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Friday March 17, 2017 vol. CXLI no. 28
{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } U . A F FA I R S
STUDENT LIFE
U. students volunteer with fire department By Katie Petersen staff writer
Of the roughly 1,000 calls the Princeton Fire Department receives every year, 100 percent are answered by volunteers. When a call comes in, these volunteer firefighters rush to the Witherspoon Street firehouse, don their turnout gear, and board a fire engine. The process takes under 10 minutes. Five of those volunteers are University students. The partnership between the University and the town fire department has existed informally for decades, but was formalized in 2006 with the creation of the Princeton Student Firefighter Association, said Bob Gregory, Princeton Fire Department’s Director of Emergency Services. The three to six students that are involved every year are full-f ledged members and go through intensive training. That means 170 hours of learning about fire suppression, forcible entry, and “all the fun stuff,” says Amanda Hurley, a sixthyear graduate student in molecular biology at the University. Hurley signed up to become a volunteer firefighter five years ago at an activities fair. She was thrilled she had the chance to do so;
she even wrote about firefighters for a writing class. “I never had the opportunity [to be a firefighter] before I came to Princeton, because they have such a well-established program for getting students into the fire department,” Hurley said. Gregory hailed the importance of the program and the students it brings in. The students “give the fire department another set of eyes on things. A lot of the students are very good because they’re analytical,” he explained. “We’ve had a couple of students help in ... SOPs, standard operating procedures,” Gregory said. “We’ve had some students look at how we do things and say, ‘Hey, I think we’d be better off doing it this way or that way.’” Hurley and other student volunteers said their service has been a benefit to them, as well as the community. Danielle Sawtelle ’17, one of the volunteers, said that she enjoys the chance to get out of the Orange Bubble and work with the other volunteers, most of whom are either older adults or younger high schoolers. “As a student, it’s cool ... to interact with people who are in different stages of life,” Sawtelle said. See FIRE page 2
COURTESY OF FACEBOOK
A Facebook page of University students sharing memes has garnered almost 6,000 members.
U. memes page goes viral By Jane Sul staff writer
University Facebook group Princeton Memes for Preppy AF Teens has recently gained fame both within and outside the University. The public group, which now has almost 6,000 members, is an open forum on which members of the group post funny memes relating to Princeton life. The group’s official page describes the group as “just a bunch of entitled millennials on a FB page wasting their time writing memes.” It also adds a friendly caveat which reminds members to “keep memes wholesome.”
Nina Osipova ’20 created the meme page on Feb. 28. She said her idea to create the page came after talking to a friend who attends Harvard about Harvard’s similar memes page. “My friend said that one of the people she knew at Harvard who is also a freshman recently started their own meme page a month ago.... She asked me, ‘Does Princeton have a meme page?’” After the conversation with her friend, Osipova looked to see if a Princeton memes page already existed. She found one page, but it was not active. “I found that there was one [page] called Princeton
Memes for Sad AF Teens,” Osipova said. The Facebook page had been created in December 2016, but it had been inactive for a long time. “It was pretty much dead,” Osipova said. “No one had posted in it for quite a while.” Osipova reached out to Shannon Chen ’20, who had originally created the page, to see if she was interested in helping revive it. “I messaged her. I knew that I was going to sound super weird,” Osipova said. Chen quickly accepted Osipova’s offer to help revive the group. She is now one of the four co-administrators of Princeton Memes for Preppy See MEMES page 3
ACADEMICS
STUDENT LIFE
U. professor Julian Zelizer is elected to Society of American Historians
Students to embark on TigerTrek to New York
By Abhiram Karuppur
By Kristin Qian
In Opinion
Today on Campus
A Wilson School MPA shares her philosophy on the PPS budget, and the Editorial Board calls for more initiatives that encourage school spirit in sports. PAGE 4
1 p.m.: Join th Muslim Life Program to participate in Jummah Prayer with Imam Sohaib Sultan in Murray-Dodge 104 from 1 pm to 3 pm.
Wilson School professor Julian Zelizer has been elected as a member of the Society of American Historians, which composes around 400 members, including professional historians, journalists, and film and documentary makers. “I am honored by the Society’s recognition of my work and to join this distinguished group of writers,” Zelizer said.
Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs, and he has been a professor at the University since 2007. He earned his bachelor’s degree in history from Brandeis University in 1991, and he received his master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1994 and 1996, respectively. According to website of the University Department of History, Zelizer “has been one of the pioneers in the revival of Ameri-
COURTESY OF FLICKR
staff writer
The inaugural weeklong New York TigerTrek trip, hosted by the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club, will take place over spring break next week. Twenty undergraduates have been selected to participate in this trip, and they will be meeting with founders and CEOs of startups, venture capital firms, and other companies in New York and Philadelphia. The lineup includes Comcast, Chegg, x.ai, Etsy, Bond Street, Greycroft, WaitButWhy, Tory Burch, Iris, Stitch, Insight, REINGE Clothing, and the author Jennifer Weiner. The trip is co-directed by Soham Daga ’18 and Caroline Stafford ’18. The E-Club has hosted a weeklong Silicon Valley TigerTrek for the last five years, and last year, a one-day TigerTrek to New York City was developed. Stafford, who is a concentrator in comparative literature and has been a member of the E-Club since her freshman year, led the trip. She has since worked on transitioning the one-day trip into a weeklong experience for this year, modeling it after the Silicon Valley program that the E-Club offers as well. “Everyone on campus here always talks about ‘West Coast,
best coast’ in terms of entrepreneurship and innovation,” Stafford noted. She explains that there accordingly seems to be a lack of consideration of the buzzing entrepreneurship that is taking place in New York. Daga, an ORFE major, participated in the Silicon Valley TigerTrek trip his freshman year, characterizing it as a defining experience of his Princeton career. “I wanted to create a similar experience,” Daga said. “I really wanted to see whether or not opportunities that exist on the West Coast, like in Silicon Valley, can be found on the East Coast,” he added. Many people think that going to Silicon Valley is the only plausible way to succeed in entrepreneurship, Daga noted, but there are actually quite a number of startups in New York. Although most major tech companies are in California, there is a much more diverse selection of companies in New York, from fashion to biotech to artificial intelligence, Daga said. Three freshmen, five sophomores, eight juniors, and four seniors will be embarking on the trip. “Of course Silicon Valley is great for tech startups, but entrepreneurship is not just about tech. New York is obviSee TIGERTREK page 2
WEATHER
Professor Zeliger noted he is “honored by the Society’s recognition.”
can political history” and is the author of several books, including “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society,” published in 2015, and “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism,” published in 2010. Zelizer has edited 10 books on American political history, and he has published over 700 op-eds in outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. He also has a weekly column on CNN.com. Some of his recent op-eds include “Trump’s Hidden Success,” published on CNN.com, and “How Medicare Both Salved and Scarred American Healthcare,” published on Zócalo Public Square. He is also a regular contributor on CNN’s TV channel, and he co-hosts the podcast “Politics & Polls” with Sam Wang, University professor of neuroscience and molecular biology and founder of the Princeton Election Consortium. Wang, a polling expert, said that if President Donald Trump won more than 240 electoral votes, he would eat a bug — which he later did on CNN. In addition, Zelizer has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New America Foundation. Zelizer is not the only member See ZELIZER page 3
Associate News Editor
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