Feature - June 9, 1999


Seniors Reflect
Looking back on four years at Princeton

There is no one Princeton experience. Many students love their time here, a few hate it, some thrive, and a handful flee early. Every few years, paw finds a group of seniors and asks them to reflect on their Princeton experience -- whatever that means to them. This year, we profiled a group with a remarkable range of activities and interests: students who prove that even in this era of specialization, it's still possible to excel at a number of different activities. In fact, if these seniors are representative of anything, they show that students at Princeton are almost impossible to categorize. So meet six students who we think eloquently describe something unique about this place. By Wes Tooke '98

Club Life and Art

Gretchen Hultman

Late one night during freshman week last fall, Gretchen Hultman, perhaps the last president of DEC, walked into her old eating club. It was the first time she'd been back since she'd learned that its graduate board had sold Dial and Elm to the university. The bottom floor of Elm was bare: the furniture was gone, the doorway to the dining room was boarded over, and the walls were painted white. She was standing in the doorway of the red room -- the big room on the first floor that used to serve as a dance floor -- when a drunk freshman walked up behind her.

"What are you looking at?" he asked.

"This is my club," she said, staring into the room that just four months earlier had often been filled with friends.

"No it's not," he said. "This isn't a club. People just live here."

At that moment, all the anger and sorrow Hultman felt at losing her club, all the disappointment and frustrating helplessness, finally bubbled to the surface. "I wanted to turn around and smack him," she says. "This kid has been on campus three days and he's telling me that DEC -- my club -- isn't a club."

Hultman had joined DEC (the combined former Dial, Elm, and Cannon clubs) as a sophomore. To her, its strengths were obvious. "We were the club that had almost one type of every kind of person on campus," she says. "We covered the full spectrum: football players, engineers, politicians, artists. I thought it was the friendliest place on the street -- it was a place you could always go for a beer. But in a scene where exclusivity is the name of the game, that openness probably hurt us." She was elected president of the club late in the fall of her junior year, and she was planning on making a number of changes to improve it: encourage the kitchen to serve healthier food, clean the physical plant, and throw parties that would attract a variety of underclassmen.

But she never got that chance. Late last spring, the club's graduate board decided to sell the Dial and Elm buildings to the university and suspend operations until it could (hopefully) repurchase the old Cannon Club building. (The university currently owns the Cannon building, using it as the home for the Office of Population Research.) While Hultman understood some of the rationale behind the decision -- DEC was, after all, down to 50 members -- she remains bewildered by the process. "They didn't take the current club members into account at all," she says. "For example, they promised us before room draw that both buildings would remain open for housing. Way after the draw -- even after the public announcement that DEC had been sold -- they sent us a letter telling us that we had no place to live. Fortunately, the officers had told everyone to draw with the university just in case." Throughout the entire process, the graduate board kept the club officers, including Hultman, almost completely uninformed about DEC's future. "I know there was information we shouldn't be privy to," she says. "They had to keep their bargaining power with the university. But they kept us in the dark just to keep us from interfering in their own agenda." Ironically, when the graduate board finally sent out a letter announcing that DEC wouldn't be open this year, Hultman never got it.

This year, with DEC gone -- and her responsibilities as president suddenly vaporized -- Hultman has mostly concentrated on academics. As a molecular biology major, much of her time has been spent in the lab. "It's the best department in this place," she says. "I've loved the education I've gotten here. That's been the best part of Princeton for me." For her thesis, she studied a virus called CMV, which is particularly troublesome for people with weakened immune systems (such as AIDS patients). Next year, she'll be a medical student at Columbia University, a school she chose partially on the basis of her interview. "I had this really interesting neurosurgeon," she explains, "who loves art, goes to his daughter's lacrosse games ... just has a whole life. He told me that Columbia wanted its doctors to be people first. That really gave me hope it's possible -- and made me want to go there."

But Hultman has another reason to be in New York -- her art. She is an accomplished and talented painter, who took three semesters of painting classes while at Princeton, and plans on digging through New York's many art museums and galleries in whatever spare moments she can find over the next few years. Before coming to Princeton, Hultman considered going to art school, but although she discovered different interests in college, her passion for art never waned. "Coming to Princeton was a huge artistic reduction," she says, "but I know I'll be interested in art and paint my whole life. I've been cutting paper since I could use scissors."

So even without her club, DEC's last president has found plenty of ways to occupy her time. Still, she wishes things had been different. "I really miss having that place on the Street where you could just go and get a beer," she says. "I miss having a place where you could sit and hang out and not get those little questioning stares. I miss DEC."

Of faith and laughter

Bob Smiley

Before Bob Smiley came to Princeton, his father, John Smiley '70, sat him down and gave him a piece of advice. "Son," he said, "don't spend your time trying to get straight A's, because on graduation day the person with the highest GPA will stand up, and it will be someone you've never seen before in your life."

On the spectrum of motivational speeches, that one might not rank with St. Crispin's Day from Henry V, but Smiley has used it as a reminder that he should spend his time at Princeton searching for things he finds fun and interesting. When he first got to campus, he wanted to be a politician. "It seemed like a very Princeton thing to do," he says. "But I found out that I wasn't good at it and didn't enjoy it." Smiley also considered writing for The Daily Princetonian, but one day, while he was lying on his bed and reading the Tiger, inspiration struck. "I realized that what I wanted to do was write and make people laugh," he says.

And for the last four years, Smiley has written humorous articles, pulled pranks, and written plays that have kept the campus amused. As cochair of the Tiger, he was one of the people who led the magazine, which was teetering on the verge of oblivion, back to the land of laughter and financial stability. His freshman year, when Smiley first began working at the magazine, the Tiger was burdened with a debt of over $9,000. "The Tiger went through a streak when different people decided they could put out the magazine without getting any advertising," he says. "Thank God our printer doesn't charge any interest." Today, that debt is around $1,000, and it might be gone by the end of the year. "In some ways we're really relaxed," Smiley says of the Tiger staff. "For example, we can be dangerously laid back when it comes to deadlines. But you also need people in power who want to get things done and who can put their foot down."

Smiley has found other outlets on campus for his humor. He was part of the group that wrote Triangle's spring show last season, Love and War. "It was incredible to see something start in my room and end up on the McCarter stage," he says. This year, he managed to convince the English department to let him write a comic play for his thesis -- a parody of Walden. "As great as Thoreau was," Smiley says, "his experience was a little hypocritical. His mom would come out and do his laundry... stuff like that. I figured he was a character who hadn't been made fun of enough." He submitted a rough draft of his thesis in November, and in February the department told him he could direct a dramatic reading in 185 Nassau. "At that point I had to take it from a funny 70-page play into something that actually said something," he says. Smiley felt that the reading went well, although he was disappointed that he couldn't get an outhouse for the stage. "The script called for one," he says, "but it's harder than you think to get an outhouse."

Next year, Smiley wants to write for TV sitcoms. He's currently putting together sample scripts and plans on showing them to an agent sometime in the early summer. "I'd like to start in TV and then just see what happens," he says. "I want to stick with comedy, but I don't know what God has in store for me." God? Does the chairman of the Tiger really believe in God? Smiley, a member of the Agape Christian Fellowship (formerly the Campus Crusade for Christ), doesn't think that there's a tension between his faith and his humor. "The biggest mistake Christians can make on this campus is to be too sheltered and stick to themselves," he says. "It's important for us to get out there and break down people's barriers and misconceptions."

But Smiley's faith does influence his humor. "I think a lot about how it's possible to be both a Christian and be successful in Hollywood," he says. During his time at the Tiger, he's made an effort to make the magazine less profane. "In the last couple years," he says, "we've made a conscious effort not to be just sex and foul language -- to be more all-encompassing." His favorite cover shot, for example, was last year's Houseparties issue, which featured a picture of President Shapiro as a DJ spinning a record with the caption: "Hal's Parties."

In some sense, Smiley believes that every funny piece he writes or prank he helps pull is part of a larger mission. "It's important to keep this place laughing a little bit," he says. "People get so focused on work. They need to step back and laugh at this place and laugh at themselves. That's what we try to do." Aside from the predictable outlets for the lighter sides of overachieving Princetonians -- Triangle, Tiger, and Quipfire -- Smiley thinks that campus humor often surfaces in unusual places. "Some of the best humor on campus is unintentional," he says. "The Prince is often unintentionally funny."

But even after four years on campus, there's one group that Smiley has trouble making laugh. "There are some pretty tough proctors," Smiley says. "We really try, but they can be pretty tough."

Running and dance

Aiyanna Burton

The way Aiyanna Burton walks up a flight of stairs betrays her. She doesn't step, she glides, every movement possessing a lazy ease that reveals the power in her small frame. She is a transistor of compact grace, an athlete so deftly designed that it's possible to imagine her as a star in any sport played on this planet.

Her sport is track. Burton, the captain of this year's team, has been a star since her freshman year and is a threat to win any event she enters. During her career at Princeton, she has won individual Heptagonal titles in the long jump and 400-meter hurdles, placed second in the pentathlon, and was on the 4x100 team that set the Princeton record in 1998. "She's one of the best athletes we've ever had here," says head track coach Peter Farrell. "She has an incredible spring in her legs. At the same time, she's also been a tremendous captain -- she shows the rest of the team how to compete."

Despite her successes, two frustrating bouts with illness and injury have bookended Burton's time on campus. During her freshman year, while in the middle of a remarkable indoor season, she contracted mononucleosis and was forced to miss both indoor Heps and ECACs. This year, she pulled her hamstring at the beginning of the outdoor season. "I feel like I came in and left on an injury," she says. The battle this spring with her hamstring, which has curtailed her training, has been especially frustrating, as she wanted to finish her career by winning two Heps titles -- in the 400-meter hurdles and long jump. Instead, she took two seconds. "Aiyanna hasn't even come close to tapping her full potential," says assistant coach Angie Taylor. "I hope she has a chance to go to NCAAs -- she worked really hard to rehab her injury and deserves a chance to show what she can do." (Burton competed in the ECACs, a qualifying meet for NCAAs, on May 21-23.)

For Burton, who has many friends on the team, track has been an enjoyable, if ubiquitous, part of her Princeton experience. "Track made my time here a lot of fun," she says. But, she adds, "It also prevented me from doing a lot of other things." For most athletes, collegiate track is a two-season sport -- the indoor meets begin in mid-December and the final outdoor meet is in late May -- and the in-season training is both exhausting and time-consuming. Fortunately, Burton says, "the coaches are really great about understanding our academic commitments."

For Burton, those commitments are extensive. She arrived on campus knowing that she wanted to become a doctor, and therefore chose to major in molecular biology. "I had a really hard junior year," she says. "The labs and precepts took up so much time. It was rough." She joined Stevenson Hall instead of an eating club -- partially because she was rarely free around dinner time and needed to get late meals in the Student Center. Her coaches have been amazed at the way she has been able to handle her challenging academic schedule while still competing at a high level. "She's been amazing at balancing academics and athletics," Taylor says. "She's just so focused that she can handle it really well."

The last three years during the fall, when she could have been resting for the track season, Burton instead fulfilled another one of her passions: dance. She's been part of the Black Arts Company, a student-run group that performs several popular shows throughout the year. "I didn't dance freshman year, because I didn't want to do too much," Burton says. "But one of my closest friends was in the group, and I thought I might have some extra time in the fall." Although the company performs a wide variety of dance forms, including tap, ballet, and modern, Burton mostly danced in hip-hop pieces.

Next fall, Burton will fulfill her freshman-year dream and go to medical school at either the University of Pennsylvania or one of the New Jersey state schools. Although she's not certain, she thinks that she might eventually want to become an ob-gyn. She has, however, made up her mind about her future in track. "When I get older," she says, "I think I'll try to race in the Master's. But I'm going to take a break. After eight years I'm ready to be without track for a little while."

A poet's perspective

Richard Johnston

By the end of his interview for a Marshall scholarship, Richard Johnston was exhausted. Along with a barrage of questions that had tested the limits of his education, the committee had asked him to do a sight translation of Latin and recite various opening lines from famous works of poetry. Near the conclusion of what had been a very long day, someone asked him what poem he would suggest the members of the committee go home and read.

"I drew a total blank," Johnston says. "I finally said 'The Sheep Child,' by James Dickey. It's an amazing poem about men and sheep being able to produce progeny. Very funny. But as soon as I said it, this guy on the committee from Alabama starts laughing. He asks me to explain what the poem is about. I start talking and this woman across from me -- her eyes go bonkers. I'm blushing bright red, the vice-consul is staring at me ... And then the guy from Alabama leans across the table and says, 'Don't worry, Richard. You're from South Carolina. I'm from Alabama. I understand.'"

Although Johnston went home that evening convinced that he'd blown the biggest interview of his life, when the Marshall committee announced the winners in January, his name was on the list. He will spend the next two years at the University of Sussex, England, earning a master's degree in 20th-century literature and a master's in education. The pragmatic attraction of Sussex, he says, is that "it's a really good place for the more cutting-edge subjects." But, being a poet, Johnston has another, more idiosyncratic reason for choosing that university. "I kind of liked the idea of being near a beach," he says.

When Johnston arrived at Princeton as a freshman, he planned on writing a play. After taking several poetry workshops, however, he eventually became an English major and later wrote his thesis -- a series of narrative poems titled Cottonmouth -- in the creative-writing program. Johnston's adviser was Yusef Komunyakaa, the 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winner in poetry. "He was very demanding," Johnston says. "The kind of adviser you'd want to have towards the end. But it was a remarkable experience."

Outside the creative-writing program, Johnston tried a wide variety of English classes, and found himself especially fond of the Romantic poets, admiring, in particular, their "narrative quality." But Johnston's education in the humanities hasn't been confined to McCosh Hall -- he spent eight weeks in Rome one summer studying Latin. "Our teacher was a monk from Milwaukee who was the Pope's Latin secretary," Johnston says. "We'd get together at night under the trees in this old monastery and read Latin while passing around a jug of really bad wine."

For Johnston, the opportunities he's gotten to see the world while at Princeton have made him change the way he sees his own hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina. "When I got here," he says, "I didn't like South Carolina very much -- I thought it was regressive and conservative. Funny how it's taken my being here to appreciate and love where I came from." Many of the poems in Johnston's thesis are set in South Carolina, and he explains that his home state gave him much of his material. "Now I realize how rich that place was in all its idiosyncrasies and, yes, prejudices," he says. "It has all these growing pains. It was small-town southern when I was growing up, lots of shut-down yarn mills. Now there's a BMW factory and it's getting -- at least a little -- cosmopolitan."

Although Johnston is certain that he'll keep writing poetry, he's not sure he wants to fight through the trials of becoming published. "I enjoy the idea of having my poems read," he says, "but the whole industry side of writing really turns me off." When he returns from England, he plans on teaching creative writing to high school students -- he doesn't have a preference between public and private schools, and this summer he'll be teaching a creative-writing class at a program in western Massachusetts. Some day, Johnston thinks he would like to be a professor.

While he has a few months before he gets to England, the process of applying for a Marshall has already taught Johnston one important lesson: "I made a little note to myself when I left the interview. I said, 'Richard, at the Rhodes interview, don't mention bestiality.' But maybe that's why the Marshall people remembered me."

Speech Therapy
By Richard Johnston '99

From the start, I butchered
words, my tongue, so marred
I was afraid to speak

and didn't much.
In the therapist's office,
I gouged out chunks

of chair stuffing, spat back
the syllables as she said,
baring my teeth to match.

Sometimes she flashed glossy
cards for each sound
my mouth couldn't. One by one

came sickles, spurs, and soap,
the rings of a circus -- I always stuck
on that one, lost a blue marble,

and when I faltered over
and over, she made me say tears
until it was a prophesy.

Drill days, I came straight home
to lock myself in the basement
with a glass of warm milk,

my mother's old Roget's.
By the washing machine I pored over
words I could say.

The lessons of campus politics

Grace Maa

An ancient adage of politics is that the smaller the stakes, the nastier the fight. As a student majoring in political economy, Grace Maa might have read about that theory in the abstract last fall; now she knows it through bitter experience.

Until this January, Maa was the president of a class administration known mostly for throwing the best and most original study breaks on campus: a murder mystery dinner, a "Rock 'n' Bowl" party, a trip to the I-Max theater in New York, a Grease movie night at the Garden Theater. "Our job as officers is to promote unity and bonding," Maa says. "We try to get as many people as possible to meet one another because that's what ultimately makes your time at Princeton great."

Maa's career in campus politics began during her freshman spring, when she was immobilized by a sprained ankle. As a way to occupy herself, she decided to run for vice-president of her class. She won, and the next year her class elected her president -- the first of her two terms. As her responsibilities increased, she gained a reputation among campus administrators as a capable and energetic leader. This year, for example, while serving as the chair of the Honor Committee, she helped revamp the process of educating the incoming freshman class on the Honor Code. Maa also made an effort to get to know as many members of her class as possible -- she estimates that she knows 80 percent of seniors by name -- and she described her job as being "a lot of fun."

But an article last January in The Daily Princetonian changed the way Maa will remember her time as a class officer. The article revealed that the committee responsible for picking the design for the class jacket had disregarded the results of an online vote and instead had picked the jacket that had finished third. A minor issue? Not at Princeton. When Maa learned about the article -- just as the issue went to press -- she sent her class a 1,500-word e-mail that both explained the decision and announced a revote. Ten days later, the Prince published a vitriolic letter by four seniors which called the decision-making process "pathetic" and Maa's e-mail both "nauseating" and "disgustingly" disrespectful. (The March 24 PAW included an On the Campus column by Dan Grech '99 comparing Maa to President Clinton.)

"For the first couple of days [after the letter] I didn't leave my bed," Maa says. "As a woman you're brought up caring about what people think of you -- and I suddenly had this feeling that people hated me." The criticism hit Maa, who is extremely proud of her work as a class officer, in a particularly vulnerable spot. "You run for class office because you care," she says. "People say you shouldn't take [their attacks] personally. But that's just a wall they hide behind -- it's always personal. When they attack something I do, they're attacking me."

Amid the controversy, Maa remembers one moment that reminded her why she had became a class officer in the first place: "On Alumni Day, a man named Mr. Fox '54 -- his father was in the Class of 1899 -- came up to me. He gave me his father's class jacket and told me he wanted me to keep it through graduation. At that moment... it was overwhelming. I have a firm faith in God, and I think He puts these things in your path for a reason. Mr. Fox didn't know me, all he knew was that I was the class president, yet he gave me this thing that was incredibly valuable to him. It was a reminder that the ties of Princeton can overcome vast differences in gender, race, and age."

Despite moment like those, however, Maa says, "I can't really tell you if I'd do it again." She credits her fellow class officers with helping her get through the worst few weeks. "I'm so proud of them -- the four other women who took this responsibility," she says. "They've been so strong." Perhaps her fellow seniors noticed the strains they'd put on all their officers: an unusually small number of candidates ran for class office this spring. Maa was not among them. "Even my friends at Princeton usually introduce me as 'Grace Maa, our class president.'" she says. "I'm looking forward to being just Grace Maa again. I want my life back."

The perfect choice

Chris Kilburn-Peterson

In the spring of 1998, Chris Kilburn-Peterson faced the kind of choice that Princeton ought to put on the front page of every piece of admissions literature it sends to prospective students. As a member of the men's basketball team, then ranked seventh in the country and enjoying a dream season, Kilburn-Peterson had an opportunity to go to the NCAA tournament -- one of those experiences you can tell your grandchildren about in 50 years. But Kilburn-Peterson, a mechanical engineer, was also part of a six-person group in a design class that had built a super-quiet vacuum cleaner, and his group had been selected to travel to Hong Kong and Thailand to meet with various business leaders to discuss their design. The trip was scheduled for the same weekend as the tournament.

Seldom are people forced to choose so clearly between different aspects of their life. Scholar or athlete? Grandkids or Grand Tour? At most other top-ranked basketball schools, the choice would not have been in Kilburn-Peterson's hands; coaches are understandably reluctant to lose players -- even bench players -- for the biggest games of the year. So how did Princeton coach Bill Carmody react? "I went up to Coach three or four weeks before the tournament," Kilburn-Peterson recalls, "and explained the situation. He was really supportive. He told me that I was picking between two opportunities of a lifetime and that I should do what was best for me."

Eventually, Kilburn-Peterson decided to travel to Asia with his class. "I felt a responsibility to the team," he says, "but I knew that for my long-term academic goals that [going to Asia] would be best." During the first game, he was trapped without even a radio in a plane 32,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean. "I had a stewardess run me back scores from the pilot," he says. "I just had to know." Looking back, he is still positive that he made the right decision. "The trip was unbelievable," he says. "We got great feedback, and I learned that when you have an idea and build something ... that's only 10 percent of the process. It was an incredible experience."

Kilburn-Peterson came to Princeton knowing that he wanted to be an engineer, but he was unsure what type. It took only one visit to the engineering quadrangle for him to make up his mind. "I took the tour and it seemed like mechanical engineering had the biggest and coolest toys," he says. His first year he was remarkably busy: he took the usual load of first-year engineering classes, rushed a fraternity, and played JV basketball -- he watched Princeton's 1996 NCAA upset of UCLA from campus and says he was the first to "freak out." But his packed schedule eventually caught up with him. "It got ugly real fast," he says. "I ended up getting mono. It was a discouraging and humbling experience. Eventually I pulled things together, but I learned not to load myself up too much."

His sophomore year, notoriously the hardest year in the mechanical engineering department, was also difficult. "I didn't make varsity basketball," he says, "which was frustrating. But it worked out for the best -- I was so busy with work." That spring he took four departmental classes, finishing his requirements. His junior fall, therefore, he was able to try a variety of design classes. Kilburn-Peterson tested a number of designs, including an engine, but he found the vacuum-cleaner project the most rewarding. To lessen the noise that comes from the fan on a traditional vacuum cleaner, he and his group decided to try to change the way a vacuum works by replacing the fan with a positive-displacement pump. Along the way to producing a functional model, Kilburn-Peterson developed an unusual attitude toward testing. "It's cool to see things work," he says, "but it's also cool to watch them fail -- sometimes catastrophically."

Kilburn-Peterson made the varsity basketball team his junior and senior years, and he still seems dazed by the team's spectacular success last season. This year, the team had seven freshmen, and Kilburn-Peterson suddenly found himself in the role of mentor. "We try to help the younger guys with school, help them pick a major," he says. "It's great to see the next generation of Princeton basketball." As for balancing perhaps the most difficult major at Princeton with one of the most time-consuming sports, he is predictably dismissive: "Athletics have been part of my life since the seventh grade. Come 4:30, I just have way too much energy to sit around and try to study."

Last fall, Kilburn-Peterson also did a one-semester independent project -- he built a robotic arm to solve a control problem -- which left him with some free time this spring. "I wanted to be able to hang out with my friends when they finished their thesis," he says. He also found himself with some extra time to participate in another one of his interests: Bible studies. "I've tried to be in one every semester," he says. "We get together and read five or six passages." This summer, Kilburn-Peterson plans on taking a two-month trip to Asia with a group of friends -- including a journey on the Trans-Siberian railway to eastern Europe. When he gets back, he'll be working in the commercial rocketry division of Lockheed-Martin. The decision to take that job was easy. "I was looking for more cool toys," he says. "And what toys are cooler than rockets?"


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