When it comes to socializing, Princeton students are like all other college students in the universe - they like to party buck wild. But Princeton is not really a party school - it's more a place where everyone can find his or her own social scene. It just takes some scouting to figure out where that scene is.

Princeton's unusual "eating club" system is not very different from the fraternity/sorority scene at most other universities. The clubs are definitely ground zero for the campus social scene - they are the bar, the cafeteria, and the student center rolled into one. (Although this might change when construction is completed on the new campus-wide Student Center.) But you only join a club in the second half of your sophomore year, and even then you're not a full member until you're a junior. So what's a lowly underclassperson to do on a Saturday night? Any number of things, actually.

Thursdays and Saturdays are actually the big social nights on campus - Fridays, for some reason, are generally much quieter (some even refer to them as "date nights"). On a typical Thursday, a student might choose between a) going to a play, b) going to the Street to drink and play pool, or c) going to a quiet spot like the Murray-Dodge cafe and having some tea with friends. Often people have parties right in their dorm rooms, openly flouting the ban of beer kegs on campus and frequently getting busted by the proctors, who take the keg, the tap, and get you in some kind of trouble with a Dean. Arch sings, which are outdoor concerts by the school's a cappella groups conducted in the many acoustically wonderful arches on campus, are also a popular gathering spot for the music fans and singing group groupies.

But I'm focusing way too much on the event-driven social calendar - there is another side to Princeton social life, and that is at the residential colleges, where the underclassmen spend their first two years. Each college has a big main building with a dining hall, a library, a game room, and a lounge-type area for studying or coffee breaks. Meal time at the residential college is a huge social event, for it's here that students emerge from their rooms or the libraries, rubbing their book-weary eyes and greeting each other over strange bits of dining service food products. Residential colleges are wonderful because they represent the student body before it self-selects into the smaller sects of the eating clubs, so you students from all disciplines and interests mingling.

From a romantic perspective, Princeton isn't as bad as the students might make it out to be. There is a tendency of the student body to bemoan the lack of dating that goes on at Princeton, but really I think it's just those who don't have significant others making a big, self-pitying ruckus. In reality, plenty of people find romance at Princeton, and plenty of people also hook up drunkenly on a Saturday night and wake up in the morning with a flawed memory and a whomping hangover. I've done both, and I'm here to tell you that Princeton is not devoid of relationship potential - I submit as exhibit A my wonderful fiancee, who I met at a small party in a dorm room way back in 1995.

I don't want to underemphasize the importance of beer at Princeton, however - it plays a huge part at the eating clubs, and there are those students who choose to drink early and often every weekend. In fact, beer has been the center of many a controversy on campus, everything from a network news story to the Nude Olympics to the poor, drunk student who climbed atop the electrified train car and lost most of his limbs. It can be safely said that Princeton is as obsessed with drinking to get drunk as any other college in the country, and while it may not be a good thing it certainly keeps the party scene interesting.

Depending on your philosophy, one drawback to the Princeton social scene may be the eating clubs themselves. For most of them, the process of selecting new members is called "bicker," and some think it's as close to the ultimate in snobbery and elitism as one could ever come. Certainly it smacks of favoritism and injustice - where else are you selected purely on the basis of who you are and who you know? - but it would by hypocritical to decry elitism in the midst of one of the most elite institutions in the country. I was a member of a bicker club, and I was actually on the committee that ran the bicker process one year, and I can tell you that bicker, while not a perfect process, is about as fair as you can get while still being selective about club membership. The same debate rages every year about the injustice of bicker - school archives show that it's been the subject of heated arguments since the early 1900's - but each year the tradition continues. In a way it's like a rude introduction into the unfairness of life in general, and someday I hope someone writes a book on the process that lays bicker bare and portrays it as the complex mixture of good and bad that it is.

In my ratings below I picked some choices with "fraternity" and "sorority" in the titles - just substitute "eating clubs" in there for Princeton. There are definitely Greek organizations on campus, though - they don't really have houses, and they aren't officially recognized by the school, but they exist and they're growing every year. Many people belong to both an eating club and a fraternity or sorority, which sounds like a busy social calendar if I ever heard one. It will be interesting to see how the Greek community continues to integrate into campus life - more than once a sorority rented out my club's house for one of their events.

To wrap up this lengthy (but informative) review, I would have to say that Princeton really does offer something for everyone when it comes to the social scene. Students work hard and play hard, and the many talents and interests of the entire student body basically ensures that if it doesn't exist, someone will start it. I've only scratched the surface, too - go to the Campus Life page at http://www.princeton.edu/Siteware/CampusLife.shtml to learn more about what Princeton has to offer.



Recommended: Yes