As a Writing Center fellow, I definitely have conferenced my share of writing seminar essays, and I know that there are a lot of common themes that first years worry about. In this post, I wanted to make a checklist of exercises to try before you submit your final draft!
Continue reading Things to Check for Before Submitting your Writing Seminar Paper
As we return from Spring Break, we’re all getting ready to finish up the semester and launch into whatever we might have planned for the summer. However, now is also a time to reflect on the past year, and begin thinking about what we might want to change, or what we want to continue in the upcoming academic year. One exciting opportunity to consider is to join PCUR! We are now accepting applications for new correspondents for the 2019-2020 academic year.
What is so great about being a part of PCUR? Continue reading to find out what the current correspondents have to say about why they joined PCUR, what they have enjoyed about the experience so far, and why they would encourage others like you to apply.
Continue reading 5 Reasons to Join PCUR
As summer approaches, it is time for us to begin finalizing summer plans. An important summer option that many Princeton students forget to consider is taking courses at other institutions over the summer. This option allows you to take prerequisites and certain AB distributional requirements outside of Princeton and free your schedule to take other interesting electives during your time here. In this post, I will outline the process of getting approval for summer courses and suggest possible funding opportunities to cover course tuition.
Continue reading How to Take Summer Classes
This winter, for our seasonal series entitled “Professorship and Mentorship,” PCURs interview a professor from their home department. In these interviews, professors shed light on the role that mentorship has played in their academic trajectory, including their previous experiences as undergraduate and graduate students as well as their current involvement with mentorship as independent work advisers for current Princeton undergraduates. Here, Shanon shares his interview.
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As part of our seasonal series on faculty research, I sat down with Professor of Religion Anne Marie Luijendijk to discuss her work in Early Christian History through the study of papyrus manuscripts. Having taken a course with Professor Luijendijk before, I must say that she is one of the most enthusiastic educators I’ve ever met. As such, it was definitely a privilege to speak with her about her own research. You can read our conversation below. If you’re interested in advice for working with a faculty adviser, the importance of taking walks, or the historical study of ancient religious manuscripts, then read on! Continue reading Professorship and Mentorship: An Interview With Professor of Religion Anne Marie Luijendijk
In almost every seminar I’ve taken at Princeton, one of the main assignments has been a weekly student presentation. The professor typically passes a syllabus around the room and asks each student to choose a week or two to present. The structure of these presentations will vary, but I’ve collected some tips for how to prepare an A+ class presentation:
Make sure you understand your professor’s expectations. How long is the presentation supposed to be? Are you expected to lead the whole class discussion or just introduce the readings? What types of information do they want you to provide: Background for the readings? Summary of the arguments? Your own analysis? It can help to schedule a meeting with your professor the week before you present to review these expectations and receive some personalized guidance. If you’re brave enough, consider asking these questions in class on the first day so your classmates can also benefit!
Continue reading How to Give an A+ Presentation in Seminar
This winter, for our seasonal series entitled “Professorship and Mentorship,” PCURs interview a professor from their home department. In these interviews, professors shed light on the role that mentorship has played in their academic trajectory, including their previous experiences as undergraduate and graduate students as well as their current involvement with mentorship as independent work advisers for current Princeton undergraduates. Here, Andrea shares her interview.
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Udi Ofer is a Vi
Outside of class, he is the Deputy National Political Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Director of the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice, which is dedicated to ending mass incarceration in the United States. His background as a civil rights lawyer brings a valuable perspective to the task force seminar “Rethinking Criminal Justice: Policy Responses to Mass Incarceration,” which he leads in the Woodrow Wilson School. I’m taking his seminar this semester, and because of my interest in his research (see posts here and here about my JP last semester, which was also about incarceration), I decided to interview him as part of PCUR’s winter seasonal series.
Have you ever wanted to learn Photoshop or make a 3D model? Maybe you’re trying to edit a video or record a podcast?
This year, I have become a frequent visitor to the Digital Learning Lab (DLL), an interdisciplinary, digital creative space located in Lewis Library. I first visited the DLL in the fall in order to borrow a drawing tablet to make a digital illustration for an issue of Nassau Weekly. Since my first introduction to the DLL, I have continued to learn more about all that is offered there, and I had to share!
Continue reading Macs, Tablets, Photoshop and More: Exploring the Digital Learning Lab
I went to Paris! Not just for fun—although it’s a dope city—but to get some thesis research done to narrow down a topic. In the first part of this series, I mentioned how I submitted an application for funding to research advertisements in museum archives and libraries in Paris. My goal was to narrow down the initial research question I had at the very beginning of my research process: how Public Service Announcements (PSAs) subvert the capitalist practices within traditional commercial advertising. My goal was to see the advertisements that inspired the French theorists I’ll be drawing from in my thesis. But, alas, there was one problem—when faced with an entire archive of advertisements, where do I even begin??
I spent most of my time at the Bibliothèque Forney, a library specializing in design and the decorative arts. I emailed ahead of time to speak with one of the librarians, who wanted to get a sense of my argument and which advertisements he could direct me into researching according to my response. After explaining my general thesis topic and the research I had done in my previous two JPs (pro-tip: explaining a thesis topic in a foreign language is a good marker for how well you understand it—or rather how much you don’t), he responded bluntly: “You really need to narrow this down.” My face fell. That’s exactly what I was trying to do, the very reason I was in that library. I didn’t have a corpus of ads, which is what I was in search for in Paris. I had kind of hoped to look at a vast layout of ads and just be naturally drawn to an era, a medium, a theme, or product, but I quickly realized it was far too unrealistic to be able to survey three hundred years of French advertisements and just hope that a few of them would speak to me so I could write eighty pages about them. The librarian asked me how much time I had to write my thesis, suggesting one to two years, and I chuckled, slightly panicked, and said “six months.”
Continue reading De-Mystifying the Black Box Part 2: Research Abroad and Narrowing Everything Down
This winter, for our seasonal series entitled “Professorship and Mentorship,” PCURs interview a professor from their home department. In these interviews, professors shed light on the role that mentorship has played in their academic trajectory, including their previous experiences as undergraduate and graduate students as well as their current involvement with mentorship as independent work advisers for current Princeton undergraduates. Here, Nanako shares her interview.
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As one can see from the many PCUR posts on Junior Papers
and Senior Theses, independent work is a huge part of the junior and senior experience here at Princeton. However, everyone has different views on why this process is important, and different departments have different requirements. For this Winter Seasonal Series, I decided to interview Professor Gitai, who I met when I took MOL214: Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology in the fall of my first year at Princeton. Read on to learn more about the thesis writing process for concentrators in molecular biology, and how to make sure you get the most out of this process!
The spring semester is in full swing, and, for sophomores, concentration declaration is quickly approaching. Obviously, choosing a major is a big decision which will dictate what discipline you study in most of your courses and possibly direct your professional career. However, your department will also define your academic experience as an upperclass student in other ways; each department has different requirements for independent work, different research opportunities for undergraduates, and a different type of community. I found that considering all of these variables helped me to choose my major, but doing so may necessitate a bit of investigating.
So if you are a sophomore about to choose your concentration, what can you do over the next couple months to get to know the department(s) you are interested in?
Here are some tips to get you started, with examples from my beloved home Department of Geosciences:
Continue reading Get to Know your Department Before Concentration Declaration
