The author’s grandparents moved into this house in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan.
Research allows us to uncover the uncomfortable truths about our surroundings, or even our homes. I’m currently in AAS 350, an African American Studies class with Professor Keeanga Yamahatta-Taylor about the politics and policy of housing in the United States. It’s something that might seem straightforward at first — how complicated is building a house? But in reality, American housing policy and attitudes towards housing often perpetuate and preserve racist biases in the ways in which we build our communities.
Like many people my age, I am an uncertified, yet impressively efficient sleuth. Give me a name and some time, and I should be able to pull up at least two sources of information on any given person.
We know the process well: start with Google, aim for Facebook, and click on everything in between: Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, news media, public tax records, etc. – not to mention the terrifying wonders of Tigerbook.
I surprised my inner procrastinator this week and thought about my final essay for my junior seminar a week and a half before midterms. I had written about an interesting theme in my Blackboard response, and thought in passing that it could make a good topic for an extended essay. I didn’t take this thought too seriously at first, because with finals being months away, I didn’t want to add any extra stress overthinking
Don’t be alarmed! You don’t have to have your final essay together now, but even giving it a passing thought early on is helpful.
everything. But then I realized that thinking long-term about finals, even casually, could actually make Dean’s Date a lot less stressful. I then made a mental note of this potential essay topic and planned on consistently revisiting it as I progressed through the course.
Several difficulties come with courses that have final papers. Some prompts are open-ended, leaving you to find a relevant and interesting research topic related to the course with little guidance. Others are more specific, requiring you to tailor a semester’s worth of information and synthesize it into a Continue reading January Already? How to Begin Preparing for a Final Essay WAY in Advance
At Princeton, ‘finding your way’ can seem as daunting as escaping the Labyrinth. Even when things are going well, I find myself asking thinks like: What are the best courses to take next semester? What should I do next summer? What should I do with my life?
Developing a relationship with a mentor can be one of the most personally rewarding aspects of academic life at Princeton.
Questions like these don’t have easy answers, and as best as I can tell, we shouldn’t expect to wake up one day with everything figured out. But chipping away at these questions is important, and I’ve found it much easier to do so with some guidance. Where do we get guidance, though?
Enter the mentor. The mentor is your wiser half, your sensei—the person who guides you through this mysterious world with sage advice and unflagging support.
A continuation of my last post, in which I describe my experience starting to work as a research assistant at a Chemical and Biological Engineering lab here at Princeton. My work began in 10th grade and ended early this year.
Several months in, I felt like I was finally getting my footing. I had expanded my knowledge enough that I could understand, and make meaningful contributions to, the research project. I was working on computationally modeling the 3D structure of one of the protein receptors that HIV-1 uses to infect human cells. This receptor can bind either to HIV-1 or to other proteins (ligands), and when these ligands are bound to the receptor, they block the entry of HIV-1. By modeling these structures, we hoped to design a synthetic protein that could block HIV-1 infection by binding to the receptor.
A closeup of some of the sidechains of the protein structure for a receptor and ligand.
A few days after I returned home for the rest of the summer, I opened up an email from my post-doc supervisor and felt my heart skip a beat.
“Please write the introduction for our paper on modeling the structures of HIV-blocking proteins over the next two weeks.”
At some point in your Princeton career, you will likely have to write a long paper replete with a table of contents and extensive bibliography, possibly containing complex mathematical equations, and/or multiple figures and tables. For many students, especially those in the social sciences or humanities, writing a research paper using word processing software like Microsoft Word will be the fastest and most intuitive method (especially with the help of automated citation tools). However, for other students, formatting all of these features using regular word processors will be inefficient, or worse, create unsatisfactory results.
Formatting the different parts of your paper should not be a precarious balancing act! LaTeX automatically formats and coordinates all of these features so that edits are seamlessly incorporated into the document.
For these types of projects, you may benefit from a typesetting system capable of consistent structural layout, superior typographical quality, support for scientific equations, internally referencing figures and tables, and automatically compiling large bibliographies. Enter: LaTeX.
LaTeX is a free open-source typesetting system that uses code and text to generate a PDF document. It allows you to explicitly define formatting options so that document structure remains consistent. Although the workflow is completely inefficient for writing short documents, when it comes to large and complex papers, LaTeX can make life a lot easier. For projects like Senior Theses, many departments at Princeton even have LaTeX templates with correct formatting built-in. While struggling to get a handle on LaTeX last year, I learned some useful strategies that will help you vault over the learning curve:
Nothing screams legal research more than hefty, leather-bound tombs and dark wood furnishings.
While Princeton doesn’t have a law school (at least, not anymore), a number of University departments offer interesting courses in legal theory, history, and philosophy. Students in these courses—especially those new to legal studies—may find themselves overwhelmed by strange Latin words and mountains of footnotes. Fortunately, there are a number of online and University-provided resources specifically geared toward legal research, which anyone writing a paper concerning law would be wise to use. The following is a rundown of some of my favorites from my time in POL 316: Civil Liberties with Professor Robert George. Continue reading An Introduction to Research Resources in Law
For me, and for most other Princeton students, a thesis is the longest thing you’ll have written at this point in your life, a particularly daunting task. No matter what happens, there’s no reason to panic or despair about the task at hand. Take a deep breath — everything will turn out fine.
I enrolled in GEO/WRI 201, Measuring Climate Change: Methods in Data Analysis & Scientific Writing, last Fall to challenge myself and learn how to integrate field work, scientific analysis, and writing. Although I already had cursory experience in these areas thanks to a Freshman Seminar on Biogeochemistry in the Everglades and a summer of assisting ecological fieldwork in Mozambique, I had never created and executed my own field project from start to finish. In my naiveté, I presumed that although the course would be difficult, I would conduct research that had a clear and established “finish-line”—and that I would reach it.
My project centered around quantifying changes in vegetation cover in Utah over the past twenty years using satellite imagery. The first couple months of the class were frustrating and I floundered across the deadlines. Most of the science courses I had taken offered a framework: a set of given questions with specific, correct answers. In real research, I found, you must create the questions—and they don’t necessarily have “correct” answers.
Successful research is based on convincing motive that builds off of key literature to contextualize and explain the broader importance of a specific research question.
The Author takes a GPS reading in Spanish Fork Utah. Unfortunately, the field work never even made it into the paper…
Despite my struggles, the project seemed to be coming along. Using images from multiple Landsat satellites, I created a beautiful figure showing a steep decline in vegetation tightly correlated with rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall. Genuine results linking changing climate to remotely sensed vegetation! I was thrilled.
However, after weeks of writing and data analysis, I discovered that the seemingly important trends I was writing about were–to put it bluntly–garbage. In a peer review session, another student in the class hypothesized that the apparent decline in vegetation might be simply an artifact of comparing imagery from different Landsat satellites. I scoffed–but I also started to worry.
The loop around Poe Field and through Icahn Laboratory makes an excellent walking path, day or night.
It’s a typical Monday night in J Street. All around me, students are hunched over notebooks and pecking at laptops. Faces are neutral, if not grim, betraying the anxieties of the week ahead. In the midst of the bustle of Princeton life, it’s all too easy to let this— “the grind”—become the uninterrupted norm. I often wonder, though, is this truly what’s best for our personal and academic development in the long run?
