my Princeton days

I had never bought a stuffed toy in my life. The practical woman my mother was, she taught us that you only buy things you absolutely need or that serve some sort of useful function.

Stuffed toys fell into neither of those categories, so as a family, we just never wasted money on stuffed toys.

Yet, here I was at Target, standing across from the shelf of over-sized animal-shaped pillows, strangely drawn to a bright pink flat cushion with a pig face.

The trip to Target was part of the international orientation schedule, during which we were supposed to buy any back-to-school, dorm essentials.

But, my parents had driven me to Princeton with boxes packed with my clothes, enough toothpaste to last my four years and any other gadget I might possibly need in my college career.

So, really, I had aimlessly wandered the Target aisles until I arrived at the home-essentials section, where I chanced upon Mr. Pig.

There was something rebellious about it – this was my first week apart from my parents, and I could buy a useless stuffed pig pillow because no one was stopping me.

Was it something I needed? No.

Would it take up unnecessary space in my dorm? Probably.

And maybe it was for all those reasons that I swiped my swanky new PNC card on Mr. Pig, dropping $18 on a pillow as a newly minted Princeton college freshman.

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The light-hearted buoyed excitement of moving into my Harry Potter-esque dorm complete with an abandoned fireplace, getting Mr. Pig set up in his corner on the wooden panelled floor, and attending school spirit rallies where we fumbled through the locomotive cheer soon spiralled into a yawning hole of long class hours and problem sets that were due every other day.

I paid attention as best I knew how to the Math and Physics lectures, although my attention was more focused on transcribing what the professor had scribbled on the blackboard before they would turn, “Ok, can I erase this now?”

The problem sets (p-sets) were the worst, because they required skills many levels beyond where I was at on Bloom’s Taxonomy.

When I had only begun to absorb what eigenvalues were, now we had to use them in a matrix to solve a differential equation.

After struggling on the p-set myself (and by struggling, I mean staring at the question), I would find myself at the McGraw Centre Study Hall at 8p.m., just starting on the physics problem set that would be due the next day.

Me, the high school nerd who was voted Young Einstein in the yearbook and always took a few more AP classes than the recommended number, was now at a tutoring centre, begging the upper-year supervisors to just please tell me what the right answer was instead of ask me more obtuse questions that confused me more.

“OK, so the answer should be C then?” I pressed.

“Well, let’s see. Going back to first principles…do you have a piece of scrap paper?”

I knew I wasn’t getting out so easy. No, this tutor was going to draw abstract diagrams and elaborate derivations, while I watched the precious minutes I had left before the p-set deadline tick by.

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It’s been quite a few years since I left Princeton’s hallowed halls (I now do admission interviews, and what a relief it is to be on the other side :P), but there are certain scenes that remain permanently engraved in my memory.

I remember how Frist was before finals, the study rooms that clubs (or in my case, my Christian fellowship) would book out for “group study”.

The oppressive quiet of collective stress when you walk into one, the empty juice boxes and crumpled chip bags of snacks bought from late meal littering the tables.

I always tried to be healthy and get a big salad instead – boiled eggs, cashews, sundried tomatoes with honey-mustard dressing – to tide me through the night.

I’ll be out before midnight, I’d tell myself (we all know how that ends).

I remember the lonely lunches before any exam, when I would climb into a semi-circle booth at the Butler dining hall so no one could disturb me. The bright blue and orange plates inappropriately cavalier towards the impending exam I was in no way prepared for.

I’d pull out my stack of notes (back in the day, when y’know everything was still printed out and our notes were handwritten), and read (or rather skip-scan) through the pages, hoping something would stick.

I never knew whether those last minute cram sessions served any function, other than making me feel assured that I was “doing something” before the exam hit.

I remember the oddly-shaped side tables in McCosh, the ones that folded down beside your seat, too tiny to hold the exam paper and your calculator at the same time.

Five minutes before the exam started and we were all spaced apart, with our abnormally sized paper hanging over the edges of the table, our calculators balancing precariously on one end.

To this day, I still have no clue why they printed our exams on the large paper, perhaps to give us more space to write long derivations or draw abstract diagrams when we didn’t know what the answer was.

We would turn around and wish ‘good luck’ to those sitting in the row behind us, although secretly you’d wish they didn’t do that well, because it was all about that curve.

If you got a 65% but everyone else did worse than that, well then your 65% would count as an A.

I remember the feeling of walking out of my last final. I may have left several pages completely blank, save a little diagram I had memorized from the notes on how force related to magnetic field, but I had finished the exam.

And hey there’s always the curve.

The world always seemed a bit brighter when I exited the exam hall (did the sun JUST come out?).

I’d go back to my dorm with a little skip in my step and do a load of laundry, because let’s face it, I had been basically living in my sweatpants for the past week.

Then, I’d sit on Mr. Pig and just stop for a while, his presence a welcoming relief.

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Honestly speaking, the Princeton culture made it hard to breathe in many ways, a sentiment expressed in this Medium article I recently read, “Why getting into Princeton ruined my life.”

There was this undercurrent of “not being good enough” or always having to do more to “make it in”.

It manifested itself in the eating club system, where you had to be cool enough with a wide enough social network to make it into clubs like Cap and Gown, or intelligent/eloquent enough for Tower.

It showed up over casual conversation in the dining hall as you were asked about your summer plans and people name-dropped the likes of “McKinsey” or “Bain” to a collective “ooh” of unspoken respect.

We were all rushing to get somewhere, although I think the vast majority of us didn’t really know where that was.

Somewhere significant, that was for sure.

Five years out and it doesn’t matter where you fell on the curve or what salary you landed immediately out of Princeton.

It seems like we’re now looking for meaningful relationships or the secret to living meaningful lives.

And although I may have relegated Mr. Pig to a corner of my room that I frequented only when I needed to rest from the hurry of it all, ironically I think he held the secret often pushed to the sidelines in pursuit of other bigger things.

That round flat cushion of pink was the sanctuary of rest I retreated to, the cushion I knelt on in times of prayer, the place I sat cross-legged in the early morning with an open Bible and a couple of colored markers.

“Do you want to sit on Mr. Pig?” I asked my friends when they came over for a visit.

Soon, I had a tissue box permanently installed beside Mr Pig as he became the place tears were shed, goodbyes were said but also many happy memories were made.

When Nahrie visited my room for our morning prayer sessions in junior year, we relocated Mr. Pig out to the laundry room so we could play the guitar and sing without disturbing my still-sleeping roommates.

Over senior year, I spent many nights sitting despondently on Mr. Pig as I contemplated the state of my thesis and then many nights after my thesis submission what I would do if my visa to China didn’t come through on time.

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But as it goes, graduation came and went, and I survived.

Mr. Pig did too.

And while my binders full of my copious organic chemistry notes lie in some unknown location probably collecting dust, Mr. Pig occupies a prominent place beside my current bedroom window.

He reminds me of the things I treasure about my Princeton days. Of the day to day, the mundane, the late night chats.

But he also reminds me of certain important life lessons:

(1) things don’t always have to be useful to have purpose;

(2) there’s not much a good cry on Mr. Pig can’t solve;

and (3) no matter how busy you are, there is always enough time to sit on a flat pink pig cushion.