxy, where conventional rules and social norms seem to disappear—at least for me, in a negative way. It’s a place where the nerds become social overlords you find vomiting in a bush on the street while wearing minimal clothing, and suddenly being a varsity athlete becomes less appealing because “they just got in for XYZ sport.” And, of course, it somehow becomes less appealing to start “fights” with professors about why they’re wrong. True story.
Not to go too far down a tangent, but I thought this idea was kind of interesting. So I’m sitting in my linguistics precept, and some girl asks something along the lines of, “If there are an unlimited number of word combinations, is AI limiting that?” Without much thought, my preceptor (who is also a full-fledged professor) responds, “Of course not.” Yet, as someone who has studied this kind of stuff and can generally spot AI writing pretty easily, I’d argue against that.
The whole point of AI text generation is to generate text based on statistical likelihoods—letters and words follow certain patterns. AI-generated text follows patterns. Over the years, AI has even started to favor certain words over others. A quick Google search of “AI words” gives you things like delve into, tapestry, navigating, landscape, realm, embark, vibrant, etc. In addition, we know ChatGPT loves to overuse discourse connectors (firstly, next, lastly) as well as those interrupting dashes—you know, like this—that everyone seems to love now. So as more people use ChatGPT for tasks and start to emulate its style in their own writing, I think sentences will become more standardized, easier to predict, and our overall vocabulary will be shaped by these AI words. There are even studies showing a measurable increase in AI-favored words in academic writing. What does that tell us?
Speaking of unconventional, Princeton is one of the few colleges in the U.S. without sorority or fraternity houses. According to the University, they do “not recognize fraternities and sororities because, in general, they do not add in positive ways to the overall residential experience on campus. These organizations can contribute to a sense of social exclusiveness and often place an excessive emphasis on alcohol.”
Hmmm… sounds kind of like something called an eating club.
While they don’t have official houses, sororities and fraternities do still exist for sophomores and upperclassmen. However, I’d never really seen them around or known anyone involved. So imagine my surprise when, around 9:30 p.m., I was in line for pasta at late meal and suddenly about 100 girls—dressed in similar dresses and wearing name tags—appeared, all talking about how Rush went. It felt surreal, like a movie scene.
While I know frats and sororities are a huge part of other campuses, they still feel fake to me, like something out of a college movie. But nope, they’re real, and apparently just as cheesy as in the movies. I’m headed down to Hopkins in a few weeks to visit a high school friend, and I’m totally expecting a stroll down sorority row to have my own Legally Blonde Delta Nu moment. Bonus points if they’re singing some weird chant together or throwing a rager.
That brings me to my next point: my sophomore year bucket list.
On the bus to Target, I realized that yes, Princeton can be kind of boring. But just like I invented the Mercadona game in Spain, I can create my own Princeton fun with a bucket list. It’s still a work in progress, but here’s what I have so far:
- Take the bus to the store. (Done.)
- Walk through every building on campus (that’s open to students).
- Visit every coffee and boba shop in Princeton and try their drinks.
- Go to Chipotle.
- Go inside an eating club.
- Go to a frat/sorority party. (Simiao, you might have to help me out with this one at Hopkins.)
- Crochet something.
- Go to NYC.
- Attend a sporting event.
- Have a basic conversation in French (name, interests, where I’m from).
- Meet a really cool person.
- Master my espresso machine.
- Learn how to use the weirdest-looking machine in the gym.
- Go to the really far-away gym. Bonus points for taking the bus.
- Take a NJ Transit bus.
- Go to a music/dance show.
- Have a day without electronics.
- Take a photo with the Princeton mascot.
- Go on a hike/nature walk.
- Try something new.
- Attend a lecture event.
- Get five free T-shirts.
- Have a picnic.
- Plan a movie marathon.
- Visit my brother’s college using only public transportation or a rental car.
- Make a friend in every single class I’m in.
- Attend a class I’m not enrolled in.
- Go to a formal/semi-formal.
Of course, I also have an academic-based list—more of a set of goals than a bucket list—but I’ll spare you the boredom of hearing about publishing papers and learning XYZ.
Speaking of teaching myself things, as I mentioned last week, I’m teaching English to Spanish-speaking immigrants. This past weekend we had our training, which was… surprisingly shallow. I knew it was only an hour long, so I didn’t expect much depth, but it’s still wild to me that in a week and a half I’ll be teaching actual people English.
Considering my Water Safety Instructor (swim lesson teacher) certification took 30 hours of class plus readings, I’m a little nervous I’m going to be lost. Sure, I taught swim lessons for two years without certification, but that was partly because 1) Connecticut didn’t really offer the class and 2) I’d grown up swimming competitively and taking the same classes I was now teaching. Plus, you all know me—I’m super motivated—so of course I found a pirated version of the WSI book online and wrote out all my lesson plans with activities from both the book and my own invention.
But teaching English is nothing like that because I never actually learned English. As we’ve discussed in my linguistics class, there’s something special about the brain up to age five where we absorb language almost instantly. After that, you’re stuck with “I run, she runs, they run, we run” grammar drills. While I did some grammar lessons in elementary school, I went to a terribly funded public school and still don’t fully understand commas—so I think you can infer how well that went. Most of our grammar was taught through weird songs: think Schoolhouse Rock, but make it Pearson Common Core.
So when someone says, “Just teach English,” I can’t help but feel like I’m setting myself up for failure.
Now, on the flip side, if you asked me to teach a Spanish class (in English), I would know exactly what to do. There’d be maps, diagrams, the occasional rant about Spain, and of course tons of grammar—because outside of Spain-related things, grammar is my favorite part. The good news is that I’ve always wanted to learn English in Spanish (something I’ve written about here before), so now I’ll finally get to fulfill a lifelong dream.
I did, however, just learn today that the classes are going to be held on Zoom—or potentially not at all—because the SPEAR program, part of Princeton’s PACE Center for Civic Engagement, no longer wants volunteers working directly in the community. I’m not sure I really get this one, since the PACE Center supports another ESL group on campus, but apparently this specific SPEAR program is the sticking point.
And Zoom… well, Zoom is a whole other level of problems. As anyone who worked or studied from home during the pandemic knows, Zoom classes and meetings are kind of terrible. No one’s really listening, no one wants to be there, and they completely lack that unique vibe every in-person class has. One vivid memory I have from freshman year on Zoom was my English class, where we were reading The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), and it was basically just me and my English teacher talking while 15 other students silently watched. It was… odd. But hey, it all worked out—he ended up writing my college recommendation letter.
Taking all these non-engineering classes this semester has been an odd experience too, mostly because the professors actually seem to want to know us. One of my professors is scheduling one-on-one meetings just to hear about our goals, and another wants us to come to office hours just to say hi. Maybe this is normal behavior in the real world, but it couldn’t be further from what life was like in the engineering department, where professors didn’t want to know you, didn’t seem interested in what you submitted, and didn’t even grade their own homework. They just… existed in class, and I’m sure they had office hours somewhere, but the vibe was very much “please don’t talk to me, you’re just a clueless freshman inconveniencing my life.”
That said, I do have to give myself credit: even without knowing the professor’s name—or them knowing mine—I still got an A+ in the class. And yes, I plan to add a few more of those to my collection this semester.
One of my new classes has a very unique project: we’re writing a biography about a woman. Yes, that is the exact wording of the assignment. It can be a woman you know or someone famous, as long as “they use she/her pronouns” (interesting definition, by the way). I still have no clue who I’ll choose, though I’m leaning toward writing about someone I know because I think it would make the project more meaningful. Whoever I choose has to be interesting (loosely defined), because I’ll be dedicating 12 weeks to not only writing about her (with the end goal being a full-fledged book) but also completing other “core activities” along the way—like making a 2D collage, a 3D representation, and a bunch of other things I’m already forgetting.
So if anyone reading this is interested in having a biography written about them (and uses she/her pronouns), hit me up. The only requirement is that we’ll probably be chatting a lot, because I can’t write a book about your life without actually knowing the details.
And that was my week. I know, kind of boring. Does that mean I should cancel the blog until my life becomes more interesting? Maybe. But honestly, I’m having fun writing these posts, and that’s all that really counts. Not every week has to be a blockbuster episode; sometimes it’s just a slow slice of life—a Target bus ride here, a Princeton gripe there, a sprinkle of linguistics drama for flavor. Plus, I think there’s something kind of fun about documenting these in-between moments because I’ll for sure need something to compare Oxford to next year.
So, boring or not, the blog lives on.
Hasta luego,
