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The story John C. Bogle ’51 often tells of his senior-thesis journey is something to which nearly every Princeton senior, past and present, can relate. It started in Firestone Library and ended before graduation in a 133-page document.

 

Holed up in then-newly built Firestone Library, Bogle paged through a December 1949 copy of Fortune magazine looking for inspiration. An article on page 116 caught his eye. It was titled “Big Money in Boston,” and it discussed the “tiny but contentious” mutual-fund industry. Bogle realized he had found his thesis topic as he read about an industry that appeared “totally untouched by academics and the press” at the time.

 

Bogle’s thesis, titled “The Economic Role of the Investment Company,” outlined a strategy to make investing in mutual funds more accessible to individual investors with lower costs made possible through indexing rather than actively managing funds.

 

The idea eventually led to Bogle’s founding of the Vanguard Group in 1974, an investment-management company that took advantage of low-cost indexing. Vanguard now manages approximately $1.6 trillion dollars in assets, according to a February 2011 estimate.

 

At a Jan. 31 gathering that celebrated Bogle’s influence on the financial world, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker ’49 said, “[Bogle] is still living off an undergraduate thesis he wrote at Princeton. He got the thing reprinted! And it sells 50 years later!”

 

Bogle replied, “Never underestimate the power of luck.”

 

A week after protests and walkouts at on-campus J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs recruiting events, students reflected on their experiences and where they hope the Occupy Princeton movement will go next.

 

“The on-campus reaction was exactly as I expected — it’s going to be controversial,” said Evan Warner ’12, a student involved in the Dec. 7 and 8 protests. “What surprised me a little bit was the amount of coverage it’s gotten elsewhere, including The New York Times.”

 

About 20 students targeted sessions held by J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs last week as part of Occupy Princeton, founded this fall in response to the Occupy Wall Street campaign. The students, dressed in business attire, carried resumés and networked with recruiters who approached them. After directing pointed questions at the recruiters during the sessions’ question-and-answer periods, the demonstrators used the Occupy movement’s “mic check” call-and-response method to air their grievances.

 

Photos by Emily Trost ’13

 

After the onslaught of midterms, most Princeton students headed home or into hibernation for the weeklong break that began after classes ended Oct. 28. While my classmates recovered, I stood in a Swiss quarry clumsily balancing a hardhat on my head, gazing up at massive walls of chalky yellow and white rock.

 

With me stood nine students from my paleontology course, a recent alumnus, a geosciences lecturer, a geosciences professor, a Swiss professor of geology, and his graduate student. Our Swiss guide asked us to examine the massive rock for clues about what sort of environment we would have been standing in over 130 million years ago. Putting our noses close to these chalky surfaces, we could see that these rocks told a surprising story. If we had been here 130 million years ago, we would have been walking on the seafloor.

 

We were looking at the remnants of ancient carbonate platforms, the products of today’s coral reefs that serve as indicators of changing ocean and global climate conditions over time. Our studies of mass extinctions in Professor Gerta Keller’s 300-level course, “Evolution and Catastrophes,” required an understanding of the many global processes that contribute to these severe environmental changes. But to really understand those processes, Keller makes it a necessity that her class travel each year. “The classroom is one thing,” she said. “It’s theoretical. You are shown pictures, given concepts, and explained things — but it’s not real.” Standing on an ancient seafloor in Switzerland, however, is.

 

Four Princeton undergrads traveled to Palo Alto, Calif., last weekend to compete at Facebook’s campus in a national hackathon programming competition. They ended the weekend with top honors for their program “Color Me Bold,” and a head start on a potential future business dispensing algorithmic fashion advice to end users over the Internet.

 

The platform, created by Daniel Chyan ’14, Angela Dai ’13, Tiantian Zha ’13 and Amy Zhou ’13, would allow users to take a photograph of an outfit and upload it a website that then recommends modifications to the outfit based on complementary color schemes.

 

If the idea seems fanciful or trivial, consider the technical obstacles the group overcame: The program first reads the photograph, then normalizes for the lighting, identifies colors and articles of clothing or accessories like ties or jewelry, generates advice based on color coordination algorithms, and finally displays the recommendation in a visually appealing format. And the team designed and built the program in a period of 24 hours.

One week into December 2010, the Princeton men’s basketball team was on its first winning streak, having recovered from a rocky neutral-site stretch with three consecutive victories. One week into December 2011, the Tigers are on their first winning streak after losing two of three games in a similar neutral-site tournament. Tiger fans know how last year ended, so things can’t be too bad for this year’s team, right?

 

Well, last season’s Ivy League lacked a nationally ranked team in Cambridge, for one thing. But beyond Harvard’s rise, the beginning of the season has exposed some flaws in the 2011-12 Tigers. Their record through eight games is 3-5, the inverse of last year’s mark (though they have scored 10 more points than they have allowed on the year). And gone is a 16-game home winning streak: Princeton has fallen at Jadwin Gymnasium twice in four games.

 

Though wins are certainly better than losses, Princeton’s current two-game streak says as much about the caliber of its opponents (Division-II West Alabama and Lafayette) as it does about its own play, and losses within the previous fortnight to Elon and Morehead State were not confidence-inspiring. With a seven-game road trip on the horizon – and 12 straight road games against Division-I opponents, a stretch that will last into the middle of February – let’s look at some of the factors in Princeton’s slow start and identify what the Tigers can do to contend for a high position in the Ivy League.

 

 

Everyone expected that, with the graduation of Kareem Maddox ’11 and Dan Mavraides ’11, second-team All-Ivy forward Ian Hummer ’13 would be the focal point of Princeton’s offense. But Hummer’s workload so far has been extreme. The 6-foot-7 junior has attempted more than 10 field goals in all but one game while ranking second on the team with 21 assists.

 

At times, the Tigers have done little more on offense than put the ball in Hummer’s hands, and the stats bear that out. Hummer’s usage rate (a statistic that uses shots, assists, and turnovers to determine what percentage of a team’s plays someone is involved in when he is on the floor) is currently 33 percent; only 13 regulars nationwide have a higher usage, and no other Ivy League player is as high as 28 percent. (Hummer led Princeton regulars in usage last year, but at 26 percent, his rate was in line with the numbers of Maddox and Mavraides.)

 

Seventeen young men and women dressed in button-down shirts and business attire quietly took their seats at a long, narrow table in a conference room just down the street from the white dome of the U.S. Capitol. They opened their binders and began sorting bills and resolutions they planned to discuss for the next few hours. A gavel banged on the table.

 

“The chair will now look favorably on a motion to open the docket.”  

 

A young woman in a white blouse waved her name placard. “Motion to open the docket,” she offered.

 

“Is there a second? All in favor?” asked the chairwoman.

 

Seventeen placards shot up into the air. Gavel in hand, Molly Nacey ’13 smiled at the group from the head of the table. “The chair will now entertain ‘The No-Fly List Notification Act,’” she said. “Please take a few minutes to read it over.”

 

The room quieted to the sounds of rustling papers and pen scratches as 17 high school students from across the country prepared to debate the proposed legislation with Nacey moderating the discussion.

 

For Nacey, it was her first time chairing a committee at the Princeton Model Congress (PMC) conference, a three-day, student-run program held in Washington, D.C.  Designed to be educational, fun, and transformative for high school students, the conference, now in its 30th year, invites students to step into the shoes of U.S. congressmen and women, Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, members of the press, and others involved with the political process.

  

It is official–the students of Whitman College have spoken, and they have chosen to be known forevermore as the “Whitman Whales.”

 

The University’s newest residential college is now the only one with its own mascot. Though Whitman College Council Arts Chair Jackson Dobies ’14 first introduced the idea of a mascot specifically for use in intramural sports, the vote between mascot choices evolved into more than a decision over what graphic to put on a jersey.

 

Rather, the election between the Whales, Wolves, and Knights engendered spirited debate about college pride and community – and drew a stunning 405 participants, a majority of the students affiliated with Whitman.

 

Puns played a prominent role in the debate. The “Whitman wail” is a communal cry of despair that occurs at midnight before every Dean’s Date, and members of the college refer to themselves as “Whitmanites,” adding humor to the idea of “Whitman Knights.” Alliteration was another consideration, with Knights the clear loser in that contest.

 

 

More than 80 budding Web entrepreneurs, including Princeton undergrads as well as students from nearby universities and professional developers, participated in the University’s first Startup Weekend Nov. 11-13.

 

The open competition challenged teams to start a Web-based company and pitch it to industry leaders. In addition to $1,500 and a head start on a new business venture, the Newsance.net team that won first place earned the attention of Internet developers, including investors and Web entrepreneurs who spent the weekend mentoring the teams and judging their final presentations.

 

According to Momchil Tomov ’14, one of the event’s student organizers, the program aimed to “help people overcome the initial barrier of realizing an idea.” Startup Weekend gave students a deadline, which often seems to be the most effective motivator for goal-oriented Princetonians. It encourages people to set aside time for an elective project, and possibly start a business in the process. “This event lets people dip their toe in the amazing world of startups in a creative environment,” Tomov explained.

 

Newsance.net team included Princeton students, a University of Pennsylvania undergrad, and one professional developer. Their startup is a news website that tries to “let you engage actively with your community in exploring the events around you” by adopting a kind of wiki-news open-source format that would let readers contribute to and edit live stories.

 

Emily VanderLinden ’13 showed up at “The People’s Kitchen” in Zuccotti Park on Oct. 16 intent on helping out with the community effort, which was set up to provide food for participants in the Occupy Wall Street protests. But VanderLinden came away with more than just a dishwashing experience: She also found herself pleasantly surprised by the spectrum of people she met in the kitchen who were involved with the movement.

 

“I got engaged with people in a really unique way,” she said, describing conversations with both the homeless and the affluent in the communal kitchen. “A little piece of everyone can support this movement, to be honest.”

 

VanderLinden is one of several Princeton students who have been making their way to New York City on recent weekends to check out Occupy Wall Street, a series of demonstrations in the financial district that started on Sept. 17, 2011. Demonstrators are largely protesting corporate greed, social and economic inequality, and corporate influence over the government – and several students from the University are joining in, whether as supporters or curious observers.

 

Lily Yu ’12 believes that poets and physicists aren’t that different. “They’re both looking to describe the world as clearly and honestly as they can,” she explained. Yu, an English major pursuing a certificate in biophysics, knows this firsthand. Her writing has been published in Clarkesworld Magazine and The Kenyon Review Online and chosen for the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 6. She says her work is the sort of “stuff that gives people headaches trying to classify.”

Her play, Glass, Darkly, won last year’s Princeton Science Playwriting Competition, and it is something different than her usual work, she says. Glass, Darkly seeks to bring the life of physicist Chien-Shiung Wu out of the shadows. Once a Princeton instructor in the 1940s, Wu was a Chinese-American physicist often called the First Lady of Physics and the Chinese Madame Curie. In addition to her contributions to the field of nuclear physics, Wu participated in the Manhattan Project, and her work laid the foundations for others to receive the Nobel Prize. Still, Yu says, history has seemed to forget Professor Wu.

Yu was drawn to writing about Wu’s life because she had known virtually nothing about Wu and felt something needed to be done. “I wanted to make something beautiful out of material that was interesting to me,” she said, laughing as she noted that her desire to write about Wu might have been a selfish one. “She was a Chinese-American physicist; I thought I was going to become a Chinese-American physicist,” Yu said.

In recent years, the finish line of the cross country Heptagonal championships has been dominated by orange and black, as the Princeton men’s and women’s teams have combined to win nine of the last 10 titles. But this year, the entire course will have a Princeton theme – in a departure from tradition, the meet will be held at the Tigers’ own West Windsor Fields on Saturday, Oct. 29.

 

Running for the Ivy League championship at home will be a new experience for both teams. The Heps meet has been held at Van Cortland Park in the Bronx every year since 1981 for the women and 1979 for the men.

 

“We’ve done a lot more work on the course this year than we’ve ever done,” Donn Cabral ’12 said, explaining that not only is it the site of Heps, but the team’s other big races will be run on similar courses. “We’ve been getting used to the different parts of the race and how we’re going to attack each part.”

 

A home-course advantage for the Tigers is the last thing that the rest of the men’s field wants to see. Princeton has won four of the last five championships – losing to Columbia by the smallest possible margin in 2009 but reclaiming the title with a comfortable win last fall – and appears stronger than ever. The Tigers finished fourth in a field that included 21 of the country’s top 30 teams at the Wisconsin adidas Invitational and jumped up to No. 9 in last week’s coaches’ poll, their highest national ranking since 1998.

 

“We have a ton of confidence right now going into Heps, because we know that if everything goes as planned, we have some leeway,” Cabral said.

 

At the head of the Tigers’ pack is Cabral, who finished fourth in Wisconsin and will be trying to defend his title as the individual Ancient Eight champion. As a junior last fall, Cabral – despite feeling under the weather and a little bit “past his peak” in training – beat 2009 champion Dan Chenoweth of Harvard by more than 10 seconds, finishing with the second-fastest time in Heps history at 24:03.8.

 

Being the defending champion is no guarantee of success, as Chenoweth discovered a year ago. But Cabral’s expectations could not be higher for his final Heps meet.

 

“I’m just as confident about my individual chances at Heps as I am about the team’s chances,” he said. “For both of them, I think that we can have just a good day and still win. And having won last year, against a great runner who’s now graduated, is definitely giving me confidence this year.”

 

Purely from history, the women’s team should be even more confident – while the men were defeated two years ago, the women are five for their last five at Heps, winning every meet by more than 20 points. But after losing strong racers such as Sarah Cummings ’11 and Ashley Higginson ’11, the Tigers may have a tougher fight on their hands this year.

 

Counting down the days to winter means different things for different alumni. For those who work in the private sector, year-end bonuses may be on the way. For others, the bonus is time with family over the holidays.

           

Nathan Crumpton ’08 — a backcountry snowboarder, budding Olympic skeleton-racer, and self-trained filmmaker — looks forward to winter, too. But for Crumpton, the bonus is fresh powder on the mountains and fresh ice on the skeleton track.

           

The mountains have been a part of Crumpton’s life since his family moved to Switzerland from Tanzania when he was 5. Although he started on skis, Crumpton transitioned to snowboarding during his high school years, and he learned the mechanics over thousands of hours of rigorous “trail and error,” as he describes it.

           

“Trail and error” is a recurring theme in Alpine Nirvana, a 12-minute compilation of Crumpton’s 2010-11 skiing and snowboarding footage taken around his new home ski area in the Rocky Mountains. (See video below.)