The first lessons at Princeton aren't academics

Classes started. I'm taking 5 classes: Math, Spanish, Macro Econ, Computer Science, and Time Travel Writing Seminar. They are great - lots of work, but also lots of new things to learn. Done academics update, and this post from the title is obviously not about academics. Lectures with eminent professors are great, yet there are bigger lessons I've learned here at Princeton.

1.
I came to Princeton unemployed. By economics definition, being "unemployed" requires three conditions: (1) be able to work, (2) doesn't have a job and (3) actively looking for jobs. I was not working before, but I was not looking for jobs either, so I have never been unemployed in my life and this is the first time. I have two big reasons to work, and I was so determined to get a job before I came to Princeton. Yet when I came, no job was available.

Then I understood, being unemployed is by itself an emotional thing, like any other feeling: sadness, happiness, anger or jealousy. It's the mixture of eagerness, disappointment, worry,... altogether, so complicated that unless you are unemployed you won't ever understand. I went around asking for jobs, called different people, sent email to many departments asking for open positions. My consistence pays off: this week I've got hired for two jobs: circulation desk assistant at Princeton Humanities Resource Center and Office Assistant at Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS).


Having a job doesn't only mean getting money; it also means learning how to spend that money. Never had I thought so carefully before deciding to buy something from a store, considering whether I truly need it or not. Not that I were a lavish consumer; I just became even more thoughtful for the very penny I earned. Before, buying an 11-dollar object would just mean spending 11 dollars out of my parents' or financial aid's money. Now, it means spending an hour of work. Everything is no longer monetary figure, for it is converted into time and effort now.

That's my first lesson.


2.
I promised not to talk about academics, but here I will bring up the subject again. I'm taking five subjects, and in combination with two jobs and 1 community service in the fall semester of freshman year, it appears to be way too much. No, it IS in fact way too much.  My parents have expressed concern, and even I myself am concerned. But currently I just have to sleep a bit later than midnight, try to arrange my time in the most efficient manner, and wake up a bit earlier than 9a.m. (college students tend to wake up very late, some people won't have class until 11am or 1pm). I just have to extremely focus when I study, cut off the time I waste on facebook or stop the habit of procrastinating. I just have to sacrifice a little bit here and there of the unnecessary pleasure, and things go under control. I still have time to do things I like: I can still take guitar lessons, hang out with my friends, watch movies with them on weekends, or just hang a bit on the dining table to have a conversation about whatever on the news. Life was hard, or at least I thought it was, and when I push myself a bit to be more efficient, life doesn't seem unmanageable anymore.

Pushing myself a bit, that's the second lesson I've learned.


3.
Princeton is full of talents, obviously; but there are many opportunities as well. I wanted to join a singing group at Princeton, either the University Choir (Glee Club), Chapel Choir or any of the ~10 a cappella  and theater groups (Especially Triangle had been my dream since Princeton Preview Weekend). It was, certainly, very competitive, but I was confident that there would be a place for me somewhere in that pool of opportunities. But, yeah, life is unpredictable, a chance event, a dice rolling game that any face of the dice, no matter how cruel, can turn out.

Truth is, last week was the week that I got the most rejection letters ever in my life; it alone is double than the total number of rejection letters I previously received in my whole life combined. Sunday I received two, Monday I received three, Tuesday two, Wednesday two, etc. The number of rejection letters I received in a day last week can be described as a linear function of the number of auditions I underwent: f(N) = N. This, I could never imagine, even though I had prepared myself for this worst situation.

I felt bad. I thought I was good enough. I didn't know why I didn't get in. Or, can it be that they hate me as a person? Can it be that they have already favored someone else? That was how I felt on Sunday and Monday.  I was really an ignorant idiot trying to explain whatever happened to him so suddenly. It was not until two days after when I overheard someone's practice, and someone else's audition that I felt so happy. Literally SO HAPPY. They were so good, and their voices were god-like. That was such a soft, easy-going yet confident sound. No wonder I was outweighed. At that point, I no longer felt bad, for I had totally understood why I deservedly was pushed out of the game. In fact, I felt so good that here there are so many talented people who would (1) make Princeton even better and better, make it deserve being the place I chose and (2) motivate and challenge me to better. Not that I like competition, but I chose this competitive environment because I wanted to be better anyways. So, this is perfect.

At Princeton, I learned to accept and move on.

I have to write one separate post for my best Princeton experience.

Outdoor Action 2011 was rather an unusual one. (Note: Outdoor Action is a wilderness program at Princeton University, which brings a groups of 10 students and 3 leaders each to the woods for a week). There was continuous thunderstorm and rain for three days straight in the Pennsylvania and Virginia region, resulting in the evacuation of all OA groups. As people joke around the fact, OA 2011 is the first time ever in the long history of OA that our wilderness explorers ended up staying in the hotels and eating pizzas for dinner. It seemed - to an outsider - as if the purpose of the trip, i.e. bring the groups together through the difficult time in the woods, had been ruined. Some people even laughed hard at the fact that our OA lasted for 3 days, instead of a week, and in their laughter they wondered "Poor guys didn't get anything out of the ruined trip".

We, the insiders, understand the matter better: Before we got evacuated to the hotel, we stayed for more than 2 days in the non-stop rain. Even now when typing this note, I still can visualize the raining days, the unclear vision due to dripping water onto our disrupted eyes; I can feel again the wet clothes sticking to the body and the water running from head to toe; I can remember clearly the disappointment when we had no way to light up a fire  for all the woods collected were drenched in water, or the self-asked question "How are we to sleep tonight with our sleeping bags wet?". Since we hadn't brought that much clothes to the wild, in order to make sure we had dry clothes to sleep with every night, we had no choice but to put on our wet clothes again during the day-hike. It means, there's a pair of wet clothes that you had to constantly put on every morning, even though it felt like the grossest thing ever. Never before have I missed home, pitied myself and wanted dry clothes so much.

LADIES OF THE TRIP
A few minutes before the thunderstorm commenced a week of raining and a potential flood.

Yet, there's always light in the darkest moments. If it hadn't been for the severe weather, we wouldn't have got so close as a group. Our group - LH98 - started off our trip as complete strangers playing awkward games; yet, after only three days we felt like we had been best friends for long. One night, we - 13 people - had to sleep altogether in a shelter that had a maximum capacity of 5 people. None of us could lay down our tiring bodies entirely, and each of us had to sleep in a weird position. Alvina - a dancer - felt comfortable in her yoga style: slept sitting and laid her head on her toes; Alomi slept sitting the whole night; Evan slept between Julia's legs (this sounds very inappropriate); some leaned against the wall; and I and David just slept one on top of another. That night I couldn't imagine how I would get through the long night, but eventually everyone passed down due to exhaustion and woke up the morning after finding each other in a weird position. It was in no way a comfortable experience - but it was fun though. What's worse that night, there were only 4-5 dry sleeping bags for 13 people, and the night was really cold. We ended up sharing the sleeping bags, using them as blankets to cover more people at a time. I could only get the "blanket" to hide my toes, considering my wool top kept me comparably warmer than others.

This is the first night when we can actually lie down.

Then there was that one afternoon we were waiting for the support van in the windy cold. The wind just made everything worse: it penetrated into our clothes, made the cold colder, made what's wet wetter. I no longer remembered how long we waited, maybe almost 2 hours. Those 2 hours may have been the worst part of OA - and the most desperate moment for me - and it may have been the best part of OA at the same time. There are several things people can do when they are extremely desperate in the cold: they can huddle and kick a nut around the circle (pretending to be playing soccer while not being able to run around), they can play pokemon (just act silly), can play human Tic-tac-toe, or do the simplest game: throw rocks at the tree. That said, it should be clear how cold and desperate we were; but at the end of the day, it turned and transformed into the best moments one could have in life.

Okay, this can go on and on if I can't control myself. There are tons of other things that made OA the best thing that could ever happen, and hopefully even though they are not written here in this blog, I won't forget them.

I think I'm just bad at concluding things. Let's just leave it the post unconcluded.

Wake Up Inside Forbes

My first night sleeping at Princeton lasted for an hour (for clarification from the title, Forbes is my residential college, aka dormitory). One old Vietnamese belief states that when you first sleep at an unfamiliar place, you can't really sleep because you are not used to the bed. This is true for my case now, but I can't complain about the comfy bed. When I woke up at 4 in the morning, tried to close my eyes and found out that I had to leave the bed while everyone else was still enjoying their pillows, I knew jet-lag was still controlling my brain and, what's worse, it would put me into a coma during the day when I would be supposedly joining the orientation activities. Well, I have no better choice than to make use of the time then.

I decided to write a blog post.

Truth be told, this post has been a procrastination. Back to my last days in Vietnam, I wanted to write a post telling how much I loved my friends there and how I realized I was so unwilling to leave my parents and the little kitties (my siblings), yet when I would rather use that time enjoying the last moments, I didn't put myself to write anything. When I finally had time, even ample time, to write something when being stuck at the San Francisco airport, I was already too tired to type anything good.

My little HP corner in San Francisco Int'l Airport

In fact, Princeton is making me miss UWC. It is such a different world. There are so many more people (about 6,000 compared to 251 at UWC-USA [200 students + 50 faculty + 1 post office workman]) that you have the excuse to just not look at the eyes and pass by someone, pretending not recognizing their existence. I still have the UWC habit so when I came to campus this morning, I said hi to the people I met on the way to my dorm. Guess what, they said hi back, while looking like "Hey, do I know this strange guy?". They don't say hi to someone they've never met, and I knew that when I finally realized I was no longer at UWC, when you just approached a new person in orientation and started your favorite sentence: "Hi, I'm [dot dot dot] from [dot dot dot]". Well, I was a bit uncertain and shaky about my choice to enroll Princeton a very tiny bit this morning because one of the big factor of my decision was the friendly environment that really resembled UWC, and it just didn't turn out to be like that anymore. Luckily, when I and Jane passed by Whitman residential college (residential college is Princeton's term for dormitory) in the evening, we saw a group of 20 students making a circle on the grass with three people playing guitars and ukulele while the rest sang. That was just so UWC! (especially Ghost Ranch and random picnics on the field in summer). Princeton had proven itself to be not a bad choice at all.  I really didn't choose wrong hehe.

I told my father last year that I wanted to become a Princeton Student. And now, I am an official tiger.

I got reminded by a close friend that I shouldn't make getting into Princeton a big deal. I agreed with him by then, since I really believed the college admissions process, despite however objective, was partially random. Many good people aced it, and a small portion of equally good people just didn't have that luck for several reasons. That said, I am proud of myself for the effort I spent rather than for the fact of being accepted by Princeton, since I may (or may not) have made it this far merely by luck. However, above all that talk about college admission, getting into Princeton is really a big deal however. It's important in the sense that now I have access to the world-class education, the great academic environment surrounded by wonderful people, and the unlimited source of opportunities; now it's up to me to make that advantage really useful. I was a bit afraid this summer about whether I would have enough capability to make this chance a blast or I would just let it bypass; yet, as I find it challenging, I am eager to do it.

Recently people asked me what I wanted to study in college, and my principal answer which I didn't tell anyone is that I will study anything that would make me as useful as possible for this society, with Vietnam being the priority. That said, I used to dream to become a computer scientist, made cool stuffs and earned lots of money. I could make software that would help people, making their lives more convenient. However, one day I realized that without software we could still survive, even at a lower living standard from the one we currently have. That's not to deny the importance of Internet or Windows and Google or whatever, and as a computer person, I can claim to understand that better than many people. However, as of now, I want to have a more direct impact. I want to become an economist who will either contribute to control the rather unstable macro-economy so that it will have less effect on the lives of people, especially the poor and workers, or contribute to make economic development a real concept, eradicate the poverty with little trade-off on environment and social equality. This may sound too serious, or even like a cliché essay in the college application but I really mean it, and I want to do it.

Okay, it's long enough. I hope this post can be a reminder to myself about what I want to do and why I want to do, as well as how enthusiastic I am when I put my first steps in college. Now the sun is up, and it's time to move out.

P.S: This post ends with a bonus picture of me and my brother 8 years ago: