Doug Sprankling '10 is serving two years in the Peace Corps, performing health-related work in a rural village in the African country of Burkina Faso, formerly known as the Republic of Upper Volta.

 

The Davis, Calif., native was a member of the Princeton University Band, which was founded in 1919 and is famous for its lively, fun-loving approach to sparking University spirit at athletic games and events. It has 50-plus regular members who "scramble" into creative formations, making music and raising laughs while cheering on the Tigers.

 

Sprankling played the trumpet with the band and in his senior year was drum major. He performed at many Princeton football games, but a favorite memory was the win over Yale his freshman year. "We came back from a huge deficit to clinch the win and celebrated with a bonfire on campus," he says. Sanctioned by the University, the bonfire is lit whenever Princeton defeats both Harvard and Yale in the same football season.

 

The band was just one of Sprankling's extracurricular activities. He led two Outdoor Action trips, trained as a Wilderness First Responder, taught first aid courses and served as a coordinator for the pre-orientation freshman Outdoor Action trip.

 

He was on the Forbes College Council, where he represented his fellow students at the residential college and organized events such as study breaks and the annual Casino Night. He also wrote the newsletter for Forbes. In another capacity at his residential college, he helped to organize and captain Forbes’ intramural sports teams. One of the sports is broomball, which he describes as "playing hockey on ice in your sneakers, using a plastic stick with a broom-like base to hit the ball into the opposing team's goal."

 

Drawn to Princeton's liberal arts curriculum, Sprankling came to Princeton thinking he would concentrate in either philosophy or English. He later decided on English. Two of his passions were the works of John Milton and contemporary post-modern fiction. He wrote his senior thesis on Dave Eggers’ memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” He says one of the academic highlights of his Princeton years was a class taught by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates.

 

"I traveled all around the country looking at liberal arts colleges," he says. "When I got to Princeton, I thought it had a fantastic campus, and all the people I talked to were impressive."