February 15, 2017

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Wednesday february 15, 2017 vol. cxxxix no. 8

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Women encouraged to pursue engineering projects Head news editor

Last spring, five undergraduate women in engineering at the University realized that their female peers were dropping out of the engineering departments at much higher rates than their male peers. Last summer, Suren Jamiyanaa ’19 decided to change that.

Jamiyanaa came up with the idea for ReModel – a new student organization that launched yesterday – designed to encourage female engineers to pursue their own hands-on projects and see more engineering role models.

Founder and president Jamiyanaa and co-president Victoria Davidjohn ’19 both participated in the Freshman Scholars Institute (FSI) before matriculating. There, they took an engineering class and noticed the same trend in their female peers.

Jamiyanaa said that about 60 percent of the females in her class dropped out of engineering in the first semester of freshmen year.

Madeleine Cheyette ’19 serves as co-president, and Ifeyinwa Ikpeazu ’18 is the business manager.

Jamiyanaa said she began thinking about the issue at the end of freshman year.

She and Davidjohn spent last summer meeting with and developing connections with companies like Microsoft and Google in New York.

“I grabbed Victoria and was like ‘Yo, we need to do something about this,’ because it was challenging for us and we were able to take a challenging situation and identify a gap and take personal accountability to solve it,” Jamiyanaa said.

She added that the meetings with Microsoft and Google were centered around how the companies approached this problem in recruiting and the workplace.

“The relationships with Google and Microsoft will provide us with project mentors and they will provide direct guidance on the projects,” Jamiyanaa said.

She added that professors from the entrepreneurship department at the University will also help to facilitate projects.

Jamiyanaa said that ReModel plans to complete one to two projects by the end of the semester. The projects will be led by groups of three to five women per project, according to ReModel vice president Emily Abdo ’19.

Jamiyanaa added that she wants ReModel to be able to build confidence for women in engineering and offer more opportunities for young women in engineers to see more role models.

Abdo agreed. “There’s a lack of visibility of engineering role models. If you look up engineers, you’ll see someone like Mark Zuckerberg,” she said. “It’ll always be a guy.”

Because the group has only just launched, they

have not decided if they will require an application for the projects that ReModel will focus on each semester. The group plans to meet twice a week, according to Jamiyanaa . After the organization’s launch on social media Monday, Jamiyanaa said there was a strong positive response with text messages and social media comments and responses.

Abdo said that when Jamiyanaa reached out to her last summer, she was excited to collaborate on this project.

Abdo said that although she knew the rates of engineering drop out were higher for women than for men, she did not realize it was as large of an issue at the University as it is nationally.

Abdo finds the hands-on aspect of ReModel particularly compelling. She said she plans to focus a lot of her energy into the organization. She said that another aspect of ReModel that drew her was that she had always wanted to pursue engineering since her father and brother were both engineers but because of the lack of female role models, she did not know exactly what the role entailed.

“Going forward, I’m just really excited,” Abdo said.

“I think one of the biggest things I want to see is the project to be really diverse, but that’s contingent on the group of women.”

Abdo said she wants to see all facets of engineering represented, such as computer science and electrical engineering.

“We want to also make sure we’re not just software heavy, build more on hardware so there will be more partnerships with the University School of Engineering,” Jamiyanaa said, although ReModel is not limited just to BSE students.

“I think keeping the hands-on project is the most important,” Abdo said. “As we get more established, I’d love to bring in more professionals from industry to do panels or lectures.”

Abdo emphasized that all of the officers involved in the launching of ReModel are passionate about their work.

“When we talked earlier in the year with starting ReModel, we were all pretty up front that this is something we’re really passionate about,” she said. “I definitely want to put lots of time into this.”

ReModel will be recruiting new members to begin projects this semester in Frist Campus Center this week.

ReModel will hold its first informational meeting this Sunday at 4 p.m. in the Innovation Space. They will also be hosting their first event this Monday at 6 p.m. entitled Google #WomenInTech Presentation and Discussion, which is co-hosted

by Princeton Women in Computer Science (PWiCS).

ANDREA AYALA

Undergraduate women decided to challenge the male-centric engineering narrative.

STUDENT LIFE

New pop-up shop offers free business clothing to students Jisu Jeong staff writer

University students browsed through and took home free lightly-used and new business clothing at the first ever Tiger Threads PopUp Shop, an event run by Career Services, on Feb. 14.

The selection included blouses, dress shirts, pants, ties, scarves, and other formal garments obtained through a partnership with the Office of Community and Regional Affairs, which provided extra clothes obtained

through its clothing drive to the Pop-Up Shop.

The goal of the event was to give students access to attire for business and professional events such as interviews.

Career Services Director Evangeline Kubu said the event reflects Career Services’s mission to enable students to “design their own unique career and life vision” by creating “equitable access to opportunities.”

“One of the things we never want to stand in their way is going into their closet and not feeling that they have the

right blazer, or the right or appropriate clothing for an interview, or any other opportunity to connect with an employer,” she said.

The Pop-Up Shop was one part of the three-part Tiger Threads program organized

by Career Services that seeks to provide not only the appropriate clothing to students but also education about dressing for interviews. The other two parts are The Closet, which gives students the opportunity to borrow brandnew business clothes for up to three days, and the Dress See BUSINESS page 3

ACADEMICS

Environmental course makes sustainability recommendations for U. Jacob Tyles contributor

The most sustainable structures that stand with us today “naturally encourage” sustainable behaviors within its occupants, director of the Office of Sustainability Dr. Shana Weber said. Her class, ENV 327, provides a nexus between the ethics of an ecologically friendly environment and the application of proposed solutions to campus-wide sustainability challenges.

“There has been a huge evolution in the way campus as a community perceives itself in the past ten years,” Weber said.

The University and the Office of Sustainability have taken measures to be more sustainable, such as installing water refilling stations adorned on building walls, placing vast numbers of recycling and composting bins around campus, and implementing campus co-generators which use dissipated heat to power the university. Students in ENV 327 take active part in “tackling some of the tougher questions on sustainability on campus.”

It is Weber’s goal is to bring her student’s imagination to fruition.

What originally started out as an office meeting between Weber and three students, Misha Semenov ’15, Hannah Kraus ‘17, and Jenna Spitzer ’17, ended as a course investigating the ways in which the process of ethical framework and community identity help shape the continual work on campus sustainability.

ENV 327 focuses on these ethics, but takes an applied approach

through student-made ideas and written proposals to improve sustainability on campus.

“My idea was about the design of buildings, and how that can foster sustainable behavior,” Alie Fordyce ‘19 said. She used natural woods and lighting in her proposal after investigating the research on worker productivity in various environments, and worked that into an architectural framework which would inspire more sustainable behavior in the occupant space.

“It’s about starting at the roots, creating buildings to be sustainable, and fostering sustainable behavior,” she added.

“How do you think about architectural design as something that is a catalyst for sustainable behavior?” Weber posed. “The most sustainable buildings have been built encourage certain behaviors,” she said. For example, faculty from different disciplines are encouraged to meet each other in the hallway, and talk, Weber said.

“One might actually design a building with that objective in mind,” Weber said. “How things are organized, where offices are located, where the public spaces are, where the coffee machine is, these simple things all play a part in ‘how you want human beings to actually interact’.”

David Kim ’19, on the other hand, focused on waste and proper trash collection and how to change the culture around sustainable waste management.

“I remember at one point during a 14-hour flight, how much plastic trash I had generated ––

In Opinion

Today on Campus

Liam O’Connor writes against the renaming of Yale’s Calhoun College, Luke Gamble explores how we allocate our attention, and Leora Eisenberg highlights the danger of thinking we’re perfect. PAGE 4-5

12 p.m.: Latin American Writer Series will feature Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec, who will present “Documento, Alias Relato.” The lecture will be in Spanish and will take place in 216 Burr Hall.

there was just so much waste,” Kim said, which compelled him to think about ways to reduce this waste.

“I tried to extrapolate that to the whole plane, to all planes in the air, to a country, to the whole world –– I could not wrap my head around how much trash people around the world must make,” he said.

Students in Weber’s class tackled questions on how changing the culture of sustainability can positively affect the response of individual behavior for their own sustainable purposes.

Sam Rob ’18 looked at the difference between student residential college and eating club sustainability. What he found was that recent pushes for residential dining hall sustainability has greatly increased, and he wondered whether there was a similar push within the eating clubs.

“Thinking about what are the recommendations that are fruitful now,” Weber said, “would start pointing us in the desired direction that is defined as a student.”

Carrying over the habits built as underclassmen into the eating clubs may be one solution.

Difficulties lay in conceiving proper and ethical implementations for sustainability. Applying feasible ideas and having an attitude that “everyone can make a difference” became necessary for successful proposals, Fordyce said. For Kim, finding the right kind of support for his recommendations became challenging.

See ENVIRONMENT page 2

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Wednesday february 15, 2017

Novel approach to U. environmental course ENVIRONMENT Continued from page 1

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“In a way, that revealed that there was more research to be done in these areas,” Kim said.

“There will always be questions that need additional attention,” said Weber. University efforts to expand student enrollment, faculty membership, and overall sustainability all fall within the University’s strategic plan, a 30-year guideline on the future status of the university.

To implement these large-scale plans, a campus plan which fo-

cuses on actual implementation logistics is needed, which is what Weber’s class focuses on.

“It’s incredibly interesting to study the global status quo and how Princeton compares to it,” Kim said. “Both require an extraordinary sense of orientation to the community identity, as Weber’s class does. It is exciting to see the interdisciplinary work involved in solving sustainability issues on campus.”

There’s a sense of wonderful collaboration that’s “starting to infiltrate every area of study,” Fordyce said, “which is adding to this new stir of sustainability.”

U. impostor Hogue pleads guilty in Colorado Alice Vinogradsky staff writer

On Feb. 7, James Hogue, famed con man, plead guilty to felony and charges related to an array of stolen goods after being found living in an illegally-built shack situated on a peak on Aspen Mountain in Colorado. Hogue once entered the University as a student and a grad student under an alias.

According to The Washington Post, Hogue “wowed the admissions office at Princeton University with his incredible backstory: His father was an artist who died in a car crash, his mother a sculptor dying of leukemia in Switzerland, he wrote.”

Now, Hogue faces one to three years in prison for felony theft valued between $2,000 and $5,000, felony possession of burglary tools, and obstruction of police officers – a misdemeanor. Hogue’s plea deal allows for consideration of probation or a halfway house setting.

Police suspect that Hogue had been living in the shack for approximately a year when officers first knocked on his door this September. In that instance, Hogue fled the shack out of a window. Two months later, employees of the Aspen Skiing Company saw that Hogue had begun the construction of yet another cabin in the vicinity.

This ultimately led the police to Hogue’s vehicle laden with $17,000 in cash and stolen skiwear.

This series of crimes adds to Hogue’s three decade-long history of encounters with the law. With a fabricated story about the tragic loss of his parents, Hogue, who applied under the alias Alexi IndrisSantana, gained admission to the University in 1987 at age 28.

During his time at the University, Hogue had stellar grades, became a member of Ivy Club and the track team, and had friends yearning to hear his intriguing stories and engage in him with conversations. In 1991, Hogue was identified at a Harvard-Yale-Princeton track meet by a competitor who had known Hogue in Palo Alto, where Hogue had previously pretended to be a high school student at age 26.

Several investigations later, Hogue was found to have been an impostor, and was arrested and charged with forgery, wrongful impersonation, and falsifying records. Hogue was sentenced to nine months in prison, and had to pay back $22,000 in financial aid to the University.

Prior to coming to the University, Hogue had served 10 months in the Utah prison system for stealing costly racing bicycle parts for a bicycle shop. After he served his prison sentence in 1991, Hogue worked as a part-time cataloguer for the Harvard Mineralogical Museum in Cambridge, MA, when $50,000 worth of items went missing.

Hogue was a prime suspect in this case after investigators received a tip, but he was never charged. Since then, Hogue has been arrested, violated his probation multiple times, and reappeared in national news in 2007 after stealing $100,000 worth of items from homes in Colorado.

Such a repertoire has earned Hogue a spot amongst TIME Magazine’s list of “Top 10 Imposters.” In making this listing, Hogue joins the ranks of Clark Rockefeller, David Hampton, and others.

Wednesday february 15, 2017

University students take home business clothing at first ever Tiger Threads Pop-Up BUSINESS Continued from page 1

for Success workshop series, which teaches students how to dress and how and where to purchase business clothing on a budget. In one of the workshops, students had a chance to go to a thrift store, where volunteers helped them pick out clothes.

“We decided to have a threepronged approach because we felt as though a robust strategy would be the best way to service the various different needs of students,” said Russell Dinkins ’13, a diversity coordinator with Career Services who helped launch the Tiger Threads initiative.

Dinkins said he was driven to help start the Tiger Threads program due to his personal experience as a first-generation, low-income University student and his experience working with first-generation, low-income students when he worked with the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students.

“I was Class of 2013, and I was first-generation, lowincome background. So the idea of what to wear for an interview was very intimidating to me. Before I worked in this role, I used to work for ODUS, supporting firstgeneration, low-income students through student activities and student life side of things, and through my work there, I noticed some of the same feelings and thoughts and worries that I had which was reflected in the student body here,” said Dinkins.

Kubu said the turnout was impressive for a first-time event.

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“The number of students that are here — this is our first time doing this. To see a line wrapped around the corner here tells me this is something we absolutely want to continue to invest in and expand,” Kubu said.

Several students who attended said that the event had a positive impact on them.

“I think this is marvelous, I think this is a really great thing,” said Luke Henter ’20.

“I’ve been absolutely thrilled with what I’ve found so far.”

Kara Dowling ’20 said she liked the choices available.

“There’s some stuff from Banana Republic and J. Crew and stuff like that,” she said.

“Honestly, I was really worried about being seen as not [as] financially well-off as other people, but it’s a really good opportunity for us to get a chance to diversify our professional apparel, because a lot of us can’t afford it,” Andrew Goh ’19 said.

Career Services plans to survey the students who attended on Tuesday and work to improve the program accordingly for next year. Kubu said it hopes to have larger selection of clothing for next year.

Tuesday’s event was the only Pop-Up Shop for this academic year, but it is scheduled to be offered once every spring semester.

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Opinion

Wednesday february 15, 2017

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Calhoun’s conundrum Liam O’Conner columnist

This week, Yale University succumbed to the latest in activist hysteria without fully appreciating American history when it decided to change the name of Calhoun College. This change came about as a result of protests by students who detested the residential college’s namesake Senator for his ardent support of slavery. Yale’s Board of Trustees should have left the name unchanged. I believe that Calhoun’s legacy is worth preserving for posterity so that they may evaluate the successes and shortcomings of the country’s past leaders.

John C. Calhoun was born in South Carolina and attended Yale University. After graduating, he pursued a career in politics, serving as a Representative, Senator, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and Vice President.

Throughout this time, Calhoun became the single defining voice for the South. Fellow Senator and opponent of slavery Daniel Webster praised him as, “much the ablest man in the Senate.” In 1957, then-Senator John F. Kennedy commended Calhoun for being a, “forceful logician of state sovereignty” and, “masterful defender of the rights of a political minority against the dangers of an unchecked majority.”

Calhoun’s legacy differs from those of other leaders in that he was one of the last political theorists to serve in an elected office, having expanded the arguments of states’ rights and the protection of minority opinions. Perhaps his greatest contribution to constitutional theory was the Concurrent Majority: the argument that minorities can block actions from the “tyranny of the majority.”

Yale students contend that Calhoun’s name should be removed from the college for two

vol. cxli

Sarah Sakha ’18

editor-in-chief

reasons: he upheld slavery and he created the arguments that caused the Civil War. I believe that both of these are unfair assertions because of the moral and historical contexts surrounding him.

While it is true that Calhoun planted the seeds for the secession of the South, secessionism began long before him with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and the Hartford Convention of 1814. Even abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison advocated for disunion. Calhoun should not be solely blamed for the secessionist movement.

His political opinions were often motivated by his desire to maintain slavery as a “positive good” for society. But I do not believe that we should entirely eliminate his legacy for this view either.

The problem with the Calhoun naming conundrum lies in the fact that we judge the people of the past with the morals of the present. As a result, we often disparage individuals without truly understanding why they held such beliefs. Instead, we play the role of armchair historian by automatically labeling them as “immoral” and tossing them aside into the waste basket of history. To understand John Calhoun, we must understand his upbringing.

Calhoun spent his formative years in South Carolina — a bastion of slavery. For him, the sight of slaves working in the field was probably a daily occurrence. During this time period, black people were treated as property in the South and, for the fortunate few who were free, as inferiors in the North.

Calhoun likely did not ponder the morality of slavery.

Most northern states abolished slavery after the Revolutionary War, but that did not actually free the slaves due to grandfather clauses. In fact, New Jersey reported that it had

slaves as late 1846.

I am providing this narrative merely for historical context.

Traditionally, college students have favored the philosophy of moral relativism.

Stanford University’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that this viewpoint considers, “the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to the moral standard of some person or group of persons.”

If a person was taught from a young age that murder was tolerable for revenge, then he or she would never perceive its immorality. The same was true of slavery and racism at that time. There were some people who simply did not know any better. Even the Southerners who did see slavery’s immorality — which I believe is highly improbable for Calhoun — as a “necessary evil” could not advocate for abolition because it would result in their own economic ruin. The colloquial saying that they were “stuck between a rock and a hard place” was especially true for these morally enlightened Southerners.

Moral relativism should not be used to excuse human slavery or to sympathize for slaveholders; we can all agree that this was a human disaster. Rather it should serve as a lens through which we can understand slavery’s underlying causes so that we can prohibit it from reoccurring.

Slavery was preserved because human beings were directly equated to personal wealth. Generally speaking, people care about their financial wellbeing. If we simply dismiss leaders like Calhoun on the basis that they were racist, then we miss the deeper issue of addressing rampant greed in society. White supremacy might have started slavery and been used by Calhoun to justify it, but avarice was the underly-

ing cause that perpetuated this institution in spite of conflicting moral arguments.

America’s leaders were imperfect people. For example, President Franklin Roosevelt often serves as the gold standard for modern politicians; however, few question his prominent status despite his blatantly racist policy of Japanese internment.

We cannot discredit the legacies of our nation’s leaders simply because of their role in a tragedy. During the first half of the nineteenth century, slavery was a fact of life.

I urge Yale University to not erase all of their references to Calhoun and instead to adopt the approach that Princeton took in relation to evaluating Woodrow Wilson’s legacy. Yale should create an exhibition that publicly displays all of the major features of his life in a candid manner so people can silently weigh his vices against his virtues. This will both encourage the scholarship of our history and prevent the dangerous spread of groupthink among the nation’s next generation of leaders.

John C. Calhoun was a flawed man. He was a brilliant political philosopher who used his talent to defend the great evil of mankind. It is this conflict that makes him a magnetic figure in American history. Unfortunately, Yale has submitted to the outcry of expunging his legacy rather than, as Calhoun himself said, “learn from your mistakes and build on your successes.”

Liam O’Connor is a freshman from Wyoming, Del. He can be reached at lpo@princeton.edu.

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The new attention disorder Luke Gamble

senior columnist

The three weeks on campus that preceded Dean’s Date and finals felt eternal.

But what was most painful was having no idea what to do with myself after I did eventually finish all of my schoolwork. Many of us went from a frantic working pace and wanting nothing more than a short break, to having no idea what to do with ourselves. What is most depressing are not the challenges that we expect to be unpleasant, but rather when the thing that we hope will bring relief is itself another burden.

For the first few hours after finishing our work, we enjoyed hanging out with friends and the ability to just sit around in leisure.

Yet, soon afterwards, we simply didn’t know what to do with our time. The boredom that follows finishing our work reveals a certain emptiness. We’ve learned how to pay attention to things that are put in front of us, but we haven’t stopped and considered what is worth paying

attention to when those assignments are no longer being handed out.

The lack of relief after finishing the semester left me with a horrifying vision of my life as a series of successfully completed tasks, but with little accomplishment and no satisfaction, a yoke successfully carried nowhere. Is there nothing that I want to do after I’ve fulfilled all my to-do lists?

Is there no meaning I look to after accomplishing all my to-do list? No purpose? At the end of it all, not rest, no “R&R,” just boredom filled by nothing more than Instagram scrolling and endless streaming of one movie after another?

At Princeton we learn how to focus on tasks that we often have no personal desire to fulfill. This large attention span accomplishes nothing if we don’t also develop our own criteria for deciding what we want to and ought to do once our superiors stop making these decisions for us.

David Foster Wallace suggests that one of the hardest things to do in life is to learn how to intentionally choose to what we will

pay attention, rather than just falling into the default modes of existence, without independent decision making. He writes, “I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about ‘teaching you how to think’ is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: ‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to…”

There is no point in having the ability to pay attention for long hours if we do not know what we want or ought to be paying attention to.

We are all good at completing assignments and we excel at following directions. But our mental awareness should not be solely occupied with the endless treadmill of tasks and expectations that are placed in front us. It would be a tragedy for us to live our whole lives with our heads down, tending diligently to whatever we are presented with, only to find later in our lives that we

never attended to what was actually worth our attention. If paying attention is a kind of worship, we would do well to make sure that we are not just worshipping golden calves. What a horror to find that we have worshipped efficiency, only to find that we’d moved in a direction that did not really matter. How terrifying to one day realize that we are little more than a dog chasing tires, that we have no clue what to do with ourselves once we actually have the freedom we work so hard to attain.

We all develop an ability to focus on things. But if that focus is too tied up in completing tasks and moving onwards and upwards, we will miss some really big ways in which we are supposed to apply our attention. If our attention is only task-oriented, then we’ve missed out on one of the biggest things our education was supposed to empower us with, which is not just the ability to complete tasks, but to analyze which tasks we ought to invest in in the first place.

I won’t pretend to tell anyone what those things

are. I am simply more and more conscious of a desire to live in such a way that when we’re old and gray and can’t work anymore, we still have things that we think are worth paying attention to. I want to have lived in such a way that I am proud of the things I have paid attention to, that I’ve dedicated my life to what’s real and important.

As Wallace says, “the really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” There’s no final exam for that class, no break or boredom afterwards, but it is a task you can give yourself every day.

Luke Gamble is an English major from Eagle, Idaho. He can be reached at ljgamble@ princeton.edu.

Wednesday february 15, 2017

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Smile: You’re not perfect Leora Eisenberg columnist

A year or two ago, P!nk’s song “Perfect” was blasting on radios across the country.

Her powerful refrain implored us “[not to] ever, ever feel like you are less than, less than perfect.” People — myself included — drank in her lyrics as a powerful message of self-affirmation and acceptance. P!nk meant well when she asked us to remember that we are perfect just the way we are, but she neglected to mention that we are humans and thus, inherently flawed.

I remember listening to that song on repeat and telling myself that I was indeed perfect, but then I remembered that I was rude to a friend earlier that day and that I had yelled at my brother. These were hardly the actions of someone perfect, but P!nk was still telling me that I was.

One Direction later sang to some special girl that “Baby, you’re perfect.” But if, say, the girl is consistently told by her 1D boyfriend that she is “perfect,” but also comes late to dates, forgets birthdays, and makes hurtful comments, she neglects to improve upon character traits that need work. If one member of a couple buys into notions of the perfection of their partner, they are giving their partner license to ignore the places where they need to improve.

Looking through old high school yearbooks, I find numerous entries from girlfriends telling me that “I’m

perfect! Don’t ever change!”

While my friends’ comments were motivated by goodwill and encouragement, they also subconsciously reinforce the notion that I don’t have anything to work on — and, as a human being, I absolutely do. When we tell each other how “perfect” we are, we let each other forget that we have failings and flaws that need to be tended to for the sake of our emotional, physical and mental health, no matter how “perfect” we pretend we are.

As humans, we can be impatient, rude, unkind, selfcentered, and greedy. Our actions can lead us to broken hearts, failed exams, and misguided thoughts. Yet, instead of pursuing a course of self-evaluation and selfimprovement in the moments when we feel like “nothing,” we turn to our friends and favorite singers who tell us that we’re perfect.

We are not perfect, and to remind ourselves of that fact is not an assault on our self-worth. It is, rather, a reminder that we need to grow.

Deluding ourselves by believing we’re “perfect” robs us of the opportunity to improve ourselves, and, in doing so, build our character and appetite for positive growth. It is the triumph over a vice or bad habit that instills us with the courage and tenacity we need to succeed. Only once we’ve developed in a meaningful way can we applaud ourselves on a job well done.

With perfection, there is no job to be done at all.

I can’t possibly be perfect

if I hurt a friend’s feelings last week, which I did. Instead of listening to P!nk’s vapid words, I devised a stepby-step plan on how to better listen and care for others.

Instead of telling yourself that you’re perfect when you procrastinated on your paper until 3 a.m., go to a McGraw session on time management. You have nothing to lose in introspection except, of course, the notion that you are perfect. So I suggest you rid yourself of the idea, and instead improve the quality of your work, relationships, and health. Once we’ve made the decision to change for the better, we’ve accepted our imperfection and ventured further into the long journey of self-improvement as a mortal striving for moral goodness.

The next time that a song on the radio tells you that you’re perfect, smile. You know something that the singer doesn’t realize. You know that you aren’t perfect. You know that you are a fallible, flawed being. You know that you have a long road ahead of you, and you know that you will make mistakes. You also know, however, that you have the enormous potential to change.

oh, crop.

Leora Eisenberg is a freshman from Eagan, MN. She can be reached at leorae@princeton. edu.

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Wednesday february 15, 2017

PRINCETON “SNOW” DAY

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Princeton students take a study break to enjoy the snow while it lasts.

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Nassau Hall blanketed in snow.

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Students compete to create the best snow man standing yet.

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