<p>Hello, all!
I will be applying to colleges this upcoming fall. I wanted to take a minute and see if I could get any more information about what the social scene is like at Princeton. Given the transition from residential colleges to eating clubs, is it easy to make friends and keep them throughout your whole academic career there? Additionally, are the eating clubs very exclusive of others?
Thanks so much for sharing your insights! Any help is greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>As a 2018-er I haven’t started even freshman year yet, but I can tell you that you should not worry about the social scene at Princeton. Alumni giving rate is one of the best ways to measure how happy a university’s students are, because students who love their school are more likely to donate. Princeton has the highest giving rate of any university in America at 62.4%, and in fact no other university has a giving rate over 50%, not even peers like Harvard. Students, it would seem, are just really happy to be at Princeton.</p>
<p>To color my data with an anecdote, I have a friend there who said during her freshman year that the three months she had spent on campus were the greatest three months she had ever lived. She was already closer to her new friends than she had been to the school friends she’d known for 10 years or more.</p>
<p>To put it briefly, do not worry about having a happy social life at Princeton. You will. Worry instead about getting in. That’s not the question you asked so I won’t overload you with unsolicited advice, but do look at SCEA. It’s not binding and you have literally nothing to lose, but the acceptance rate is 18% (compared to about 4% in the regular round). Entry in the regular round is definitely still possible–I did it–but a little boost can never hurt.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Thank you so much! That was lovely and quite encouraging.</p>
<p>With the residential college system of 2 years and the upperclass years - it’s more like your first years are meant to intentionally throw you in with a lot of different types of kids and shake you out of whatever comfort zone you arrived from. The last two years let you gradually form new friendships and alliances based on where your eventual serious interests and comfort levels come to rest. Wherever they may be.</p>
<p>If you make serious friends with sound foundations freshman year - they will stand the test of time. You can also never see your freshman roommate again except maybe once or twice after the first year. Princeton’s big enough.</p>
<p>The one thing you can count on is that if you are accepted - there is a vast common community of kids where there are many who are just like you. Same interests. Same ambitions. Same thoughts. Same fears. Same sense of humor. You just have to find them. Don’t worry about anything you posted about in terms of finding friends and keeping them. There’s no way to come out of a school like Princeton without lifetime friends.</p>
<p>Thank you very much! I completely understand what you’re getting at.</p>