This particular victim thrust in front of my face his course card, a dampish rectangle of manila cardboard made nearly illegible from having been clutched by a sweaty grip and ravaged by eraser marks.

The freshman's query came out in a single, panicky breath. "I think I should take honors physics but I don't know my schedule might be too tight what do you think?"

I leaned over my desk to peer at the stunning specimen that was this student's course card. Tight, he had said? This kid, who with his backwards baseball cap, baby smooth skin, and chewed fingernails looked more on his way to recess than college, had willingly fashioned for himself a schedule so severe it rivaled that of a rookie at Goldman Sachs.

Not only did he plan to take more courses than the normal four required, he seemed open to the idea of waking up to honors chemistry, skipping breakfast for advanced math, squeezing lunchtime in-between an upper level mechanical engineering seminar, watching the sunset out of a little window of the molecular biology building, and throwing in some post-dinner physics for good measure.

Before I could deliver some sort of speech regarding roses and the benefits of stopping every once and a while to smell them, he blurted out, "I have to take honors physics." And I realized that the look on his face was the curious interplay of stricken and smug that I had seen on other freshmen throughout the day. Taking away honors physics from this kid would be like taking away a security blanket from a baby.

All at once, with the hindsight that could only have come from having kicked freshmanitis nearly three years ago, did I recognize the reason why the Princeton faculty has a common, eerie interest in first-years. The ÒfreshÓ in their title is operative: fresh from being top of their class in high school, they come to Princeton ready to target and tackle challenging courses with the uncommon zeal and conviction that comes from the feeling of academic invincibility.

Soon, after a few classes and a couple of quiz grades, they will come to realize that high school valedictorians, math geniuses, and poetry contest winners are the norm here, not the exception. For those freshmen who, in the first semester, approached their studies like a beefy linebacker approaches a skinny quarterback, this realization often makes them slightly less brazen and a little more artful when it comes to selecting their courses for future terms.

When you are a senior, you have come to grasp your limits; some of us willingly accept that we can only helplessly wallow in Economics like drowning men. I have known some freshman, on the other hand, who scoffed at the notion of introductory courses and held aspirations to triple majorÑthat is, until the moment that they were faced, horrified, with the first B of their life.

It is natural for the faculty to regard the presence of a fearless freshman in his class as a refreshing alternative to that of a jaded senior, and thus, many of our educators jump at the chance to teach these first-year students. For instance, a former professor of mine has chosen, after decades of offering his coveted writing course only to a select group of upperclassmen, to limit his writing course to freshman. It accounts for why so many professors compete for an opportunity to teach fall-term freshmen seminars. And it is perhaps the general notion about the fleeting nature of the freshman condition that explains the warning that lurks within President Shapiro's inspirational statement to the Class of 2001: "I hope that a constant companion will be curiosity; that as many discoveries as you make along the way, you will not lose the desire to learn more."

I think that I speak for most seniors in arguing that, as veterans of the system, a very positive outcome marks our approach to academics. As grades are often a crapshoot in which attaining chat-level with your preceptor is often more advantageous than polished papers or perfect attendance, seniors become drawn to classes that can heighten their interest, not necessarily their GPA.

Most students, especially those seeking liberal arts degrees, have fulfilled their dreary number-crunching requirements after their first two years at Princeton, and everyone from poets to mechanical engineers must present more than perfect grades to earn respect within their departments as upperclassmen.

In this way, seniors have honed course shopping into a refined art. It is as if we are all planning for dinner parties, picking and tsk-tsking our way through the delicacies at a gourmet market. A freshman, on the other hand, does not have the capacity to be a connoisseur. They are rather like a mom of a demanding family, pushing her cart through the long aisles at the Super Giant; their goal is to cover the bases, and there are too many items to buy and brands from which to choose that might allow them to be discriminating.

This brings me to another new freshman worth remembering whom I encountered during registration week. He caught my attention the first day, when I had been handing out course cards, and he seemed obliged to not let anyone forget him; he was sporting a flamboyant fedora and merrily countered my request for his last name with a line borrowed from Polonius in Hamlet . An egregious display, of course, but egregious mostly because he is a freshman and thus not supposed to not know anything yet. I know that first impressions are often unreliable, but I could not have imagined, the next morning, a less likely suspect to step up to PHY 103. You belong penning verse under the shade of oak trees outside the arts and theater building, I wanted to shout, not pondering momentum and messing with pulleys! Yet there he stood, budding thespian and potential student-director, grinning as he waited for the question.

"Honors or regular?"

"Ahh...honors. With an H."

As I have mentioned, there is no restraining the brute force of the freshman ego. Maybe he is one of those bilateral brainiacs, alternating his literary and mathematical gears with the ease of Mario Andretti behind a stick shift. But if he is like most of us, he will look back on this period of his academic career as an exercise in paying the dues. And turn the whole experience of PHY 103 into the opening scene of an award-winning screenplay.

Kelley King worked at Civilization magazine, in Washington, D.C., this summer as an editorial intern.