Just when you thought the school year was winding down, high-achieving Ivy League students are ready to leap into action again. Life at Princeton can be competitive and downright cutthroat, depending on your major, and nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to summer internships. Whether you’re doing community service in a developing country or learning what it’s really like to be a money-grubbing I-banker, it’s all about building the resume.

The institutions that hire college interns don’t help relieve the competitive atmosphere; in fact, they aggravate the problem by beginning their recruiting as early as October and November of the previous year. If you want to work at Goldman Sachs or Merril Lynch, you’d better be ready to be interviewed before you’ve even had your fall midterm exams.

The interviews themselves are grueling. My economics-major friends report on five-hour interviews in which they’re drilled on mental math, business sense, and whether the choices made by some corporations were wise or foolish and why. My female econ friends had to have a ready supply of pantsuits or skirts-and-blazers for the rounds of interviews, and my male friends kept pre-knotted ties hung on their bedposts to be deployed at a moment’s notice. Read More »

This weekend I met a guy. He is cute, funny, and 6′1″ – we exchanged numbers, and things were looking good.

Then at the end of the night as I was falling asleep, my phone chirped to inform me of a new text, from my new guy, “Great 2 meet u.”

Damn. And he had so much potential.

I know, I know, it is a sweet thing to say, but my problem is not with what he said, its how. I am the first to admit that I being extremely judgmental, but as an English major and someone who thoroughly enjoys words, I really hate to see them butchered.

Yeah, I’ve had people rationalize this texting style as faster, easier, whatever, but to substitute a single letter or a number for a word completely peeves me. Every time I see ‘4‘ in place of the word ‘for‘ or ‘c‘ instead of ‘see‘ or ‘2morrow‘ where there should be a ‘tomorrow‘ I cringe, I think of a junior high student, IQ points are lost, and a person suddenly seems extremely lazy- is it really that much harder to just type the extra two or three letters?? (The answer is no.) Read More »

I never studied abroad as an undergrad–the programs my school offered always seemed pointless to me. Instead of sending us to a foreign school to meet new people or learn a new language, my college had set up satellite campuses around the globe. I’d have the same teachers, the same peers, even the same dorm life, just transplanted to a new city. And since I was an English major, that new city had to be London, because that’s where they offered the classes I needed.

I thought it would be fun to have a change of scenery for a semester, but I had heard many a tale of study-abroad-gone-useless: “I never went to class, I just got drunk all the time”. “I only hung out with other Americans”. “We lived with other English speakers, so we never even bothered to work on our French”.

So I decided to skip the whole semester abroad experience and go all out–after graduation, I’d go to grad school in another country.

I applied to a few universities, one in Dublin, Ireland, two in London, and one south of London in the seaside town of Brighton. Because of rolling admissions, I heard back from the three UK schools almost immediately–accepted! Yes! Having never been to England, however, I wondered how I could possibly choose. So…I flew to London. For the weekend. In a jet lag-induced haze, I wandered the city, taking photos, visiting campuses. I took a train to Brighton and tried to imagine myself at school there. I made my choice. I bought a London guidebook.

On graduation day, I got another letter in the mail. It was from Ireland, and informed me that I had been accepted to the school in Dublin. My well-laid plans were suddenly de-railed–the masters program in Dublin was exactly what I wanted, and the school had a bit more prestige. At the advice of friends, professors, parents, strangers, whoever…I changed my mind.

I moved to Ireland in the Fall.

When I arrived at Dublin airport on a sunny day in late September, my entire life packed in two suitcases, it was the first time I had ever set foot in Ireland. I knew no one, and my program wasn’t supposed to begin for another few weeks. I was entirely alone…

[I’ll be chronicling some of the best and worst experiences here, so stay tuned!]

As an English major, I was always under the impression that literary and popular fiction were genres that were fairly at odds with each other (and, coincidentally, you are supposed to like the former and scoff at the latter. My personal tastes tend to run the opposite way). It’s rare that a book can fit into both categories without the help of Oprah, but oh how I’ve found one.

Audrey Niffeneggar’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife has gained a lot of popularity since it’s 2004 release, making a permanent home in women’s book clubs worldwide because of its earnest and heartbreaking love story. But it’s really so much more than it’s blurb would suggest; it’s also a painstakingly precise, exquisitely written book.

The story is told from the perspectives of Henry and Clare DeTamble, a married couple who have to deal with the complications that have arisen in their lives from Henry’s Chrono-displacement disorder, an ailment that forces Henry to travel through time against his will.

Time travel is usually one of my least favorite genres because it leaves me with too many questions after I’m done watching or reading. Why didn’t the terminator just kill Sarah Conner as a baby? Shouldn’t Marty McFly have known that he was going to succeed at getting his parents back together because if they hadn’t then he wouldn’t be alive to go back to the future in the first place (or even time travel in the first place because Marty essentially tells Doc he would later make the time machine work in Back the Future II?) Stuff like that. I realize that there is a certain amount of suspended belief that one has to assume in entertainment, but it’s still annoying. Read More »