How to Be a Good Mentee

In order to attract and retain strong mentors, it is important to learn how to be a good mentee and to understand how to bring value to your working relationships. Building on my post last week outlining 50 Traits of High Quality Mentors, it is important to acknowledge what it is that incentivizes these high quality mentors to invest countless hours of their precious time in your career development. As much as we may like to think that people want to help us out of the kindness of their hearts, your propensity to keep people invested in you as a human being will significantly increase if you bring a clear set of skills to the table and generate value as a mentee.

Here are ten proactive steps that you can take to become a strong mentee and attract high quality mentors:

1.  Always come prepared. When you have a meeting scheduled with your mentor, prepare an agenda in advance and know what you want to discuss in which order. Be clear on your meeting objective and print out hard copies of all work that you were supposed to prepare.

2. Do high quality work independently before committing to working with a specific mentor. This will help you to position yourself as someone who people actually want to work with. Take responsibility for investing in your own career development and show that you really want whatever it is that you are working towards and are willing to put in the time and effort to make it happen.

3. Take care of yourself.  Have pride in your appearance and stay true to who you are as a human being. Don't morph into someone just because you think it's the person that your mentor expects you to become. Be exactly who you are and don't apologize for it. People will respect you for it.

4. Turn work around quickly when collaborating. When jointly working on a project with your mentor and additional collaborators, don't have people waiting on you. When a paper or project gets thrown your way, do high quality work and get it back in your collaborators' hands as quickly as possible. You don't want to be the person that people are always waiting on.

5. Articulate how you can add value. If a mentor is going to invest countless hours in your career development, they are going to make sure they are getting something in return. Take the time to understand what you can bring to the table. Introduce your mentor to people in your network, stimulate their idea development, and learn how you can help them to simultaneously further their own career through investing in yours. Show your mentor that you are equally invested in him or her as a human being and that you want to help them to be the best person that they can be.

6. Be respectful. Your mentor likely has more experience in your respective field, and you need to acknowledge that. Be humble when collaborating and don't be that person who always insists on being right. 

7. Be open to new experiences and ideas. While you will likely aim to find a mentor with similar interests to your own, it is important to be open to learning as much as you can. Be willing to go outside of your comfort zone and explore methods, ideas, and experiences that force you to stretch yourself. Don't run away from challenges that your mentor throws your way. Attack them with vigor. 

8. Under promise, over perform. Winning the mentor/mentee game is largely about properly setting and exceeding expectations. Always do your best to do a better job than your mentor expects of you in a shorter time frame than you agree to. If you know that you have a lot on your plate in a given week, give yourself some extra buffer time when agreeing when you will get something back to your mentor. Then get the given work back to your mentor earlier than promised, and use the additional few days to go above and beyond their expectations.

9. Always be on time. Showing up to meetings and work events late just makes it look as if you think your time is more valuable than your mentor's. Don't have your mentor waiting on you to begin calls, meetings, or presentations. Show up five to ten minutes in advance and get your mind warmed up ahead of time. Be appreciative of the time that your mentor gives you and make the most of it.

10. Be passionate about what it is that you want to bring to this world. Passion and skill is a toxic combination. People want to work with people who are passionate about whatever it is that they are working towards because it helps them to light their own intellectual fire. Be open to exploring new ways to practically implement your ideas, but don't let anyone keep you from dreaming big and following your passions. Passion and drive is contagious and is one of the most important things that you can bring to the table as a mentee.

50 Traits of High Quality Mentors

When most people think about relationships, they think of spouses, friends, and family members. Yet, the importance of mentoring relationships is often overlooked. Like any relationship, finding the right mentor and building a lasting relationship takes time and mutual investment in the other person. One of the most challenging aspects of finding the right mentor is deciding whom to trust with your energy, time, and ideas. So how do you determine whether a mentor genuinely has your best interests in mind or is going to use your talents to his advantage and run you straight into a brick wall?

Here are 50 traits to look for when trying to build a lasting relationship with a mentor who is genuinely invested in helping you to become your best self.

1. He treats you like an equal and doesn’t create unnecessary distance because of differences in objective status or positions in the organizational hierarchy.

2. He gives you access to his world, friends, ideas, and resources without making you feel like you owe him something in return.

3. He doesn’t make you feel like he owns you. He genuinely wants you to learn as much as you can from whomever you can.

4. He doesn’t make you feel the constant need to prove yourself after earning his initial respect.

5. He takes the time to establish a relationship with you as a human being and learn about aspects of your life that go beyond your mutual working relationship.

6. He challenges you, pushes back on your ideas, and calls you out when you are in the wrong.

7. He makes you feel like the work you are doing is actually important. He doesn’t just give you busy work to get you out of his hair.

8. He consistently gives you honest feedback and doesn’t just tell you what you want to hear.

9. He shares stories with you from his own experiences to save you from making some of your own mistakes.

10. He expresses an interest in establishing a long-term relationship that goes beyond quarterly projects or short-term assignments.

11. He cares about you as a person first and foremost and genuinely wants you to be happy.

12. He gets to the root of your motivation both for the sake of understanding what you’re working towards and helping you to internally reconcile what it is that you really want.

13. He helps you to navigate challenging life situations and makes it clear that he always has your back.

14.  He stands by you on the bad days when you completely botch a presentation in front of a room full of clients while looking like you haven’t showered in a week.

15. He celebrates the person that you are and never makes you feel like you have to apologize for it.

16. He helps you to channel your passions into practicalities.

17. He proactively takes steps to integrate you into his network.

18. He makes sure that you are not wasting your time learning from the wrong people or engaging in useless activities.

19. He sets high expectations of you, but equally holds himself accountable for putting in equal effort to move your joint work forward.

20. He doesn’t push off his responsibilities onto you if they serve no useful purpose in advancing your career.

21. He doesn’t shut down your idea generation too early in the brainstorming process.

22. He is transparent about what his motivations are and how you add value to his life and work.

23.  He respectfully pulls you aside and has a conversation with you when things are bothering him, rather than acting like a passive aggressive child and letting things boil under his skin.

24. He shares aspects of his personal life with you and lets you get to know him as a person.

25. He is a strong communicator and clearly articulates what the best ways to contact him are.

26. He doesn’t make you feel like you are inconveniencing him by taking up his time.

27. He raves about you to other people without feeling like he has to.

28.  He teaches you things outside the scope of what he is responsible for teaching you.

29. He checks in with you frequently to see how you’re feeling about everything and to check in on the status of your mental and physical health.

30.  He goes out of his way to help you with things even when it does not benefit him directly.

31. He takes the time to help you to outline your long-term goals.

32. He holds you accountable for doing good work and checks in frequently to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

33. He genuinely enjoys your company.

34. He doesn’t micromanage you. He clearly articulates the high level objective and then gives you the flexibility to navigate how to get there.

35. He doesn’t make you feel guilty for taking breaks as long as you do high quality work on a consistent basis.

36. He admits when he doesn’t know how to do something rather than teaching you the wrong material.

37. He connects you with other people who can help you to learn skills that go beyond the scope of his skill set.

38. He provides a mix of positive and negative feedback.

39. He gives you the foundation that you need to succeed before blindly throwing you into the deep end.

40. He passes along additional opportunities, resources, and learning material that may be of interest to you.

41. He supports you in your extracurricular activities and hobbies and genuinely wants the best for you as a person.

42. He spends time with you not because he has to but because he wants to.

43. He doesn’t take advantage of your working relationship and gives you the credit that you deserve.

44. He puts in his fair share of effort when you are collaborating on projects rather than making you do all of the work and jumping through hoops for his approval.

45. He takes the time to make sure that you’re always on the same page.

46. He calls you out on your bullshit and encourages you to be transparent about your weaknesses and insecurities.

47. He thinks of you as someone more than just a person he has to supervise. He considers you a close friend.

48. He encourages you to dream big.

49. He respects you.

50. He believes in you.

10 Unconventional Ways to Increase Your Efficiency

Time is our most valuable asset. Every day at midnight, we are given 1440 minutes that are uniquely ours before we rest our heads on our pillows and the clock resets. As we finally allow ourselves to drift off to sleep at night, we are wrestling with half-baked ideas and unfinished tasks that will be waiting for us when we wake up in the morning. No matter how we decide to use those 1440 minutes, it never seems like enough time.

So how can we make the most of it?

Many how-to articles on increasing productivity will tell you to do things like make to-do lists, refrain from frequently checking emails, and minimize your use of social media. Well, duh. These overly prescribed bandage solutions are only suitable to keep you afloat - to keep you in the game, at best. If you really want to maximize your efficiency, you need to gain a deeper understanding of the way in which you navigate the stimuli that engulfs your mind at the subconscious and conscious levels. In order to be exceptional, to experience the timeliness that comes with the ultimate efficiency of achieving flow, you must open your mind to unconventional approaches. You must be willing to change your mindset in order to alter your mind.

These ten approaches to increasing efficiency are far from conventional. Yet, I have found them to be incredibly effective, so experiment with them at your own risk.

Alternate Between Conditioning and Work Tasks.

If you have a stack of papers to grade, briefs to read, or meetings to prepare for, alternate between completing a small task and doing conditioning. Read one ten page paper. Do one hundred calf raises. Read another paper. Do one hundred crunches. Read another paper. Do fifty squats. If you are in a corporate office and are more socially conscious than I am, get up and go to the bathroom or the copy room every hour and do your exercise in there. You can also run up and down the stairs as an exercise in between work tasks in a corporate office setting, or even do subtle core strength exercises while sitting at your desk. As much as you may sometimes want to fall asleep at your desk, this routine will ensure that you don’t.

Mentally Simplify Your Life.

We all have many priorities and many goals - often so many, that it is hard for our minds to keep track of these things. In order to help your mind to better situate new information and to more strategically map out where to spend your time, you need to mentally simplify your life. I suggest mentally creating three buckets: priority 1 (your main priority at the moment), priority 2 (your secondary priority at the moment), and bucket 3 (everything else). It is easier to process new information if we can situate the content into one of our mental buckets in order to assess both the importance of the information and how to relate what we are learning to the rest of our mental real estate. Your main priority should be what you spend the most time working towards. It is what drives you to get up in the morning and keeps your mind churning late into the night. If priority 1 is work related, priority 2 should be representative of your life outside of your primary job. The last bucket should be everything else. It might be helpful to create a pie chart something like the one below, to think through how you might want to create buckets to mentally simplify your own life. I have included the percentage and topic breakdown of my own current mental buckets as an example. You can anticipate that this breakdown would alter at different stages of your life as your priorities are naturally evolving.

Remove the Phrase ‘Most People’ from Your Vocabulary.

Most people function best on at least eight hours of sleep per night. Most people are most effective when they narrow their focus on one task at a time. Newsflash - you are not MOST PEOPLE. No matter what study is being conducted, there are almost always outliers. And more likely than not, you will be an outlier in at least one aspect of your life, which misaligns with the highly publicized logic as to what ‘most people’ should do. Rather than accepting everything you read as a personal truth, go figure out what actually applies to you in your own life and shape your daily actions accordingly. If it turns out that you can function just as well on six hours of sleep per night as you do on eight hours of sleep per night, then by challenging the group norms, you just earned back 14 extra hours of time per week.

Take a Long-Run Approach.

Most people tend to be fairly myopic in nature, consistently focusing on what is directly in front of them, rather than taking a long-run approach to personal and professional development. When you are in the midst of the daily grind, I know how easy it can be to feel like you are drowning in life and barely managing to get through the absolute priorities for tomorrow. There is no possible way that you could do anything more than what needs to be done to meet your short-term deadlines (or so it seems). In order to finally stop feeling like you are constantly trying to catch up with your life, you ironically need to alter your mindset and take a long-run approach. By framing your days with macro-level content and goals, you are both putting yourself in the proper mindset to succeed and better setting up a mental framework in which you will be able to sort the remainder of tasks and stimuli that come your way. By grounding your everyday actions in your long-term goals, you can easily shift your priorities away from the urgently unimportant matters and remind yourself why you are doing certain tasks in the first place. While this approach may make you feel like you are only putting more work on your plate, focusing on obtaining a high-level mastery of the material in your designated topic-area will allow you to work through micro-level tasks at a much more rapid pace.

Ride the Momentum.

When you come out of a meeting with your boss where you discussed a new project you are working on, the information and the content of your discussion is fresh in your mind. The meeting itself has initiated the early stages of a momentum build-up, which can be capitalized upon through spending the next few hours following the meeting taking your ideas to the next level. Rather than riding the momentum in our lives and following-up on tasks after the seeds of momentum are planted, we tend to walk away from the project and we let that momentum build-up go to waste. Instead of riding the momentum that your boss initiated while meeting with you about the project, you decide to continue with the project two days later rather than finishing it the night of the meeting itself. Through pushing against our internal desires to procrastinate and to give ourselves ‘deserved breaks’ following momentum build-ups, we can utilize this initial momentum as a springboard to energize ourselves to complete the work more quickly and effectively than we otherwise would have, given that we are now in the appropriate mental space.

Plant Seeds in Your Mind.

When you fall asleep watching a scary movie, what happens? Well, often watching scary movies before bed leads us to have bad dreams. As we were watching the scary movie while dozing off to sleep, seeds were planted in our mind that grew into the stories that we experienced in our dreams when they were given the opportunity to naturally develop. We don’t always think about what our minds are doing to advance our ideas when we are not consciously focused on them; yet, by simply planting a seed in your mind, your brain will utilize its excess processing power to move the idea forward without expending significant amounts of conscious energy in doing so. If you want to begin writing a fiction story or need to memorize a speech, read the speech right before bed or start crafting the beginnings of the plot development or character development for one of your characters. While your speech will not be fully memorized nor will your storyline be fully developed at the time when you plant the seed, the act of planting the seed in your mind will give your brain just enough material to play with and develop further while you are busy going about your everyday actions.

Let Your Inspiration Lead the Way.

Many people argue that you should just make a to-do list, and start working down the list regardless of whether or not you feel inspired to complete the task in the given moment. I strongly disagree with this approach. The key to moving through tasks not only efficiently but effectively is to get your mind and body excited and in a state of readiness to work on a particular project. If you are not excited about working on something, not only are you going to move through the task at a snail’s pace, but you are also going to get easily distracted and do low-quality work. While there are some tasks and projects that are inherently dull in nature and will never excite us in isolation, the mere opportunity to choose the best option amongst a set of alternatives will get our minds in a more advanced state of readiness to complete the task. In order to give yourself the leeway to operate under a system where you can choose what you want to complete at different times based upon when you feel inspired and ready to do so, you must get yourself far enough ahead in your workflow that you will not be forced to do any one thing in a previously designated hour of the day as a result of procrastination and time constraints. Never back yourself into a corner. Always give yourself the option to choose how and when you execute various tasks amongst your given set of alternatives.

Always Have Two Lists.

Many people find jumping back and forth between tasks to be incredibly distracting. I beg to differ. Trying to jump back and forth between tasks is only distracting if both tasks require the same type of brain power. If the tasks are inherently different in nature, switching back and forth between them will constantly help your mind to hit the reset button and provide a burst of new energy to help you get through your harder tasks. Instead of having one long to-do list for the day, I suggest you create two separate lists: one for content-heavy tasks and one for administrative tasks. For example, if I need to read five papers in a day, work on hypothesis development, and do a problem set, these tasks will all go on to-do list A. Beyond doing my academic work, there are also various other big-picture things that I may need to get done in a day, such as doing my laundry, buying groceries, booking a flight, painting my nails, calling my sister, and making my friend a birthday card. In order to get the most done in the shortest amount of time without ever drifting into the low-productivity zone that results from working on a project for too long at one time, I suggest going back and forth between your two types of lists. If you start with a content-heavy task from list A, when you proceed to feel yourself starting to lose energy and focus, give your mind a break by doing something from task list B. While you will still be giving your mind the break it needs, by pre-planning an administrative task list, you will be filling that time with things that actually need to get done, rather than wasting that time watching a netflix episode (which will inevitably turn into a five hour netflix marathon).

Procrastinate ‘Everything Else’.

Many people view procrastination as problematic. However, this statement is overly generalized. There are actually cases in which procrastination can be incredibly helpful in allowing us to give ourselves built-in time limitations for tasks that fall low on our priority list. In order to check things off our to-do lists, we often will start with tasks which we feel confident in our ability to complete. If we start with those tasks when we do not feel the burden of the time constraints that seem to mentally set in later in the day, we tend to spend inherently too long on these easier and often unimportant tasks, which leaves us in a time crunch when we realize how little time we have left in our days to complete the important tasks. In referring back to the pie chart above, I suggest procrastinating the tasks that fall into the ‘everything else’ category in your mental priority breakdown. Through monitoring which category tasks fall into and weighting their individualized importance accordingly, we can strategically work on the tasks that are most high-priority and relevant to our long-term goals when we feel the most energized and least time constrained. When we start with the high-priority tasks and procrastinate the low-priority tasks, bumping ourselves up against a deadline for these tasks that don’t inherently matter as much in the first place will designate inherent time limitations with regards to how long we can give ourselves to work on the task. Therefore the majority of our time can be spent working on the most high-priority items on our task lists.

Minimize Startup Costs.

In many cases, high levels of inefficiency stem from an overabundance of startup costs. A startup cost is essentially the additional time sink and effort that must be expended when getting your mind back to the place where it left off the last time that you worked on this particular project. When you stop reading a paper halfway through and pick it up a few days later, it often takes your mind quite some time to re-situate itself in the world the author has created. Beyond the additional time that it takes to get our minds back to the level in our understanding of a particular topic that we were at the day before, it is also important to realize that our precise mental states tend to shift from one day to the next. While there is generally a certain consistency about the way that each of us sees the world, we often wake up feeling like various different versions of ourselves depending on a series of different factors and stimuli that shape our view and interpretation of the world on any given day. While it is often impossible to work through projects from start to finish in one day in order to eliminate startup costs altogether, minimizing the degree to which we start and stop when working on in-depth mental tasks will help us to both work through projects more efficiently and to increase the level of consistency in our writing and ideation processes.

Preparing for the College Admissions Interview

I remember my Georgetown interview like it was yesterday. In attempt to replicate the image of the picturesque Georgetown student, I put on the one clunky argyle sweater that I managed to dig out from the back of my closet and put on the most Blair Waldorf-like headband that I owned. With my black and white flowered clipboard in hand (which contained an unnecessary amount of extra copies of my resume), I wandered into the cafe in my yuppy little town where we had agreed to meet. I had anxiety bursting out of my itchy sweater as I awkwardly eyed up the multiple tables, making guesses as to whom the man was that I was supposed to meet with.

After seeing a preppy man sitting alone in business-like attire who looked to be the most Georgetown-esque in the entire cafe, I went up to the table and uncomfortably asked if he was the man whom I had intended to meet with. Luckily acting on the stereotypes ingrained in my mind led me to the right person this time, and we started working our way into a conversation. After about an hour of attempting to portray the most ‘interesting’ possible version of myself, the interview finally wrapped up. I didn’t think it could have gone any better. We had what I thought to be a really engaging conversation, and I left feeling great about my chances of getting into Georgetown. While I thought my interview went quite well, luck didn’t exactly go my way with this one. In the midst of getting into multiple Ivy League schools, I got a big fat rejection letter from Georgetown. So apparently, my childhood dreams of attending Georgetown were crushed, and even worse, I briefly sported a hideous argyle sweater all for nothing.

Now being on the flip side of things interviewing multiple candidates each year for Princeton admissions, I always experience momentary flashbacks of all of the interviews that I had gone through for the 17 schools that I had applied to and the nerves that came along with them. As I sit waiting for candidates to come to chat with me, I always wish that I could somehow share with them the perspective that I have today. Given it’s the peak of college admissions season, I wanted to shed some light on the process for students preparing for interviews. While not all schools and alumni interviewers approach the interview process in the same way, here is some advice that I have based upon my personal approach and experience interviewing for Princeton admissions thus far.

The first thing to remember when going into a college admissions alumni interview is that it is meant to be a casual conversation. The admissions office should already have your resume, test scores, essay, etc. on file. The purpose of the alumni interview portion of the application process is to both provide an opportunity for you to talk to someone who has gone through the undergraduate curriculum at the school, and to provide an opportunity to demonstrate the various aspects of yourself that go beyond what can be articulated on paper. In many ways, the alumni interviews are subjective. While I cannot speak to exactly how the admissions office factors the alumni interview reports into their admissions decisions, I would assume that the interview is only one of various parts of the application. So while you should sufficiently prepare yourself for your interview at each school, just focus on being yourself. This is your opportunity to express who you really are, and it is simply a chance to have a conversation with someone who has gone through the process and experienced undergraduate life at the specific college.

Before going into the interview, I suggest doing some extensive research on the particular school. For research based universities, it might be helpful to look into some particular professors that you might be interested in doing independent research with, to think about what major you are potentially interested in, to brainstorm some specific sub-topics or research areas of interest in the field, and to see what research is being conducted in that area at the university. It may also be helpful to do some research on the extracurricular and community-based aspects of the school to start thinking about how you might be interested in getting involved in the university community. Finally, you should think of some genuine questions that you have about the school or about the process generally. If this school is genuinely at the top of your list, it shouldn’t be hard to think about things that you are actually curious about. Use this time to get some answers to the questions that you genuinely have. After all, four years of your life is a pretty long time, so you want to make sure that you are choosing a good fit for you as well.

Beyond doing research about the school, it is also important to practice telling your story. What is your personal elevator pitch? If you had thirty seconds in an elevator with someone whom you had wanted to meet your entire life, how would you craft your personal narrative to show them who you are? Don’t just walk the interviewer through a verbal bullet-pointed list of your multiple accomplishments. Show them who you are as a person. Give them access to your personal story and life experiences.

When you are communicating with your interviewer to schedule the interview itself, it is also important that you communicate effectively and professionally. Be sure that if you are communicating via email, your email is well-crafted and there are no spelling or grammatical errors. I would also suggest doing some brief research on your interviewer through LinkedIN or a quick google search to learn more about his or her background and professional experiences.

While all interviewers have their own styles and ask a series of different questions, here are some questions that I typically try to work into my conversations with candidates.

1. Tell me about yourself.

2. Why are you interested in Princeton? Is Princeton your first choice?

3. How would you contribute to the Princeton community? In what ways would you give back both during and after your time at Princeton?

4. What do you think makes someone a good leader?

5. How would you define success?

6. What are you most nervous about going into college?

7. What is your favorite class in school?

8. What major do you think you might be interested in pursuing? Are there any professors whom you are particularly excited to work with?

9. Can you tell me about a project that you worked on from start to finish? Walk me through your thought process from the initial brainstorming phase to how you went about executing the process and producing the final product.

10. Tell me about something you’re most afraid of. How have you gone about trying to overcome that fear thus far in your life?

11. Can you tell me about the most memorable or best teacher you’ve ever had? What was it about his or her teaching style that created an effective learning environment?

12. When you work on a group project, what role do you typically play? How do you balance ensuring that the entire project is of high quality while giving everyone in the group a chance to take part?

13. What is your ideal learning style? How do you feel you learn best?

14. How would your friends describe you?

15. What questions do you have for me?

I typically start the interview by telling the candidate a little bit about myself, and then I spend the majority of the time allowing them to talk about their stories. I typically let the conversation evolve naturally, and I try to work some of these questions in where I see fit. Then I typically leave about ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the interview for the candidate to ask me questions about the school or the application process generally. When the interview is finished, I suggest thanking the interviewer for their time and sending a follow-up email a few hours after you leave the interview.

Going through the interview process for multiple schools can be quite draining. Yet, with a little preparation, you can use the interview portion of the application to your advantage to showcase the aspects of yourself that cannot be articulated on paper.  Don’t worry so much about trying to prove yourself.  Just focus on letting your interviewer see the most authentic version of yourself.

Why You Should Stop Being So Submissive at Work

When employees start a new job, they often come in with an underlying assumption that their boss is ‘better’ or more superior in one way or another. Simply because someone tells you that a particular individual is your manager, you start flooding your mind with these follow-up assumptions - that she is smarter than you, has more industry experience, is a better problem-solver, is a more effective communicator, and the list goes on. However, this is often not the case.

Yet by convincing yourself that your boss is intellectually superior to you simply because she is higher up in the organizational hierarchy, you are making it that much more likely that it is going to stay that way. Your underlying assumptions about the managerial hierarchy instantly makes you question your own competencies in relation to those of your manager.

Rather than questioning your own intellectual abilities, you should be challenging the underlying assumption that your manager is intellectually superior to you in the first place. One might argue that there are many cases in which managers are in fact intellectually superior to their subordinates, and therefore our underlying assumptions about the organizational hierarchy do in fact have merit. I mean, your manager is your manager for a reason right? While the answer to this question is likely yes, he or she may not have gotten there for the 'right' reasons or the reasons that you may think.

While an organizational hierarchy often serves as the structural foundation of larger corporations, it is important for employees to recognize that position level is not necessarily predictive of level of intelligence or performance capabilities. Through challenging your own underlying assumptions, you are freeing yourself from the constraints that often hold employees back from reaching their full potential.

Though managers may in fact be ‘superior’ to you in one way or another, it is important that employees come into a new job experience with an open mind, ready to observe and assess for themselves the degree to which this is actually the case. The various levels of the organizational hierarchy are in place to help employees find the fine line between respecting the decision-making power of authority and challenging the ideas of individuals at all levels of the organizational hierarchy.

While as an employee, you may assume that your manager often sees you as ‘lesser,’ from the perspective of the manager, this is often not the case. In many instances, more agile companies are moving away from a more hierarchical leadership structure to a flatter organizational structure - both in the literal context of organizational role placement and in the more fluid context of organizational innovation. Given this change in mindset, leaders often do not enter into new employment relationships assuming that they are mentally superior to their subordinates in every way. Strategic leaders hire individuals whom they truly believe have something to bring to the table. They are often willing and ready to embrace a two-way dialogue, where employees’ ideas are frequently factored into high-level decision-making processes.

Given the assumptions of the employee are often in opposition to the assumptions of the manager, this creates a divide that employees must overcome in order to maximize their full potential in the workplace. As an employee, it is important to enter into new employment relationships with an open mind, readily evaluating the physical and intellectual capabilities of both parties with an objective eye. Once you undermine the skewed power dynamic that primarily exists in your own mind, this will increase your inclination to express creative ideas and to collaborate with your manager to the extent that she comes to see you as an intellectual equal.

Through fostering this two-way dialogue and building a stable foundation for corporate collaboration, your manager will often begin to more readily seek out your opinion or ask for your assistance when making higher level organizational decisions. The more collaborative your working relationship is with your manager, the more likely that your manager will keep your name at the top of the list when it comes time to fill new positions at higher levels in the organizational hierarchy.

Getting What You Want Out of Work

People take jobs for a variety of different reasons. Yet all too often, corporate managers and team leaders fail to acknowledge the differences in motivations amongst their team members. This results in frustrated employees who feel misunderstood and who are constantly working in opposition to a system of incentives that is misaligned with their individualized motivations for taking the job in the first place. In order to maximize productivity in the workplace, it is essential for managers to understand what it is that their employees are personally working towards when they come into the office each morning. On the flip side, it is equally important for employees to position themselves accordingly in order to get what they want out of their employment experiences.

No matter how hard employees and managers try to stay in sync with one another to align their motivations and create an incentive plan that is mutually beneficial, it is essential for employees to understand their own motivations and to position themselves in the workplace accordingly. With all of the distractions that are inherently associated with the modern office environment, it is easy to lose sight of why it is that you are there in the first place. In order to get what you want out of the work that you are doing on a daily basis, you need to be crystal clear on your internal motivations when you walk into the office each morning so that you can shape your daily workflow accordingly.

Here are a few motivations underlying why people decide to accept certain jobs and how they need to position themselves in the corporate atmosphere accordingly:

Some people are looking for a strict 9 to 5 job because they want to focus on developing their family, building their skills in an unrelated hobby, or traveling the world. For these individuals, career development and quickly moving up the employment ladder is often not their primary objective at the moment. If you take a 9-5 job for the purposes of maintaining financial and personal stability while focusing your energy elsewhere, it is essential to stand your ground and ensure that you are not losing sight of your primary motivations for taking this job when 5PM rolls around. If you are not aiming to become the CEO of the company and are content with earning a paycheck, developing a specific set of skills, and satisfying your managers, you need to complete your work for the day to a sufficient and respectable level and then get up and leave. While maintaining a 9-5 job while pursuing outside interests can be physically draining at times, you need to train your mind and body to maintain multiple different modes that you can switch on and off. When you walk out of the office at 5:02, take a half hour or so to get some fresh air and entirely clear your mind of the tasks that you were working on throughout the first half of your day. Then mentally reset and spend the rest of your day and the next morning focusing on your other goals and interests before you channel your energy back into your 9-5 job.

Some people take a specific job in attempt to develop a particular set of skills that will serve as the fundamental building blocks to the pursuit of a career in a particular industry. This is often the case when individuals make a lateral career move from one industry to another, and they need to spend some time redeveloping skills in a different area. If you take a job to master certain industry fundamentals or build a new skill set, you should read as much as you possibly can and ask as many questions as possible. You are there to learn, and you should think of yourself as a sponge, getting paid to absorb knowledge on the job. Be upfront with your manager when you settle into your new position to let him or her know that part of the reason that you decided to take this position over others is that you felt it would be a suitable environment to further develop a particular skill set. When the time comes, ask your manager if you can work on particular projects where you can develop these skills and collaborate with other individuals who are masters in this area. If you want to develop skills that are not directly applicable to the day-to-day work that your manager asks you to complete, come into the office early or stay late to shadow another team member and to utilize the resources at your disposal.

Some people take a job with a clear intent to climb the corporate ladder of that particular company. If your inherent motivation is to get promoted within your current company, it is not enough to simply do your job. Corporations are largely different from more agile early-stage companies in that new hires are given a list of ‘tasks’ that are aligned with their job description. While successfully completing these responsibilities may be enough for your manager to view you as competent, simply doing what you are told is not enough for you to get noticed to the extent that your manager will see you as someone who has the capacity to assume a role beyond your current position. If your intent is to get promoted within an organization, you need to demonstrate leadership skills and pour the majority of your focus into relationship-building. Go beyond your job description, and suggest ways to improve the division or the company at large. Go out of your way to really get to know your managers and colleagues as individuals so that they see all of your attributes, beyond those that are required to sufficiently complete the task list that was attached to your original job description. Meet as many people as possible and express an interest in collaborating with other teams in the company so that you can simultaneously develop new skills and meet people across the organization.

As entrepreneurs, some people take a job to learn more about a specific industry that they hope to enter with the launch of their own venture. If you are starting a company or plan to start a company in the near future, it is not a bad idea to take a job that will allow you to experience the industry from the inside so that you have some fundamental knowledge in the space before trying to learn the rest on the go. If you take a job for this reason, keep a low profile and do not be too overt with your intentions when communicating with your manager. Make sure that you perform well enough on all of your tasks to maintain your current position, but control your internal urge to want to change every aspect of the organization to make it more efficient. Carefully choose the organizational issues that you decide to address, and spend the majority of your time getting paid to learn as much as possible. Don’t give away too much information about yourself, your background, or your motivation for taking the job, and use your extra time to utilize the resources at your fingertips and learn as much as you can. If you position yourself correctly, taking a job while starting a company can often be a great way to get paid for having someone teach you what you need to know to be successful in a given industry.

The next time that you take a job or walk into the office in the morning, think hard about why it is that you are spending so many precious waking hours in a specific office environment. If you come to realize that there is no way to position yourself within your current company so that your motivations are aligned with what you are getting out of the company, get up and leave. Today. There are so many opportunities at your fingertips, that the opportunity cost to staying at a job that is simply not aligned with what you ultimately want to achieve is simply too high. Once you know what it is that you are hoping to get out of a job, you can learn to shape your corporate image accordingly to maximize your personal utility within a given position.

Under Promise, Over Perform

When you were a junior in high school, struggling through American Literature class, did you ever wonder why you would often turn in two papers that you felt were of equal quality, yet you would receive a B on one of them and an A on the other?  When you left class with both papers in hand, trying to decipher the teacher’s rationale for the discrepancy, you got home and read over both papers. Yet, you still couldn’t find any significant difference between the paper that you wrote on The Scarlet Letter and the paper that you wrote on The Crucible a few weeks later.  If anything, you felt that your second paper which you got a B on seemed even a little bit better than the first. 

After you could not find any major discrepancies between your writing styles on the two papers, you tried thinking back to your process as to how you went about drafting and editing the two different papers. Prior to the first paper that you turned in, you scheduled a writing conference with your teacher to review your rough draft.  Before she read your work, you told her that this was the first five-page paper that you had ever written and that you tried your hardest, yet you didn’t feel that you had a strong enough grasp on the material and you were eager to hear the ways in which she could suggest improvements to your paper.  In other words, you unknowingly set the bar low and decreased the level of her expectations.  When she read your first paper, she was pleasantly surprised with your work as it was significantly better than she had expected.  She gave you a grade of an A, as she walked away from her experience grading your paper with confidence in your ability to surpass her expectations as a writer. 

Over the next few weeks, you enrolled in an after school writing program, and you met with your teacher every day during your free period to tell her about all of the new things that you had been learning and about how much you felt that your writing skills were improving.  One day when you were feeling particularly excited, you told her that you thought that writing might be your life calling.  After pouring all of your energy into showcasing your new and improved writing skills in your analysis of The Crucible, you turned in your second paper, eagerly awaiting your teacher’s feedback.  Yet, when you finally got your grade back a few weeks later, you looked down and were surprised to find a subpar B staring back at you. How could this be?

While you were busy fine-tuning your writing skills and sharing those personal insights with your teacher, you were unknowingly building her expectations.  Now that the bar was set much higher, the same writing style that earned you an A on your first paper was no longer good enough (in your teacher’s mind).  Your teacher then knew that you had the potential to perform at a certain level, so beyond being judged more critically in comparison to your own previous capabilities, your work may have even been evaluated differently than your classmates' work.  So while your friend Jimmy turned in a paper much worse than yours and walked away with an A, you stood there dumbfounded, wondering where you went wrong.  The flaw in your logic was not in your product, but rather in your process.

Our teachers’ and managers’ impressions of our work are often not based solely on the final product that we turn in, but more so on how we manage their expectations throughout the process.  No matter how talented we may be, if we set sky high expectations, we are always going to fall short of the person that we claim to be. Through setting high expectations internally and setting external expectations that are slightly lower than what we believe we can achieve, we are setting ourselves up for success.

For example, if you tell your manager or teacher that you are going to get through 100 pages out of a 200-page document by Friday, yet you proceed to fall short of your goal and turn in only 90 pages, you are going to fall short of their expectations. Rather than performing better than they expected you to perform, over promising puts you in a personally stressful position that often doesn’t work in your favor.

Even if you think that with some certainty, you will be able to get through 90 to 100 pages of the document by Friday, you should only agree to have maybe 80 pages done by Friday.  Then if you turn in the same 90 pages that you would have in the case above, you will be exceeding their expectations rather than falling short of them.  Even if your teacher or manager ends up with an equivalent quality of work in their hands, (in the case of under promising and over performing) the fact that they received more than they internally expected will leave them feeling positive and confident in your ability to manage your own performance. If you happen to fall short of your personal goals as a result of unexpected distractions and only turn in 80 pages by the deadline, you will still have kept your promise and met the agreed upon expectations, reinforcing your ability to meet deadlines and keep your promises.

While it is important to set your internal bar very high to keep striving for personal improvement, setting the bar out of reach externally only sets you up to fall short of your promises and to struggle to meet external expectations.  When you set expectations that are realistic and externally agree upon performance metrics that are slightly below your personal capabilities, you are giving yourself the buffer zone that is necessary to succeed time and time again.

Capitalizing on the Undergraduate Experience

During my time at Princeton, I was often enrolled in five to six of the most challenging classes I could find, was on two to three sports teams, had some iteration of a job, and was working on starting one or more companies of my own, amongst many other things. While I was off trying to tackle the world one day at a time, many of my classmates were manipulating their schedules, taking cookie-cutter classes to make sure that they got all As – even if that meant forgoing the opportunity to take some of the most challenging and interesting classes at one of the top universities in the world. Could I have done that? Absolutely. But I never have been and never will be that girl.

I’m not the girl who takes the easy way out. I’m the girl who takes risks through challenging myself to step outside of my comfort zone one day after another. I’m the girl who took advanced linear algebra with the math majors just because I wanted to learn it. I’m the girl who walked-on to the varsity diving team without ever having prior exposure to the sport.  I’m the girl who took countless acting classes because I had the opportunity to work with some of the most talented directors I would ever have the experience to work with.

I had the unique opportunity to spend four years attending what is arguably one of the top universities in the world, and I was determined to take full advantage of it. When presented with the experience of a lifetime, there was no way that I was going to allow myself to manipulate my schedule or to try to limit myself to taking only the classes that would highlight my strengths.  I live in the moment, and I constantly challenge myself to explore the areas of thought that I know the least about, and to take full advantage of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

When again in my life will I have the chance to study the role of passion in literature, or to study violent politics with some of the best minds in the field? While undergraduate life is a time to build upon your current skill set, it is also a time to expose your mind to new topics, even if it means that you may not always come out on top. In addition to pursuing the various topics that I am incredibly passionate about, I often instinctively pursue opportunities in the areas that I know the least about, as I feel that this is where the learning curve will be the steepest. Rather than going through my entire life trying to evade my weaknesses, I am constantly searching for ways to fill in my knowledge gaps and to build upon my current skill set, not just vertically but horizontally as well.

I love life, and I love taking risks. I am an inherently curious person and I want to learn as much about the world as possible. I can’t help it – it’s in my blood. For many people, having four years at a top-tier university is the dream of a lifetime; so rather than letting four years pass you by, fully commit to living out the dream that you worked so hard to achieve. The undergraduate experience is a unique time in a young person’s life – it is a time when you are not only learning about yourself, exploring your own interests and passions, but also learning about how to piece together the many aspects of the world around you. 

Many students find themselves dressed in their cap and gown on graduation day, wishing that they had taken that class that they were too nervous to take, or that they stayed late after class to talk to that professor that they always admired.  After you walk out of the gates on graduation day with your diploma in hand, there is no getting that time back. You have one opportunity to spend four years of your life selfishly focusing on exploring the questions that have always peaked your curiosity, and learning about yourself and the world around you. So rather than playing it safe and trying to conform to the consensus opinion – take risks. Take classes in subjects that you know the least about, build relationships with the professors whom you’ve always admired, learn to master a new sport, talk to people outside of your normal social circles, and push yourself a little bit further each and every day. Let your inner curiosity and deeper passions drive your everyday actions – I know I did, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not eternally grateful that I had the unique opportunity to spend four years of my life, pushing myself to new physical and intellectual limits at one of the top universities in the world. 

The Art of the Internship

In the four years that I was at Princeton, I probably had between fifteen to twenty different jobs – from working with the Assistant Secretary of Economic Development at the Department of Commerce, to spending late nights at investment banks, to working as a book editor for a local publishing company – you name it, I’ve done it. While many people questioned if my constant career mobility meant that I was unfocused, I knew exactly what I was doing. 

For about eight years of your life, you have the unique opportunity to step foot into companies for a short period of time - to learn the ropes, to explore the industry, and to learn skills that you may never otherwise have the opportunity to become exposed to.  It’s called the internship.

While students often narrowly view the internship as a stepping-stone to their dream job, internships serve as a unique opportunity to expose students to leaders and industries that they are simply interested in learning more about. When else in your life will you have the opportunity to gain a hands-on learning experience at a company that you might otherwise never see from within?

In order to take full advantage of the internship experience, I would encourage high school and college students to consider taking internships for the following reasons:

Step foot in an industry you have always been curious about. Take an internship position in a company that you’ve always wanted to learn more about. Whether you intend to pursue a serious career in this industry or not, there is no better time to satisfy your curiosity and become more knowledgeable about the world around you.

Work for a leader you have always admired. For a few months, put your long-term career goals aside, and commit to learning as much as you can from a leader or role model whom you’ve always admired.  Through working with people whom you respect more than anyone else in the world, you will learn to push yourself to new limits and will often learn more about the macro aspects of organizational behavior – such as leadership, hiring practices, and how to foster innovation within companies.

Develop a very specific skill that may come in handy later in life. Maybe you’ve always admired how well your mom makes Thanksgiving dinner, or how well your neighbor plans monthly dinner parties – so take a few months and work for a cooking publication or work for an event planner.  Not every internship that you take needs to be directly aligned with your long-term career goals.  Through taking jobs to learn particular skills, this may actually help you to differentiate yourself when applying for longer-term positions; you’ll also find that many of the skills you learn will come in handy later in life.

Take an internship in a company or an industry that you know the least about. While it is easy to thrive in a company that allows you to highlight your strengths, some of the steepest learning curves are derived from throwing yourself into companies and situations that you know the least about.  Everyone has at least one or two knowledge gaps that have the potential to drag them down; rather than avoiding them for the rest of your life, tackle your greatest weaknesses head-on and turn your greatest insecurities into your greatest strengths. This will make you a more confident person and save you years of running away from your greatest fears.

While there is often value in taking one or two internships in companies or industries that are aligned with your long-term career goals, there are various other reasons to pursue certain internships that are often overlooked. Go against the grain and take jobs for unconventional reasons. You might be surprised by what you get out of it.

Five Reasons Every Child Should Take an Acting Class

Often when I speak on a panel, there is that one overly ambitious parent who raises their hand and asks how they can set their child up for success, or make their child ‘more like me’.  While I sit there contemplating which of the countless life lessons I’ve learned so far to share with a room full of people, my answer is usually some iteration of ‘put your child in an acting class.’  Out of everything that I could have possibly said, I’m sure that this is one of the last things that eager parents of current or future Ivy League students would expect to come out of my mouth.  Following my response, they usually look at me like I have five heads as they begin contemplating if I very well might be as crazy as I seem.

Yet every time I give a student or a parent this piece of advice, I stand by the fact that I think that the skill set that one develops through acting truly holds the potential to set an individual up for both personal and professional success.  After growing up doing TV voiceover work and performing in a series of plays and musicals, I continued to study acting from a more academic perspective in both high school and while at Princeton.  Acting has always been the one outlet where I feel like I can completely let myself go, and quite literally walk in someone else’s shoes.  Yet, it wasn’t until recently that I realized just how important my many years of training in acting have been in setting me up for personal and professional success. 

With that said, I think that no matter whether or not a child has any intention of pursuing acting on a serious level, every child should take at least one acting class before they reach adulthood.  Here are five of the reasons why:

1. You will get significantly better at reading people.  When you walk into a scene, you quickly need to figure out the relationship between the characters on stage, and find your place in the organizational hierarchy.  Understanding how to read people in a matter of seconds through picking up external cues is a key skill in the business world, from reading a manager in a meeting, to getting through the interview process for a job, or seeing just how far you can push a client before they reach the tipping point.

2. You will understand how to control your reactions.  Many directors will tell you that the hardest part of acting is not acting, but rather reacting.  While the audience often overlooks the importance of reactions in the progression of a plot line, reactions are the key to linking nonsensical pieces of dialogue together and building meaning.  Being able to control your reactions – from language, to tone, to body expression – is incredibly important in the workplace, as you are often caught off guard and forced to react properly even when your sympathetic nervous system is going crazy.

3. You will learn how to improvise.  While various aspects of a scene are rehearsed, one of the most important skills that an actor will learn is how to go ‘off-book’ and be so overtly aware of the smallest movements of the characters that they are interacting with, that they can instantaneously jump in and deviate if something goes wrong or is not as rehearsed.  Very often in business, we are caught off guard – maybe a potential investor brings up a competitor that we’ve never heard of or the customer asks you for a particular functionality that you had never even thought of building – and you have nothing left to do but to go off-book, to improvise. Through learning how to be quick on your feet and adjust to any situation, you will feel confident in your ability to handle yourself under pressure and thrive in the most challenging of situations.

4. You will start analyzing speech and body language on a more detailed level.  When you first begin studying acting, it will likely seem absurd that you will need to break apart text and craft your movements at such a detailed level of precision.  Through acting, you will learn to gain full control of your body and voice, and also learn how to analyze the movements and speech of others. By understanding how to read between the lines of people’s words and actions in a professional setting, this will give you greater insight into the situation.

5. You will learn to develop a clear objective and formulate multiple tactics in attempt to reach your objective.  When you first come to analyze a new scene in acting, one of the primary drivers of the work that you will do as a character will be your objective in the scene - what it is that you want to try to get from the other characters that shapes how you approach your dialogue and blocking.  Once you have a clear objective in a scene, you will learn to come up with a series of tactics or potential approaches that you will try to take in order to achieve your objective.  If one doesn’t work, you have to move on to the next one.  The ability to identify a clear objective and formulate tactics is extremely helpful in business, as it will allow you to maintain a laser focus and understand how to quickly move from one approach to another if your original tactic is not working as you planned.

Beyond the five core skills that you can expect to learn above, taking an acting class is important on a macro level because it teaches children how to open up, take risks, and express themselves at a young age.  While consistency and self-understanding is incredibly important, acting will teach you how to accent or highlight different parts of yourself in different situations, which is crucial in helping you to quickly adapt to the many challenges that we are confronted with along the way.

The 'It Factor'

With college admissions season right around the corner, the recurrent question of ‘what separates the few from the many’ is more pressing than ever.  In high schools around the world, college seniors are spending their days cramming SAT vocabulary and working through their extensive list of college applications, only to hope that someone behind closed doors on an admissions committee will think that they are one of the best of the best.  Amongst the many thousands of applicants that apply to the top schools each year, with near-perfect SAT scores and GPAs above a 4.0, what makes someone a standout?

There are plenty of students who appear to be qualified for these schools on paper, yet there are only a select number of spots for a mere handful of the very best to turn their dreams of being on top into a reality. While there is no exact formula for getting into the top schools, and no exact phenotypic makeup that deems someone a good fit to be in the next class at Harvard or Yale, there is one thing that recurrently separates the few from the many – and that is the ‘it factor’.  

Whether it be through informally mentoring students who are trying to navigate the complex high school journey, choosing my own friends and colleagues, or conducting alumni interviews for Princeton admissions, I can usually identify whether or not students have the ‘it factor’ after talking to them for only a few minutes.  Not every newly accepted Princeton or Harvard student looks the same – the ‘it factor’ can be packaged in a variety of different capacities, as it is not about product but rather about process.  The distinguishing factor between the ‘good’ and the ‘great’ lies in the journey as opposed to the destination – because the way that a person carves out a path to learn and grow as an individual is something that will continue to make them their own unique person for years to come. 

When you walk into a small discussion-based seminar at Princeton, the twelve students sitting around the table may not be the twelve smartest people you will ever meet; but the majority of those students are more than likely to have the ‘it factor.’  From my experience working with students who may be among the best of the best, I have found the following characteristics to be recurrent in determining whether or not someone has the ‘it factor.’

Grit. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, as long as you are the person in the room who wants it the most.  It doesn’t matter if the road is bumpy or the path undefined, as long as you have the drive to carve out your own path to find the pot of gold at the end of the tunnel.

Curiosity.  Inherent curiosity is something that is hard to fake.  If you are inherently curious, the learning takes care of itself.  This is often something that can only be acquired through reading, understanding yourself, and playing an active role in the world around you.  If you let your inherent curiosity lead the way, you just have to follow your interests and passions and will begin to stumble upon more opportunities than you could ever imagine.

Selflessness. Being the smartest person in the room and acting like everyone else is below you will not get you very far – I’ve learned this from first-hand experience.  It took me a while to develop this characteristic, but eventually I came to see that you can really learn something from everyone.  If you approach life with a ‘no task is too small’ type of attitude, then you will gain the respect of those around you and become an inherently stronger leader and more complete individual.

Authenticity.  The ability to be true to yourself is an unmet quality.  Through identifying your strengths and admitting to your weaknesses, you are building a strong degree of self-awareness that will help you to continue to develop as a person both personally and professionally.  Rather than trying to be the person that you think will appeal to an interviewer, a prospective manager, or an admissions committee, just worry about being the best possible version of yourself. If you wake up with that goal in mind every single day, there is nobody who can beat you out at being uniquely you.

While these four characteristics are not all-encompassing, they are some of the recurrent features that I have identified in individuals who possess the ‘it factor’ across various age spans and industry verticals.  While some of these traits may be inherent, there are always ways to improve as a person through understanding where your time and energy is best spent.  And what better time to start than the present.

The Testing Game

After countless days of cramming, attempting to master the art of data sufficiency questions, I walked over to the testing center where it was finally time to put my skills to the test.  As I toddled into the massive office building, my anxiety was through the roof.  I crept up to the security guard, and told him that "I’m here to take a test.” While the paper had told me to ‘get there early’, he wouldn’t let me upstairs until EXACTLY thirty minutes before my appointment time – as if I wasn’t stressing enough, this just put me over the edge.  So I left the building, only to wander around the block five times, stare at the ping pong players in Bryant Park for twenty minutes, and let my anxiety escalate even further.  When the clock finally hit 3:28 and I was technically allowed to enter the testing center, I walked back around the corner, back up to the security guard, and finally made my way into the elevator.

As I stepped into the elevator with my Princeton t-shirt on and my eighth grade North Face backpack weighing me down, I looked to my right only to see a girl heading to the same floor wearing a Harvard shirt.  Naturally, my instinct was to become extremely competitive.  We glared at each other all the way up to the correct floor, while we fiddled with putting our bags in lockers, and while we anxiously awaited the start of the test.  We didn’t say one word to each other – I had no idea what test she was even taking that day, and yet still, I just needed to make sure that I did better than her.  When the operational procedures were finally winding down and I was assigned to a computer in the testing center, I quickly discovered that there was no air conditioning.  Of course, on the day when I was supposed to take the GMAT, the air conditioner in the testing center had to break.  So inevitably, I was stuck taking a four hour test in about eighty-five degree weather.  Fabulous.

When I thought that my experience couldn’t possibly get any worse, about one section into the test, I got a blaring migraine that only intensified when met with the angst that came with data sufficiency questions. I came into the test thinking that my sole concern would be maintaining a laser focus, and getting the questions in front of me correct; yet, here I was becoming fixated on every potential detail and distraction around me.  As important as the test was for me, everyone had their own agenda that day – the woman moving at a snail’s pace signing me out for breaks, the security guard who made me agitated right before the exam, and the Harvard girl who could very possibly have been thinking the same thing that I was.  Though it took me until about section three of the test to realize it, I came to see that it wasn’t about them, and it wasn’t about her – it was about me. 

I wasn’t in competition with the girl from Harvard, and spending moments hoping that I would do better than her wouldn’t necessarily allow me to reach my own goals.  Though the staff was not helping the situation, they were just doing their jobs.  They didn’t feel the need to move faster or to accommodate my needs because they were not the ones concerned with getting a good score on the GMAT.  But when you are so focused on being in that moment and putting everything you have on the table, it is not unlikely that you may place extra weight on your own needs.

Standardized tests are by no means a walk-in-the-park.  Even more so than testing your intellectual abilities, they test our stamina, our drive, and our ability to maintain laser focus when an infinite amount of stimuli are pulling us in different directions.  Given that I’ve been quite literally buried under books for the past several weeks playing the standardized testing game, I thought I would share some of what I’ve learned before putting my stack of newly purchased test-prep books in the attic for good.

1. Instead of worrying about the people in the room with you, consider the test as a game between you and the test-makers.  Don’t try to find the right answer; try to think like the person who wrote the question you are reading.  After reading almost every brand of GRE test prep books, I came to see that there were a fairly repetitive list of tricks that the test writers were implementing – and the key to getting the question correct is often identifying which of those tricks they are trying to use.  In many ways, once you find the trick in the problem, you can feel good about yourself – you outsmarted your opponent.  The next step is not to find the ‘right’ answer, but to rather look for the answer that they intended to be the ‘best choice.’

2. If you are going through the test and feel like it’s too easy, you’re probably falling into the test writer’s traps.  When I was initially starting to go through test prep questions, I felt like when I was doing a practice section, I was getting the majority of the questions correct. Then I would go to check the answers and realize that I had fallen into many traps. During the times when I have done my best on the actual tests, I have typically felt like it was more challenging and that I was not necessarily breezing through the questions.  Yet, I learned to just take it one question at a time and try to focus on finding the trick in each question as quickly as possible.  Then I made sure that I didn’t fall into the writer’s trap, and solving the problem became easy.

3. When you are working on verbal/reading comprehension questions, try moving your lips while you are reading the questions, almost as if you are talking aloud to yourself.  In the midst of a multiple hour test, it is very likely that you are going to get tired by the time the last two sections come along.  Quietly reading the questions aloud helps you to more actively engage with the material rather than passively going through the motions.

4. As you are preparing, purchase and study from test prep books that are made by the company who designs the actual test.  For example, ETS creates the questions on the actual GRE, so their test prep books more closely mirror the material on the actual test.  Often studying with books from a variety of different test prep companies can become frustrating, because they all teach slightly different strategies and have slightly differing question structures.  This can become overwhelming, so it is often best to stick with the material that most closely resembles what you will see on test day.

5. Spend some time before the test understanding yourself, and what you need to do on the day of the test in order to do your best.  For example, I find that I am significantly more focused if I run right before the test. Develop a routine that you know works for you, and don’t deviate from it on test day.

Ultimately, testing is a game between you and the writers of the test – but it is also a test of your stamina and drive, and a measure of how well you know yourself and understand how to handle yourself in different situations.  When I went to take the GRE the other day, I knew that the test was in the middle of a very corporate office building in Manhattan, and yet I still wore my paisley pajama pants, with no makeup on, and marched right up to the security guard to take the test.  Given that I was wearing pajamas in the middle of an office building, I was inevitably getting stares left and right; yet, I didn’t care.  When you are taking a test, you need to put yourself first and know what you need to do in order to perform at your best.  It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks; put all judgment aside and focus on yourself.  So while testing may initially appear to be an intimidating measure of ‘intelligence,’ it is often those with a strong sense of self, an ability to maintain laser focus, and the most grit who can push through the various obstacles in front of them and come out on top.

Innovating the Everyday

For a long time, I was the girl walking around with my head down, literally reading a book while I was walking, or sifting through the backlog of 67,234 emails that are currently lingering on my phone.  And a few years ago, it wouldn’t have surprised me if you caught me trying to simultaneously eat lunch during that same interval that I allotted to walking.  But I thought it was time to put an end to the grilled cheese on-the-go the day that I choked on my sandwich while running to catch the warm-up in my entrepreneurship class in the dungeon otherwise known as the Princeton engineering quad.  Why? Well, for many reasons.  I thought that by keeping myself chained to the items on my to-do list and isolating myself just enough to safely live in my own head, my laser focus would help me to get ahead. 

If I was able to remain aloof enough to grant myself immunity from the many things that could possibly distract me, I was convinced that I would be unstoppable.  If I took the time to eat lunch with friends, maybe their problems would become my problems – which would inevitably be a distraction; if I dared to give myself more than ten minutes of free time each day, how could I possibly rationalize the opportunity cost of the time that I wasted watching a TV show or taking a walk with a friend? Every minute of every day was allotted to a slot in my intricate daily schedule.  I had goals to reach, which inevitably came with countless items to check off my to-do list. And any time spent otherwise, any slight deviation from my plan was unacceptable.  I mean, it would set me back – right?  Wrong. 

I was afraid.  Afraid of a world that I had no idea how to be a part of.  Afraid of where my mind might wander if I took my head out of a book and actually looked at the world around me.  Afraid that if I popped my sheltered bubble, I wouldn’t know where to begin.  Afraid of the unknown.  Afraid of allowing myself to question if the goals that I was working towards resembled what I really wanted.  Afraid that if I let people get too close to me, they might be disappointed when they discovered the real me.  Afraid to step outside the box, to color outside the lines.  And afraid to ultimately build the world that I wanted to live in, rather than accepting the world that I was a part of.

Honestly, for a long time, I didn’t know that there was another option – that there was another way to see the world.  Rather than questioning the assumptions in the world around me, I was on autopilot.  But over time, I became inherently curious. I realized that as much as I loved books, the people who wrote them were often attempting to answer questions to problems that had already been identified.  They were analyzing an event of the past, writing about a problem that had already been solved, rather than innovating in the moment.  I used to assume that the world was written in pen, but it turns out that it’s actually written in pencil.  Everything around us is constantly changing, and the most amazing thing about it is that not only are we able to witness change, but we can catalyze change.  And singlehandedly, each of us has the power to make a mark on the world that we live in. 

When I started to think differently, I was afraid that in many ways, I was falling off track - that I was deviating from the perfect plan that I had set for myself.  But I soon realized that maybe I had to lose myself to find myself.  I started to ask ‘why’ when a teacher was teaching a lesson, rather than nodding my head ‘yes’ when I actually had no idea what was going on.  I stopped trying to memorize the answers, and I started to ask questions – about why certain things in our world operated the way they did, about how things came into being, about the problems that I saw in the world around me.  Instead of walking with my head in a book, trying to cram things into my brain, I discovered it was more beneficial to open my eyes, and to let my mind take it all in. 

As I started to really look at the various aspects of my day-to-day life instead of just going through the motions, I began to discover problems everywhere I turned – in the coffee shop, at the airport, on the sidewalk, in the classroom.  In many ways, I felt like I had been living the first two decades of my life entirely blind, assuming that I could only get ahead by riding out the waves that other people had set in motion.  But as it turns out, mobility stems from divergence – by identifying problems and building solutions to the very aspects of life that the majority of people are too ‘focused’ to identify in the first place. 

I think that many people see entrepreneurship as something that requires a big solution to a big problem.  And while our views of innovation are inevitably colored by the big success stories that we read about in the news, there is another type of entrepreneurship that I like to call ‘innovating the everyday.’ While some designers and innovators may sit in a room for days on end, trying to invent a solution to an arguably fabricated problem, you don’t have to build the hottest new tech app or create a multi-billion dollar company in order to think differently, to implement change.  In more ways than one, the world that we live in is not perfect.  There are plenty of processes that we go through every day that we simply accept as a societal convention; and rather than asking ourselves how we can improve upon these aspects of our lives, we often just let them be.  Instead of trying to innovate in an area where we see the biggest market gap, or trying to create things for other people, we can arguably identify the best problems and build some of the best solutions through simply trying to improve upon our own lives.

When you design things for yourself, not only are you beginning to build the world that you want to live in; but it is typically the case that a problem that you have is a problem that many other people have encountered as well. Therefore through simply having a critical eye, the process of identifying problems will come naturally.  Every time that you begin to think to yourself ‘this is annoying’ or ‘this is so inefficient,’ I challenge you to take that thought to the next level.  Why is this inefficient? How could this process be improved? If you were reimagining the design of the system, what would you do differently? Instead of taking the five minutes that you spend each morning on the subway to think about how uncomfortable and hot and squished you are, think about how the system could be changed in a way that could improve its efficiency.  Because if you look around, I’m sure that you are not the only one who is feeling what you are feeling or thinking what you are thinking. 

Going Beyond the Rankings: Why Princeton is Really the Best of the Best

Yet again, Princeton came out on top of the 2015 U.S. News National Universities Rankings.  But when you are one of the smartest students in the world, admitted to a handful of the best schools this country has to offer, is it really reasonable to trust a ranking that was based upon an abstract formula to make a life-changing decision?  As much as I appreciate the fact that I can pat myself on the back in knowing that I went to the ‘best’ school in the country, I would have to argue that a list is simply not enough.  So as it comes time each year for overambitious seniors all around the world to start competing for the limited number of spots at the top universities, there are various things to take into consideration when choosing the best college for you – because your decision is not only going to affect the next four years of your life, but the rest of your life.  So while I might come across as biased given that I opted for the orange and black myself, I am going to take you beyond the rankings and give you a few reasons why Princeton is really the best of the best.

1.     Proximity to New York City – Through being located close to New York City, the accessibility that the school provides plays a huge role in giving students the best possible opportunity to set themselves up for career success.  During my time at Princeton, I took multiple internships in New York, and I was able to manage a Princeton course load, a Princeton athletic team, and commuting back and forth into the city a few times per week to gain a variety of different job experiences.  This diverse array of career experience gave me insight into multiple different types of industries, and having this level of experience behind me put me in a great position when seeking out job opportunities.

2.     Big Picture Thinking – In so many ways, the challenging and diverse academic experience really teaches you to ‘think big.’ During my first few classes at Princeton, I was initially getting a bit frustrated because in some ways I didn’t feel that everything I was learning was entirely practical in the sense that I couldn’t quite determine how I would be able to use what I was learning in my everyday life.  But after spending four years taking part in the various academic challenges that Princeton provided, I now see how valuable a more theoretical teaching style really is.  Through learning to think about problems at a high level and engage in more abstract problem-solving challenges, I don’t feel limited to only understanding how to solve certain problems that are directly relevant to my coursework.   Now I feel entirely equipped to push myself above and beyond in the workplace and confident that I have the toolkit necessary to work through the vast array of challenges that I may face in the years to come.

3.     Teaching-Centric Professors – The majority of the professors that I had during my time at Princeton were extremely focused on their students.  While many other schools that I was considering had very talented and experienced professors, it seemed that various professors were heavily prioritizing their research and that teaching was somewhat secondary.  Though my professors at Princeton were undoubtedly pursuing research of their own, I almost always felt that they were more than willing to go above and beyond what was required of them to help me in any way that they could.  From having dinners with me outside of class to discuss outside topics of interest, to sitting with me hours on end to help me with linear algebra during office hours, the professors were always there to help me further my education and to challenge me along the way.  Many of the professors that I had during my time at Princeton are people who I know will be advisors and mentors to me for the rest of my life, and I feel that at a less teaching-centric school, I may not have had the opportunity to form the types of relationships that I did at Princeton.

4.     Tradition – Through every class that I took at Princeton, every football game I cheered at, or P-Rade that I attended, I felt like I was a part of something much larger than myself.  When you are walking up to Nassau Hall to submit a Dean’s Date paper, sitting in the courtyard of East Pyne, or eating lunch in Prospect Garden, the level of tradition and history that you are becoming a part of is simply amazing. Year after year, Princeton has continued to develop as a top University, and with that growth comes a level of history that is unlike any other.  Many of the professors and mentors that I had at Princeton had gone to Princeton as students themselves, and through the traditions that we shared, I felt like they really understood the challenges that I was facing, and thus were all the more receptive to helping me to make the most of my experience.

5.     Community – Both during my time at Princeton and as a part of the alumni community, the sense of community that Princeton tigers create is simply unmatched.  There is no doubt that Princeton is challenging in more ways than one.  During my four years at the school, I was pushed to mental, physical, and emotional limits unlike ever before in my life; but as I pulled all-nighters cramming papers for my freshman writing seminar, or buried myself in Firestone for weeks on end when thesis time came around, I knew that I wasn’t in it alone.  Almost every single person that I met at Princeton was passionate about their work.  In addition to the support that I received from my professors, my peers were some of my best resources.  I learned so much from working with the students around me, as the school really does attract the best of the best.  Though spending four years at Princeton is far from a walk in the park, when you finally walk out of Fitzrandolph Gate after turning in your senior thesis, you are walking out with a community of people who have been by your side the whole way through, and walking into an even larger community of tigers who will always have your back.

While some of these attributes are likely apparent at other top universities, I can only speak from my own experience.  Going into Princeton, these were all things that I wish I knew; but instead, I came to discover them for myself over four of the most challenging, yet rewarding years of my life thus far.  While U.S. News may provide a black and white ranking, a Princeton experience is so much more than a number on a page.  So as you are applying to the top universities, if you are given the opportunity to wear the orange and black, my advice to you would be to wear it proudly – because Princeton really is the best of the best. 

In One Ear and Out the Other

You shouldn’t take that job. Your Tory Burch flats are last season.  Don’t chew with your mouth open. You shouldn’t wear red lipstick. Why are you taking notes in pink pen?  Your tongue is blue from the ringpop you ate. Your presentation is dull. There’s not enough color. You should use a line graph instead of a bar graph. Don’t you know how to format? You sound like a robot when you speak in public. You’re swaying back and forth. Stop touching your hair. Look straightforward, stare into my eyes, and don’t let your gaze shift until you finish your closing remarks.

No matter where you are in the world or what you are doing at this very moment, people will criticize you.  They can’t help it. As human beings, it is in our animal nature to measure ourselves up against the competition and to bring down our opponents just enough to make them feel inferior.  But when we criticize people, whether we know it or not, we are doing it for a wide array of different reasons; thus when we receive criticism, we also have to assume that while some criticism is intended to help us grow, other criticism is intended to make us feel inferior or to make us appear weak in the eyes of an opponent. When we have so many comments and critiques flying at us every single day, how is it that we can differentiate between the ones that we should take to heart and the ones that we can allow to go in one ear and out the other?

If you are anywhere near as stubborn in your ways and grounded in your beliefs as I am, it probably takes a lot to get your attention.  Rarely do I take criticism to heart; people can say whatever they want about my work, my outfits, my appearance, my etiquette.  And while I may acknowledge the criticism coming out of someone’s mouth for an all of three seconds, rarely do I allow the critiques or comments to stick in my head beyond that. Because while I know that I’m not perfect and that I have many things to improve upon in my life, I take a data driven approach to almost everything I do.  So for every 100 criticisms I have received, I have received almost double the accolades - so in my head, they kind of cancel each other out.  And rarely does someone manage to stop me in my tracks and make me think twice about my actions.

With that said, it has happened – just this past week actually.  For days on end, I had spent countless hours working on this project that I had to put together, which was extremely out of my comfort zone. I hadn’t done a lot of work of this nature before, so while I gave the project a gallant effort, I knew deep down that even if I put my best foot forward, it probably wasn’t going to be my best work.  After slaving away over my computer for days on end, I finally had a final product that I was marginally proud of – sure, it wasn’t perfect, but I stepped out of my comfort zone and did my best to assume the challenge and construct a noteworthy product.

I rarely share my finished work with a significant amount of other people before I throw it in the ringer for the big dogs to assess. But given this project was out of my normal realm of work, I figured that I would run it by one of the closest people that I have in my life to get a second opinion.  Almost every time that I had sent my work to this person before, he often followed-up with extremely positive feedback, giving me some type of confirmation that my work really was as good as I thought it was.  So in hopes of receiving a similar set of feedback on this project, I made some final edits on the file and sent it over.  While I knew it wasn’t my best work, I never expected this type of reaction – not only did he think that it was bad, but he made it impeccably clear that there was no other option aside from redoing the entire project from scratch.  Well, there went one week of my life – hours of slaving over my computer and working my butt off only to have to wipe the slate clean and go back to phase one.

While it was my initial instinct to want to get yet another opinion of my work in hopes that someone else might feel differently, my gut told me that for one primary reason, his feedback held some truth to it.  After telling me how excruciatingly painful it was for him to even get through my entire project, he did not just tell me how crucial it was that I needed to start over and throw this version in the trash; but instead, he said that he was going to help me redo the entire project, and that he would be there this time to help me along the way.  After trusting what he had said and working through the entire project with him a second time, I pinned the two final versions up against each other, and they were like night and day.  He was right, my initial project was not representative of my best work; yet had he simply criticized me and then retreated like others often do, his words wouldn’t have pulled as much weight.

Though doing my entire project two times was marginally painstaking, the experience really helped me to learn an important lesson about interpreting criticism.  In the midst of so much feedback (both positive and negative) being thrown our way, it is often challenging to know what to make out of everything.  While it is often detrimental to take all criticism to heart when the person criticizing you or your work might not have the purest of intentions, it can also hold you back from reaching certain levels of self-improvement if you put up the blinders and are resistant to feedback in all of its forms.  So how can you determine when to take negative criticism seriously and when to simply nod your head and keep on walking?

For me, there are three main indicators that I have come to take into consideration when making this decision:

Test their reliability: How much do you trust this person? What role do they play in your life? How has their feedback measured up to your outcomes in the past?

Examine whether they are an active or passive criticizer: Is the person who is criticizing you offering to help you improve, or are they throwing words at you and retreating from the situation?

Measure their intentions: Putting the scenario in perspective, does this person have pure intentions? Do they have your best interests in mind? Are they on your side or are they a competitor who may simply be trying to weaken your moral?

Through creating a set of personal criteria to assess whether or not you should internalize criticism, this will give you significantly more control over your self-confidence and you will find it easier to maintain a stronger sense of self.  Just as it is important to assess criticism on the receiving end, it is also important to take these points into account when providing criticism or feedback to others.  If we are evaluating the work of a close friend or colleague, it is crucial that we commit to helping them improve in the area in which we are critiquing in order to have our feedback taken seriously.  Not only will this help others continue to improve, but it will also help us to improve ourselves personally through learning how to turn our words into actions and impact the lives of those around us instead of wasting our breath.

The Real 'Why' of Going Ivy

I remember the moment that I found out I had gotten into Princeton like it was yesterday. I had just gotten home from gymnastics practice, and I was sitting in our family office in my gymnastics leotard as my family was anxiously hovering over my shoulder awaiting the big news. For the first time in my life, I really didn’t have high expectations, but there was a tiny glimmer of hope that had me on the edge of my seat as I logged-on to the Princeton admissions website. While all I really expected from the Princeton admissions department that evening was for them to wish me luck on my future endeavors, when I opened the admissions decision, I saw a big orange and black tiger on the screen – and under it, an orange headline that said CONGRATULATIONS.  I was frozen. I had absolutely no idea what to think, aside from the fact that there was inevitably a glitch in the system and I had gotten another awaiting student’s admissions decision instead of my own.  Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. And yet every single time I reloaded the page, that tiger just kept popping back up on the screen. 

After finally hitting refresh enough times to convince myself that I wasn’t living in a daydream, I started screaming at the top of my lungs and running around my house in circles. Not too long after, my parents and siblings jumped in with me – and together we probably sounded like a herd of inharmonious band geeks. I’m surprised the neighbors didn’t call the cops because they thought we were throwing another hoopla in the backyard. After my voice was strained and I was all out of juice, I tried checking some of my other Ivy accounts, only to find the sites bogged down by other overachieving Ivy-League wannabees who were doing exactly the same thing. Given I didn’t apply to Harvard and had already been accepted to Princeton, the anxiety in awaiting my Cornell and Penn admissions decisions wasn’t quite as nail-biting. Yet, there was definitely an ounce of curiosity eating away at me, even if only for bragging rights and self-satisfaction.  In an effort to try to prove to myself that this was actually real life and that I wasn't dreaming, I decided to jump in the shower instead of staring at the computer screen as I angrily hit refresh on my Penn and Cornell accounts countless times.  But while I had found it within myself to let the scent of uncertainty linger in the air for another half-hour or so, my parents wanted answers.  So they continued to try to swim their way through the sea of nail-biting students, and after countless efforts, they finally broke through.  This time it was my mom who initiated the screaming and that could only mean one thing – getting into Princeton wasn’t a fluke, as I had been accepted into two lesser, but still noteworthy Ivy League schools as well.  As my mom started banging on the bathroom door to tell me the good news, I started jumping up and down and dancing around like a monkey in the shower.

All in all, it was a good night, a night that I will never forget.  After countless years of pushing myself to new limits and dealing with the many sources of criticism and dumb blonde jokes that had come my way, within seconds, I had all of the validation that I needed. I no longer cared that some of my friends got better grades on their math tests, or that I didn’t have perfect SAT scores, because three schools that I never imagined getting into wanted me to spend the next four years of my life on their campuses. In the public high school that I attended, the day after college admissions decisions come out is college t-shirt day, where all of the seniors wear the shirt of the school that they plan on attending. While I had only told maybe a handful of my close friends and mentors about my multiple Ivy League acceptances the night before, word travels like lightening, and when I walked into my first period honors physics class the next morning, all eyes were on me.  For months, I had been daydreaming about what it might feel like to finally be able to wear a Princeton t-shirt and actually know that my love for the school was not unrequited – not only did I want them, but they wanted me too.  But as I faced a whirlwind of fake smiles masking the glares that many others were not as suave at hiding, I wanted to crawl back under my covers.  The t-shirt that I was so proud to wear would have to stay hidden under my sweatshirt until I built up the nerve to take it off during second period. But just because I was too afraid to flaunt the word Princeton across my chest, it didn’t mean that people didn’t imagine it being there anyway. As I sat slumped down in my chair in the back row of my physics class, I remember a girl turning around to talk to me, as I thought to myself – here we go. After the clichéd small talk and congratulations, this girl took me aback with something that I will never forget.  After talking more about her college options and trying to soften the blow of not getting into the Ivy League schools herself, she told me that I was so lucky to have gotten into Princeton, because now I would be set for life.

While getting into Princeton was undoubtedly a noteworthy achievement, I took the girl’s comment as nothing more than excessive kindness and exaggeration at the time. But now I know that she was right.  As great as it was to see that tiger wagging his tail on my computer screen the night before, I definitely hadn’t considered the ramifications of what a Princeton acceptance meant.  For that day of school and for many to follow, I had to internalize the whispers and glares of all of the people who felt they were smarter and more qualified than I was, and therefore couldn’t fathom why Princeton had possibly wanted me over them.  Were many people in my graduating high school class more naturally intelligent than I was? Absolutely.  In the midst of living in a yuppie town full of star athletes, driven students, and well-rounded people, I was rarely the smartest person in the room, and I was okay with that.  I was never afraid to ask question after question in class, or to call my friends at two in the morning admitting that I had no idea how to do any of the physics problems on our homework assignment. Not everything came as naturally to me as it did for other people, but there is one thing that I am certain of – and that is that I wanted it more than anything.  And passion and grit can take you further than anything else in the world.

While there is no exact science to college admissions decisions, I would definitely say that getting into the top schools is a lot more like a creative writing piece than a math test.  So all of the people who didn’t think I deserved to be wearing that Princeton t-shirt would just have to live with the uncertainty of the situation, just the same as I would. As the days passed and the date on the calendar crept closer and closer to the time when I would have to commit to a particular school, I explored all of my noteworthy options and tried to consider what going to each school would mean for the next four years of my life.  But while it was the next four years of my life that were primarily weighing on my decision, it was really the next seventy that I should have been mulling over in my head.  As I went from one school to the next in attempt to make my decision, I tried to talk to as many students and alumni as possible in attempt to get a sense for what my experience at the school would be like, and ultimately why I should attend. Getting into all of these great schools definitely gave me a temporary chip on my shoulder, because I felt like for a fleeting moment, I was on top of the world.  I was a senior in high school, the captain of the gymnastics team, and according to the girl in my physics class, I was set for the rest of my life.  So over time the glares of those who resented me only started to fuel my fire, and avoidance slowly began to morph into a feeling of power as I embraced my present and tried to start writing my future.

When I had the opportunity to spend a few days on the Princeton campus for Princeton Preview, I was immersed in a blur of orange and black, with students presenting me with all sorts of reasons why Princeton was the best school in the world.  And while they were struggling through writing their thesis or pulling an all-nighter in the library, they put on a good face and tried to convince me that Princeton was the best choice.  Though I appreciated all of the friendly students who were eagerly congratulating me and sharing their Princeton experiences, I have always been a pretty blunt person – and to this day, there is one rationale that has stuck with me - the ultimate reason that made me check the box that would sign me up for what I thought was four years of perpetual Halloween.  And that reason was this: for the rest of my life, I would be able to write the word PRINCETON in sharpie marker in big bold letters on a white piece of paper, and that is the extent of a resume that I would need to open any door I wanted in my future.  So while my high school crush may have been going to Penn and I would have been able to do division one gymnastics at Cornell, I realized that there was a flaw in my logic.  While the student’s notions may have been exaggerated, sitting where I am today with a Princeton diploma in my hand, I can say that there is all too much truth to the premise of his argument.

After internalizing the student’s words and trying to look at the situation in its entirety, I realized that the college that I would choose was not only going to impact the next four years of my life, but it would impact the seventy to follow.  And after coming to see the strength of Princeton’s community and alumni network at a dinner that I attended, my decision was a no-brainer. Saying yes to Princeton would not only mean four years of pushing myself academically and being exposed to some of the best professors that this country has to offer.  It would also mean setting myself up for a lifetime of opportunity, with countless proud tigers bending over backwards to help me every step of the way.  While there are a vast amount of direct benefits that come with attending an Ivy League school, such as incredible professors, wonderful academic and career opportunities, and all of the amazing peers whom you will have the opportunity to share your knowledge with along the way – the real ‘why’ of attending a school like Princeton is most clearly depicted in the stream of orange and black tigers who parade past Nassau Hall during reunions every single year.  From the proud tigers in the old guard to the seniors who are about to graduate, the group of alumni that you become a part of when you walk out of Fitzrandolph Gate at commencement is simply indescribable. I have this one Princeton t-shirt that says ‘once a tiger, always a tiger’ and as cheesy as that slogan sounds, there is no better way to articulate my Princeton experience. And now instead of having one Princeton t-shirt that I would wear under my sweatshirt in high school, secretly wondering what the word Princeton would really mean in the context of my own life, I have more Princeton t-shirts than I know what to do with, and I wear them proudly. While I may still not be the smartest person in the room, I am and forever will be one of many in a pack of tigers who are always there to help me find my way.  And though I may not have all the answers, I know that for the rest of my life, the answer will be just a phone call away.