Preparing emotionally

The most important part of choosing to go to Princeton is to make sure in advance that you can stomach the preppies. If you go there under the illusion that the Ivy League is wholly a group of people pursuing truth, wisdom and justice rather than pursuing money, power and sex but better at it than the rest of us, or that the United States is an egalitarian democracy rather than a country run largely by and for elites, Princeton’s preppies will swiftly disabuse you of those fantasies. The consequences can include cognitive dissonance, loss of motivation, bad grades, wasted years and lastingly circumscribed career prospects. Transferring to Ohio State offers no solution; it will not restore your innocence, which, once lost, is lost forever. To avoid all that, you need only discard all ideology well before applying. However, ideology, like virginity, is not lost merely by declaring intent to lose it.

To prepare emotionally for Princeton is not a pleasant process. Ideologies are not quickly or painlessly discarded. Losing them requires practice in confronting and accepting reality and suffering cognitive dissonance. Accepting unpleasant aspects of reality to which one has been blinded by ideology takes time, and ceasing to hate those aspects of reality takes even more time.

Consequently, you might do well to begin the process of preparing emotionally for Princeton in your sophomore year. You may need more than a year to work through it and recover from it. Or you may be unable to complete it within a year and need time to make another choice of college.

A useful first step might be to read, preferably no later than the winter of your sophomore year in high school, The Official Preppy Handbook (New York: Workman Press, 1980), an hilariously informative classic. Its editor, Lisa Birnbach, a Jewish woman from Manhattan’s upper east side, became adept at using humor to cope with her experience of being a stranger in the strange land of WASP prepdom, first as one of the first co-eds at the Riverdale Country School in the North Bronx, then at Barnard and finally at Brown, from which she took a B.A. in 1980. Much has changed since 1980, including the ethnic composition of the elites that send their children to U.S. prep schools. However, much has not changed, and if you cannot share Birnbach’s amusement at the preppies of the 1970s, then you may find it hard to stomach the preps of today.

Next, you might read the articles on Princeton in diverse editions of The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, written and often re-written since 1970 by the student editors of The Yale Daily News, which tries to describe the emotional experience of attending each of the colleges that it covers. It does that well. However, its articles about the same school vary from edition to edition in ways that seem to reflect subjective differences among the individual article-writers more than objective changes in the school, so it’s worthwhile to read several editions. Google Books offers online previews of the 2015 edition, here, and of the 2004 edition, here; both previews include at least parts of the article on Princeton.

The Insider’s Guide’s articles on Princeton convey both that its undergraduates feel divisively stratified by wealth and that it is a party school for rich and wanna-be rich kids.

From the 2015 edition, pp. 487 and 490: “One student said, ‘Most people would probably agree with the following description: Princeton is a great place to be from, but not particularly great to be at.’ … While students agree that Princeton has moved away from its stereotyped image as an elitist school for stuck-up, old-money prep-school kids, the school still has strong roots and values in traditions, as the eating clubs suggest. … Students warn that the old-school tradition of Princeton may also attract a certain type of student, namely those from ‘old money.’ While most students are generally pleasant, students warn that those who have not been thoroughly exposed to the East Coast prep-school culture may be in for an initial shock. One student who came from a city public school said he was surprised by the ‘jock-ish’ and ‘elitist’ atmosphere at Princeton. ‘There are a lot more affluent and wealthy kids here – some really do flaunt it and most don’t hide it. I don’t have a problem with rich people … it’s just that they sometimes come across as being obnoxious in the way they act.’” Another student pointed out that some poorer but brainier students respond to such wealth-based snobbery with intellect-based snobbery: “‘Of course, there are many rich and snobby people who dress very preppy-ish, but other people are just jerks when it comes to schoolwork, being unhelpful and arrogant. Unless you’re lucky, you really have to look around for nice and helpful students.’”

From the 2004 edition, pp. 537-40: “Every year crazy Princetonians are known to swallow live goldfish, serenade upperclassmen with love songs, and streak through the campus. But unlike at other schools, these wild acts are not performed in the name of school spirit, nor are they for fraternity pledging – students are trying their hardest to make their way into the elite of the elite, the crème de la crème, the eating clubs of Princeton University [see http://princetoneatingclubs.org]. … In spite of exclusivity, the bicker clubs have enjoyed increased popularity in recent years … making it close to 80 percent who enter the process each year. … Each club has a distinct identity. … Students tend to become identified by their eating club. Although one freshman maintained, ‘The snobbiness is pretty bad,’ another noted that the exclusivity ‘isn’t always a negative,’ because it enhances the eating club experience ‘for those lucky enough to reap its benefits.’ … [The eating clubs are] housed in former mansions equipped with dining rooms with long banquet tables, and spacious areas for social events. … The more ritzy clubs, such as Ivy, even have waiters. Prospect Avenue, dubbed ‘The Street,’ is the site of all 11 clubs and the heart of Princeton’s social life. … Weekends at Princeton begin Thursday night at The Street with parties at the eating clubs. … One freshman observed, ‘The Street itself feels like a nightclub.’ … Another student pointed out, ‘There’s pretty much nothing outside of The Street.’ … Fridays at Princeton are noticeably tamer and referred to as culture nights. On these evenings students head for the a capella concerts, improv shows or theatrical productions. … Saturdays are much like Thursdays, and students head to The Street until the wee hours of the morning. The weekend of ‘house parties,’ a three-day-long extravaganza hosted by the various eating clubs, is unanimously cited as the biggest event of the year. One student explained, ‘It’s like a three-day-long prom,’ involving a semi-formal, a formal, and a day of lawn parties.”

In preparing for one's encounter with prepdom at Princeton, the university's website is of limited help. It seems to lack any overall site map. In some cases, it seems that one must already know that some aspect of Princeton exists in order to find it online. For example, absent personal experience of Princeton's long tradition of enthusiasm for fox hunting and other leisure equestrian arts, one might fail to find Firestone Library's 1,000-volume collection of books on fox hunting in England and America, described here. Similarly, one might fail to think of doing a Google site search of the Princeton Alumni Weekly section of the university website for “fox hunting,” which yields 56 mentions of it, chiefly as a favorite pastime of some alumnus remembered in the PAW’s “memorials” (obituaries), online only for years since 1989. From the athletics page of the university's website, here, one might fail to notice that Princeton has an equestrian team and a polo club (websites here and here). One might fail to appreciate that the University will pay for the pleb who aspires to ride horses in show jumping to take an hour's riding lesson each week at one of the nearby equestrian arts facilities (see websites here and here).

A more helpful next step in discarding ideology, perhaps best done during spring and summer breaks of your sophomore year of high school, might be to order some prep wear from Vineyard Vines and Brooks Brothers or Lilly Pulitzer and to visit some of the places that matter most to Princeton’s preppies. These places do not include Princeton. They are the places where preppies live, where they “summer,” where they winter (less often used as a verb), and where they “prepare” (as in, “Where did you prepare?”).

You almost certainly cannot afford to visit the places where the preps winter, which are never to be called “the Caribbean,” the name of the sea surrounding them, but always “the islands.” Preppies love the islands more than they love Princeton partly because people like you can’t get into them. All you need to know about them is not to talk about them. You thereby avoid both profaning the inner sanctum of prepdom and committing such plebian gaucheries as calling St. Barthélemy by its full name, rather than by its preppy nickname, “Saint Barts.”

You might also find it difficult to visit any of the places where preps prepare whilst they are preparing; prep schools tend not to have open campuses and not to welcome casual visitors. There is also limited value in visiting a prep school when it is not in session and still less value in visiting one during the summer. During summers, top-drawer prep schools educate chiefly guest students from lesser schools, like you; no preppy worthy of his topsiders willingly summers at school rather than in the Hamptons, on the Vineyard, or in Europe.

However, you can visit the places where the preppies live, such as Wellesley and Weston in Massachusetts; Greenwich and Darien on the “gold coast” of Fairfield Country, Connecticut; Scarsdale, New York; Short Hills, New Jersey; and Bryn Mawr and Haverford on Philadelphia’s “Main Line.” Of course, you can’t enter their country clubs, cricket clubs and yacht clubs. But you can walk through their residential neighborhoods and linger at cafés in their town centers, observing their interactions and eavesdropping on their conversations. The concentrated wealth of these towns, although tastefully displayed, is staggering. The best time to visit a couple of them is your spring break; during your Christmas and summer breaks, the preps tend to winter or summer elsewhere.

During the summer of your sophomore year, spend as much time as you can afford in Southampton, on “the island” (Long Island, not to be confused with “the islands”). “The Hamptons” – Easthampton, Bridgehampton, Southampton and Westhampton – are not peas in a pod. All four towns are more ostentatious than “the Vineyard” (Martha’s Vineyard) or Nantucket, which feel almost Puritan by comparison. However, Southampton outdoes the rest. Manhattan’s corporate management and financial elites summer there, striving to outdo one another in conspicuous consumption, of which Southampton offers North America’s grandest display. Summertime Southampton is America’s Versailles, the palpitating heart of prepdom.

You might be able to get a summer job in Southampton, especially if you start looking for one well in advance. In New York, kids 14 or older can legally work full-time during the summer; summer jobs in the Hamptons are advertised nationwide online; and Donald’s restriction of B-2 visas has bereft local businesses of the foreigners they have hired in the past to clean the pools, trim the hedges, mow the lawns, deliver the food and care for the children and pets of thousands of multi-millionaires and dozens of billionaires. You won’t make any money unless you find a place to sleep and shower as cheaply as do the B-2 visa foreigners, but there is no better preparation for Princeton than a summer spent serving preppies in Southampton. It will teach you your place in the great scheme of things, and enable you to meet and talk with the minority of Southampton’s summer population who live there year-round and survive by catering to the rich during the summers. Few plebs know the preps so well as they; you can learn a lot from them about how to handle your betters. If you can visit Southampton only briefly during the summer, consider going back there during the autumn, winter or spring, when it’s empty and affordable and the locals have lots of free time to talk.

Southampton town center at Christmas, preppie-free and affordable