Nass Admissions Staff, GPA or SAT? Meditations on Preview, Cast Iron, 2016
Nass Admissions Staff, GPA or SAT? Meditations on Preview, Cast Iron, 2016
  1. Overstate your sexual prowess/experience.
  2. Drink your host student’s Fireball, puke for the very first time.
  3. Have an existential crisis.
  4. Allude to the fact that you’re the only one from your school who got in to Princeton.
  5. Answer inquiries about your SAT score with your SAT score + 100 points.
  6. Answer inquiries about your SAT score with “we either got the same score, or you did worse.”
  7. Answer inquiries about your SAT score with a bludgeon to the head.
  8. Drop acid on an Orange Key tour.
  9. Compare trust fund sizes.
  10. Little entryway 9.
  11. Pee in the Prospect Garden fountain.
  12. Propose to your host in Prospect Garden.
  13. Hold a one-woman arch sing.
  14. Hold a one-woman arch sing and charge the other prefrosh money to watch it.
  15. Ask presumptuously if the Dining Houses are party-free, because you’re Going To College For An Education.
  16. Scowl judgmentally at the answer.
  17. Pay your host for the nachos they “buy” you at late meal.
  18. Ask everyone you meet if they want to read your common app essay.
  19. Get a coffee at Witherspoon’s and contemplate how you would explain to someone that you chose not to go to Princeton because the quality of campus coffee was so low.
  20. Go to Small World.
  21. Leave Small World empty handed because who carries cash anymore?
  22. Walk through the curvy statue outside Lewis.
  23. Attend an advanced physics lecture because you got an A in Physic C: Mechanics.
  24. Realize high school physics is garbage.
  25. Introduce yourself as a prefrosh to the professor of the advanced physics course.
  26. Get brushed off by the physics professor who could not possibly care less about your meager existence.
  27. Introduce yourself to a prefrosh as the professor of the advanced physics course.
  28. Scoff at the line in Rapelye’s address about the “undergraduate focus.”
  29. Remind yourself that you are not actually an undergraduate yet.
  30. Have an existential crisis.
  31. Dress your family in corduroy and denim.
  32. Cry in a stall in Frist.
  33. Realize that “open house” does not mean the same thing it did in high school. tuck your jack daniels & eight ball back into your free admissions tote. soon, soon.
  34. Board a TigerTransit bus for the first and only time.
  35. Ignite a class war.
  36. Spread misinformation.
  37. Spread the weird disease that originated in your small town in, like, Manitoba.
  38. Spread Joy®—The Nut-Free Nutella Alternative!—all over your face & body at Rocky brunch.
  39. Hook up with someone who ends up being the head of a student group you are interested in joining. take a gap year for the sole purpose of avoiding them.
  40. See them at reunions every goddamn year anyway.
  41. Realize all mistakes have consequences.
  42. Have an existential crisis.
  43. Study photographs of every eating club online. walk down prospect & point them out to the other prefrosh. you are their queen.
  44. Give your orange drawstring bag to your parents because otherwise people will know you’re a prefrosh.
  45. Leave your lanyard on.
  46. Have a panic attack & retreat to the j.crew dressing room. breathe. brindled grotto. oxford yoke. marled watercress. this is your safe space. amagansett brine.
  47. Go to the Bent Spoon.
  48. Leave the Bent Spoon empty handed because WHO CARRIES CASH ANYMORE?!
  49. Your parents do. That’s why you brought them.
  50. Forget your host’s name.
  51. Fail to ask within an appropriate amount of time.
  52. Get mccoshed and get your acceptance revoked but it’s fine because you didn’t want to spend four years at this hellhole anyway.
  53. Accidentally spend two days at Westminster Choir College.
  54. Break up with your boyfriend 3 days before & sign him up for 45 listservs at the activities fair.
  55. Match with a current student on Tinder.
  56. Match with Dean Rapelye on Tinder.
  57. Match with Professor Emeritus Toni Morrison on Tinder.
  58. Get on the chapel wedding waitlist.
  59. Insist on pronouncing the “th” in “Mathey.”
  60. Paddle in the woody woo fountain with your eyes closed.
  61. Go to all the office hours.
  62. Kick back, chill out, live your life.
  63. Have an existential crisis.
  64. Go an Anscombe Society meeting.
  65. Go home with an Anscombe Society member.
  66. Realize what it meant, to you and to them, that you did that.
  67. Ask about tryouts for the debate team, then actually meet the debate team.
  68. Mistake Christopher Eisgruber for Robbie George.
  69. Mistake Robbie George for Ted Cruz.
  70. Hang out with other prefrosh who you think are really interesting and cool who all decide to go to Yale instead.
  71. Matriculate to Brown.
  72. Impersonate a tour guide.
  73. Lead your flock to ruin.
  74. Pretend not to be a virgin.
  75. Receive oral sex on your host’s floor while your host is asleep.
  76. Wander away from your dorm alone at night, walk past Forbes, through the golf course until your reach the graduate college; stand under the large arches, look up at the wistful, lovely spires, and, for a second, feel grateful.
  77. Come to a Nassau Weekly meeting with a stack of every poem you’ve written since middle school in the hopes of being the first of your classmates to be published.
  78. When that doesn’t work, send them to the Nassau Literary Review.
  79. When that doesn’t work, send them to the Princeton Alumni Weekly.
  80. Poop in a Firestone carrel.
  81. Have an existential crisis.
  82. Pregame This Side of Princeton.
  83. Black out at the activities fair.
  84. Visit the Nassau Weekly table, write your email, and alter your young future irrevocably.
  85. Wonder if you have what it takes.
  86. Wonder why you were created.
  87. Wonder if you have been created sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
  88. Congratulate yourself but not too hard because holistic college applications are a scam and a crapshoot and you could have been rejected but you weren’t, and that’s something.
  89. Love your body, love yourself.
  90. Procure cigarettes from the Wa.
  91. Silently stare in awe at the kid who posted the poem about sex from the point of view of a penis on the Official Princeton Class of 2020 page.
  92. Ask current students if, like, they’re happy with their grades or if they’re in the top quintile or like do they really care about grades, ya know?
  93. Ask current students for help on your D3, which you’ve already started drafting.
  94. Find a hidden compartment in Nassau Hall.
  95. It will lead you to a vast historical conspiracy involving George Washington (one of the good guys), Woodrow Wilson (one of the bad guys), and Professor Emeritus Toni Morrison (the best guy).
  96. Follow the trail of breadcrumb clues to the top.
  97. Confront Eisgruber.
  98. Get told.
  99. Steal the Declaration of Independence.
  100. Steal Nassau Hall.
  101. Steal the hearts of a school and a nation.
  102. Pull a Parent Trap and go home with someone else’s parents.
  103. Lie naked on alexander beach & accept that you are no more than a tiny baby, a new specimen birthed into the great Princeton experiment. all memories of your past life have been erased. you may find directions for continuing into the next phase of development in the user manual.

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