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Four residential college advisers (RCAs) huddle outside an oak door in a dormitory hallway. A slip of paper posted beside the door gives hazy details of a freshman student’s concerns with his roommate. “Who’s going in?” someone asks. Alyssa Mancini ’13 nods and the others step back as she knocks on the door. “Come in!” a voice calls from inside. Taking a deep breath, Mancini turns the knob and enters.

 

The scene inside is improvised, cut, and critiqued. It is early September before the Class of 2015 has arrived, and Mancini, a new RCA in Forbes College, is training to become an upperclass mentor to freshmen and sophomores.

 

While RCA training consists of a wide collection of presentations and discussions, RCAs overwhelmingly agree that the three days of role-playing sessions, collectively known as the “Behind Closed Doors” program, most realistically prepare them to serve as leaders, friends, and resources to their fellow students. Associate dean of undergraduate students Cole Crittenden *05 insists the program “is far and away the most important thing we do with RCAs.”

 

For a typical session, a group of about four new RCAs take turns acting as an RCA while senior RCAs step into the roles of freshmen with common first-year problems. Once the door opens, the situation is “real” and its handling is later analyzed by the non-acting RCAs and visitors from various campus resource offices. The scenarios are designed to prepare RCAs for what they are most likely to encounter and range thematically and in their level of urgency— from residence hall and health concerns to more complex identity issues.

 

For Mancini, the sessions were invaluable for putting knowledge of campus resources to use while learning from experienced RCAs what really works in the field. The silences throughout an exchange were important, she explained. “They gave everyone time to think and calm down in a tough situation.”

 

Photos by Gavin Schlissel ’13

 

If you’ve been to a Princeton home football game you’ve probably heard them. They provide the shouts that punctuate the moments between plays. Or maybe you’ve even seen them: Their neon body paint reflects the fluorescent stadium light, framing the front rows of the student section with a dim orange halo.

 

They are a band of cheerleaders – but they aren’t the band, and they aren’t the cheerleaders. They call themselves RAWR, and they are an unofficial student group dedicated to spreading school spirit – especially at sporting events.

 

The group formed last year when Bianca Reo ’12 and Adeline Brown ’13 started an informal email list advertising body paint and “rabble rousing” on football game days. The club was a hit, attracting a core group of about 20 students who meet at Frist Campus Center to paint each other and plan chants for the game.

 

The advice of White House speechwriter Adam Frankel ’03 was very simple. “Follow your passion,” he said at a dinner discussion on campus Sept. 23. “But it’s better to be lucky than good.”

 

Frankel, a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama, joined other speakers to discuss their careers with 19 interested students at “Perspectives on Speechwriting and Communications,” an event hosted by the American Whig-Cliosophic Society and the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students.

 

Part of a series titled “The Road Less Traveled: Exploring the Creative Professions,” the dinner talk featured three alumni: Frankel; Thayer C. Scott ’93, previously chief speechwriter for former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and founder of Executive and Policy Communications; and Nancy Mensch Turrett ’81, the global president for health at Edelman, a leading independent public relations firm.

 

Other speakers included Graham Buck, a speechwriter for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and John Weeren, President Tilghman’s speechwriter and assistant.

 

Attendees applied for an invitation by answering the question, “Why does a career in speechwriting interest you?” Nearly all of the students chosen were editors and writers for campus publications or members of the University Press Club.

 

Nearly 40 years after graduating from Princeton, Chief Economist of the World Bank’s Africa Region Shanta Devarajan ’75 still remembers one particular message from his freshman orientation.

 

“‘Do something with your Princeton education that will benefit people less fortunate than you.’… Some of the things I’ve learned over the last 10 years relate back to this message,” he told incoming freshmen at the Reflections on Service keynote address held in McCosh 50 Sept. 13. The event was aimed at inspiring new Princetonians to participate in civic-engagement activities on campus and to be proactive in taking on their own projects.

 

Devarajan described a week he spent in a village in Gujerat, India, working alongside women who live on about $1 a day, as well as his leadership of the World Bank’s World Development Report. While working on these projects, Devarajan began questioning why regions such as Africa and South Asia were still mired in poverty despite numerous government programs aimed at reversing the crisis.

 

“Programs intended to help poor people are being captured by politicians,” he said. “The problem is that poor people don’t perceive that it’s a problem of politicians – they assume it’s a problem of just life being terrible.”

 

When Rachael Alexandroff ’12 found out that her Sunday flight back to Princeton was cancelled in anticipation of Hurricane Irene, she tried to rebook it – six times. Alexandroff, a volunteer leader of Princeton’s international student pre-orientation program, finally gave up, boarding a bus that got her into Princeton on Tuesday night, just in time to help check in incoming freshmen.

 

With half of the pre-orientation volunteers held up due to hurricane-related travel disruptions, Alexandroff said that “everyone has had to step up and work a bit harder and longer.”

 

In the wake of the hurricane, the University was closed on Aug. 28 and 29 to all but essential staff, and implemented a delayed opening on Aug. 30 due to power outages and road closures. Hurricane updates were posted periodically on the University homepage.

 

At least eight trees fell along campus roadways, according to University spokesman Martin A. Mbugua, but all windows and roofs remained intact. The worst flooding hit the Boathouse, which took on four feet of water as Lake Carnegie spilled over its banks. The University facilities staff was on call throughout the storm.

 

The University announced Aug. 23 that it will ban freshmen from participating in fraternities and sororities and upperclassmen from recruiting freshmen beginning in the fall of 2012. The delay in implementing the ban, President Tilghman said in a letter to returning students, was to allow time for a committee of students, faculty, and staff to recommend how the ban should be enforced and penalties for violations.

 

A working group appointed by Tilghman examined the Greek organizations as part of a broader look at campus social and residential life. Among the group’s recommendations in a May report were a ban on freshman affiliation with fraternities and sororities, with penalties “severe enough to encourage widespread compliance which probably means a minimum penalty of suspension.”

 

Robert K. Durkee ’69, the University vice president and secretary who was a co-chair of the working group, told PAW on Aug. 23 that while the new student/faculty/staff committee would be charged with taking a fresh look at the issue, “what we want to come out is a set of policies and procedures that maximize the likelihood that this policy will be effective.”

 

Tilghman also said that the University would continue its policy of not recognizing the Greek organizations, though students will not be prohibited from joining fraternities and sororities after freshman year.

 

She said she recognized that her decision “will be disappointing to some who have advocated an expanded role for Greek life at Princeton,” and said she respected those views. The University estimated that the four sororities and about a dozen fraternities on campus attract about 15 percent of undergraduates.

 

For more details on the University’s announcement on Greek organizations, see the Sept. 14 issue of PAW.

A few years ago, playwright Marvin Cheiten *71 noticed that Princeton’s Hamilton Murray Theater was empty from late August to early September, between the end of the Princeton Summer Theater season and the start of Theater Intime’s fall calendar. Cheiten and director Dan Berkowitz ’70, who had staged works at Hamilton Murray, inquired about the vacancy. “We know the theater, we like the theater,” Cheiten recalls saying. “Could we perhaps use it, and use as many Princeton students as we can?”

 

Theater Intime and the University were amenable, and in the span of seven years, Cheiten and the California-based Berkowitz have become August regulars, staging a half-dozen original works with a rotating cast of local performers and Princeton undergraduates.

 

This year’s production, the historical tragedy Zenobia, opens its six-show run Aug. 19. The play debuted on campus in the summer of 2005, and Cheiten said he has made the script “sharper” with a series of recent changes. It tells the story of Queen Zenobia, the third-century leader of Palmyra (now part of Syria), who used her political and military clout to take on the Roman empire. Carolyn Vasko ’13, a veteran of Lewis Center productions and Triangle Club shows, plays the title role.

 

Zenobia marks a change of pace for Cheiten, whose most recent plays have been comic mysteries built around a teen detective and her father. In the ill-fated queen, he expects audiences to find a sympathetic protagonist. As she loses her power, she becomes a better person. “It’s a tragedy,” Cheiten said, “but yet, I don’t think people will leave frowning.”

 

 

 

By 2 a.m. our fingers became listless from a day of typing lab reports and scribbling flash cards. We’d get up and walk slowly the hundred paces from the library to the coffee machine, and chat or complain about the course. “Their expectations are just unreasonable,” I whined. “There is just way too much time pressure.”

 

Those complaints turned out to be fleeting. When I think back on summer school now, I don’t think about the late nights or the early mornings or the three-hour midterm or the 14-page lab reports. Now when people ask me what Bermuda was like, the only words that come to mind are from my good friend and roommate Chris Luminais ’13: “It’s definitely the most fun I’ve ever had while being bludgeoned repeatedly with a textbook.”

 

This summer I was one of 15 students in Princeton’s Marine Biology Summer Seminar, a four-week course taught 782 miles southeast of Nassau Hall at the Bermuda Institute for Ocean Sciences (BIOS). The course is the brainchild of Professor Jim Gould, who brought along his wife, Carol (Dr. Carol, to us), as a self-described “de facto mother” for the group. Neither seems capable of discussing aquatic ecosystems without referencing Finding Nemo, if only to make a delightfully dry ironic comparison. In Bermuda, the two taught alongside Dr. Samantha de Putron (Dr. Sam) who was a coral reef biologist on the faculty at BIOS, as well as an undergraduate teaching assistant who put in even longer hours than we did.

 

As the business manager of Princeton Summer Theater in 2008, Kelvin Dinkins ’09 learned about theater management and customer service at the Hamilton Murray Theater box office. As an actor in the PST production Urinetown shortly after his graduation, he took a final bow on the Princeton stage. And this summer, Dinkins has returned to campus as PST’s artistic director, leading the summer stock company through four main-stage shows before heading to New York to start an MFA program in theater management and production at Columbia University.

 

Dinkins, a president of the Princeton Triangle Club during his undergraduate years, said that the 43-year-old summer program has helped generations of students explore careers in theater, on stage and off.

 

“It’s really an experience that you won’t get going to work [as an intern] for a producing office or a casting office in New York,” he said. “It’s a unique experience for collaboration between artists, from many different backgrounds ... and you feel that ownership of your own season.”

 

In the 2010-11 academic year, the athletics department launched a student contest called “Tiger Universe,” in which undergraduates checked in at Princeton varsity games to earn points and prizes. At year’s end, freshman Jay Hashop from Dallas, Texas, topped the rankings after watching the Tigers about 50 times – mostly in football, basketball, baseball, and lacrosse.

 

Hashop, who plans to major in math, sings in the Chapel Choir and plays club water polo, so his schedule is not exactly loaded with free time. But when he has a chance to watch a game, he goes, even if it means “late Sunday nights working on problem sets due Monday morning.”

 

While Hashop still has a long way to go before he reaches the high bar set by Tiger alumni – for example, Walter “Holly” Hollenbach, Class of 1903, attended every home football game for more than 70 consecutive seasons – he’s off to a good start.

 

Below, get Hashop’s take on the highs and lows of Tiger fandom this year.

 

Through the generous gift of an alumnus, 10 Princeton students traveled to the beaches of Normandy this spring to experience the history of D-Day firsthand.

 

The group, which consisted of nine students in Professor Philip Nord’s class on the history of modern France and one ROTC cadet, spent seven days visiting military and other historical sights in Normandy and Paris with Lt. Col. John Stark and Master Sgt. Tom Jones of Princeton’s ROTC program.

 

Stark, the director of Army officer education and commissioning at Princeton and a lecturer in the history department, had led similar trips to Normandy while a professor at West Point and wanted to bring the experience to Princeton students.

 

He approached history department chair William Jordan last year about the creating the trip, and Jordan matched Stark with a history and ROTC alumnus who agreed to fund the trip. “Part of my goal was to give someone the chance to learn about one of these key turning points in history,” Stark said. He also hoped to enhance the connection between the ROTC program and the University.