Since graduating from Princeton last year I have moved from Princeton to Berlin to Melbourne, where I am currently based as part of my Sachs Global Scholarship year. The aim of my scholarship project has been to extend the research I began with my independent work in the English Department: examining the sociopolitical impact of black…

My career since Princeton has been a bit non-traditional, but that was true of my studies as an English major as well. Of course, I read Milton, Shakespeare, and the rest of the canon like any other English student, but my interests skewed towards literary theory and film. My senior thesis, about how filmmaker David Lynch deploys the discourse…

I knew going into Princeton that I wanted to be a lawyer. And since middle school, I knew I wanted to work with vulnerable children, either through custody and divorce cases, or through foster care system reform. Despite having a clear vision of my post-college endeavors, I did not have such a clear vision of my Princeton academics. I did not…

Last February I ran across Princeton’s campus to McCarter Theater to share with one of my professors that I had just been accepted to Yale School of Drama for acting. As I ran, I tried to memorize what I was feeling—a mix of shock, excitement, fear, relief—so that if I ever found myself playing a character in a similar situation, I would be…

If you had asked me during my college days what it meant to be an Operations Supervisor at an industrial supply company, I would’ve stared blankly at you. At Princeton it seemed that the only fields available to us after graduation were medicine, finance, academia, law, the arts if you were very good, or non-profit service. I assumed that as…

In some ways, I haven’t strayed far from English. After college, I was a Teaching Fellow in English at Phillips Academy Andover; now, I’m a PhD candidate in American literature at Stanford, and I hope to eventually become a professor of English. That path began when I took Contemporary Fiction with Professor Benjamin Widiss (and a fearless…

I never expected to major in English when I got to college, and I certainly didn’t expect what came after college either. My senior year I was awarded a Marshall Scholarship for two years of study in London, but I really had no sense of what I wanted to do next. 

Part of my senior thesis had tinkered with thoughts about race, dance, and…

The contents of my bones include myelopoietic cells, lymphocytes, and a deep passion for medicine. Knowing medicine would fill my post-graduate years, I chose to focus on my love of literature and arts during my time at Princeton. I relished office hours with faculty as we chewed over Gourevitch’s methods to depict tragedy or Thoreau’s embrace…

Since I exited through FitzGerald Gate three years ago, I have been pursuing my law degree at Stanford Law School. As my graduation swiftly approaches, I am grateful for this opportunity to reflect on my pathway so far and how my Princeton English degree has influenced it.

At Stanford, my background in English has served me well. The…

While at Princeton I majored in English with certificates in Theater and Gender & Sexuality Studies (GSS). I hoped to structure a program and an experience for myself in which I could learn, develop, and practice skills for directing and choreographing theater and performance art. My joint English and GSS thesis was a queer theory…

One year ago around this time, I spent the hours around midnight on a little motorboat with my colleagues off the shores of Manhattan. Every so often, a string of light threaded across the Manhattan Bridge, the train shuttling back and forth on its nightly commute. I had grown up in the city, yet never seen it from this angle—at a distance…

In their article featured in Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story, Roger Schank and Robert Abelson claim that “knowledge... is experiences and stories, and intelligence is the apt use of experience and of the creation and telling of stories” (16). I can think of no better quotation to summarize both my experience as an English major…

Although I didn’t know it at the time, my experience in the Princeton English Department served as excellent preparation for an academic career in architectural history and theory. Architectural studies is a broad field, one that requires familiarity with a variety of disciplines and methodologies. In the very first class that I took as a…