Princeton's Students

When I worked at Princeton I sometimes half-seriously wondered if a eugenicist consulted with the university admissions department to admit or turn away students based on their physical appearance. They were almost all slender, attractive and free of acne. (Contrast Windsor, where a randomly chosen group of 5 or so may have more size variation than Princeton's entire undergraduate population. Possibly more acne as well.) The uniformity of appearance was underscored by the unofficial dress code - a sort of discretely preppy look that relied heavily on Lacoste and Abercrombie and Fitch.

As individuals, I quite liked most of them - they were well-mannered, intelligent, hard-working. En masse they left me wanting to dye my hair magenta, get a few random piercings and start handing out radical pamphlets of some sort at the door to the library. Some insane percentage of them - 35% or so - went on to become investment bankers.

They frustrated me intensely.

I remember one student who told me that she was really enjoying her thesis research, because after she graduated she didn't think she'd get to work on anything interesting again. She was going into banking, of course. Why, I wanted to know, if she found it so dull? Oh, well, she shrugged. As if the question hardly made sense. And she was one of the treasures - the ones with a spark of real interest.

And that was the thing. I wanted to shake her, her and all the other little proto-bankers, lawyers, financial engineers. Look, I wanted to scream. You're at one of the greatest universities in the country, and everything's open to you. You could study literature under a world-famous novelist, paint with acclaimed artists, learn about social welfare or cutting-edge physics from some of the best there are. You're bright, beautiful, talented. You could be anything.

The selection process for getting into an Ivy-League is intense, though as far as I know no eugenicists are actually involved. The requirements include high SAT scores (generally gained through months of intense coaching with one of the test prep services), high grades in pretty much every subject (GPA counted across entire high school career) and a full schedule of extra-curricular activities to demonstrate well-roundedness. Serious applicants to the Ivies take on the task of preparing for university as a full-time business, with committed parental financial backing. Their parents need to be very supportive, wanting all this for them, the top school, the high-powered career, the hard-working student they can be proud of.

And yet - many of them seemed to have this peculiar joylessness to them. A way of being industrious yet listless at the same time. As if it was all the same to them - calculus, the Comedy Club, track and field, volunteer work, whatever 101. Everything just another bit of resume padding, another hurdle to jump, another box to check off, and they're a little tired of it all already, before they've even started. And their parents wanted all this for them, and pushed and guided them to get there, but somehow, I think, I hope that if they knew, they wouldn't want that.