Time flies, and it turns out that I’m now halfway done with my Princeton undergraduate career. It’s been a glorious two years, and as such, I have two things to share:
Category: Higher Education (Page 1 of 2)
I spent the past two months as a System Analyst intern in the Office of Quality at Educational Testing Service. For those of you who don’t know, ETS is the company that performs the academic research and assessment development for tests such as the SAT and AP programs. I’m going to perform a quick post-mortem on my experience there.
If you take a look at my reading list, you’ll notice a litany of non-fiction readings, and a relative dearth of other types of books. It is like this for a reason.
I have three distinct methods of approaching books:
- Immersion
- Information mining
- Incorporation
I’ll use my physics class as a case study for this. I’m taking PHY 104 this semester, which is Physics E/M (electricity and magnetism). From the very start of the course, we had to do integral vector calculus for electric fields and I panicked; I had never done anything of the sort, and then when I tried to read through the textbook, there were even more intimidating vector calculus problems (involving gradients mostly, which at that point in time I knew of, but didn’t know how to use them). I stopped paying attention in class, and fell further behind.
A few months ago, William Deresiewicz came to talk about his recent book, “Excellent Sheep: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” In it, he talks about how the Ivy League and other schools of similar “elite” status manufacture students who are — surprise, surprise — “excellent sheep”: people who have no great sense of purpose in their lives, people who are unable to think critically.
I’ve read countless pieces crucifying Mr. Deresiewicz for his opinion, and many others praising him for his insight. I’m going to do neither, and diverge into my own tangent.
Here at Princeton, students have an intimidating workload. Impossible? I think not. But I do find myself constantly agreeing with this Deresiewicz quote: “The classroom is the grain of sand; it’s up to you to make the pearl” (82). In my own experience, I agree with the general premise of the quote; most of my learning does indeed come out of the classroom. That’s not to say that lectures and precepts are useless — far from it. Instead, these lectures and precepts are mere jumping off points, sessions that I find galvanize my interest in a topic and cause me to furiously give chase thereafter. But I must admit that the constant exposure to all these different resources and fields of knowledge is a cruel reminder of sorts.