Princeton University - Bric A Brac Yearbook (Princeton, NJ)

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This ...Ill.icl IS uh.il I h.ivr lou.ul t.. hv s(, mu. Ii l.rllcr Ih.m .■xpfcli ' il ami proMil. ' S tlir .• i)l..n..li..n tor ihr inii scqiu-nl insivjnificanco of iin adverse ratio. To hv inorr specific, my hi«h school boasted a uradualinjj class of four hundred, and after spending; six years lonelher, we knew each other all loo well. Therefore, 1 found comuiK to Princeton and finding; a thousand f-irls that 1 didn ' t know a refreshing experience. 1 have also found livinj in Wilson C.ollene a help in overcoming the .sex ratio. Wil- son is bi« enough to contain a reasonable number of coeds, yet small enouKh so that you can meet a per.son one ni ht at dinner and still be able to find him a ain the next night-something not always possible at Commons. Non-academic activities have been another great help. Sports that practice on a coed format such as gymnastics. karate, and, to some extent, scpiash and crew proviile a place to make acquaintances that with a little work can l.ni.iden into friend.ships. It all bods down to the simple |.u;t that with all the opportunities that Princeton pro- vides, anyone who is willing to make a little effort to meet people will be able to meiM a rea.sonable number of .;oeds. This survey is the view of .i freshman to whom every- thing at Princeton is still fresh and exciting. Conversing with upperdassmen, 1 notice that for many this excite- m(!nt wears off; people start to move in the; sam(! circles, learn to know everyone in lh(;se circles, and find th«! three-to-one ratio beginning to bcsar down. HoweviT. I will enjoy my freshman enthusiasm as long as it lasts and say that, particularly considering the fact that 1 should spend the majority of my time hrvv. working rather than girl-watching. 1 cannot justifiably complain about the number of coeds on campus. Steve; evitl

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i(nv(nl by a fn shmun As I turned my thoughts toward college in late Soptem- ber of my senior year, I was overwhelmed by the number of institutions willing to accept my application-pro vided it was accompanied by a twenty-five dollar check. One Saturday night, feeling a bit panicky, I sat down with a catalogue of U. S. colleges and a list of things I hoped to find in a college. Stuck somewhere in the middle of that list of criteria was the ratio of sexes: I wanted a college that roughly approximated society. By Sunday morning I had worked out a list of ten colleges that looked good. At this point coeducation really was an unimportant factor: it was easy to find colleges with sex ratios between five- to-one and one-to-five. Seven months later when 1 had to make the final deci- sion, the extent of coeducation became a much larger fac- tor. I had three colleges I was seriously considering, equal in almost every major aspect, and I was scraping the bot- tom of the trivia barrel in trying to make a decision. It was then that I began listening to all the prophets of doom preach about the sex ratios. Dartmouth, I was told, was populated by animals who, starved for female com- pany, regularly made mass weekend migrations to the more fertile southern lands. Princeton, being so close to New York, was great as long as you had a car and a bill roll that stretched across the country. Satisfying these conditions you might be able to date a coed once a month. Townies and exports, although not as intelligent, were more plentiful and better looking than the coeds af- ter you found the right contacts. Finding the right con- tacts, however, just might take all four years. The Yale alumni were convinced that Yale was vastly superior to all other Ivy schools in numbers and looks of coeds, and to prove their point, they made all their seminars coed one-to-one. Friends and classmates worked hard to con- vince those of us contmeplating Eastern schools that we were heading for instant insanity. They warned us that we would quickly be driven to the wildest lengths of des- peration chasing coeds that didn ' t exist. In all, it was a gloomy social picture I foresaw when, letting other con- siderations overrule the sex-ratio gossip, I chose to come to Princeton. Now, five months later, I can view the situation from a much more rational and knowledgeable position. It is true that girls are not on every street corner, but then again neither are they an endangered species. At times getting a date with a coed can indeed approach the im- possible, but with a little planning say two or three weeks of it, is is actually possible to go out on an occasional Sat- urday night. The situation is really not as bad as mere sta- tistics would seem to indicate. A helpful junior I met ex- plained it to me this way: First, one segment of any male class is so discouraged by previous reports that they never even try to get a date. Second, there seems to be a larger percentage of boys with girlfriends at home than girls with hometown boyfriends. Third, more boys turn into complete bookworms than girls. The net effect of these three factors is that the real ratio is reduced to the point where a perseverant male can usually find a date. However, since most of us spend more time going about trying to get educated than we spend searching for a Saturday night date, it is the day-to-day contact one has with the coeds on campus that is most important.

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dramati .i ;;i i i(!(.T n If I ' m to believe what everyone tells me, being a female engineer is unusual. I generally don ' t regard my position in that light until some bystander comments upon it. Granted, women constitute only a small fraction of all engineers, both nationwide and at Princeton; thus, th(;re is numerical justification for being labelled unusual. Yet. as an aspect of my personal life. I see nothing at all un- usual about engineering. It merely happens to be the field of study in which I ' m most interested. I ' m just another student-just another engineering student. Admittedly, these thoughts have not always constituted my outlook on the subject. My impressions and opinions have formed and shifted over my past two years at Princeton as I ' m sure they will continue to do in the future. My class was distinguished by being the first engineer- ing class to boast of more than three female members. At a reception during freshman week, the Dean of the Engi- neering School proudly announced that our entering class included nearly fifty football captains, an approxi- mately equal number of class presidents, and fourteen women engineers. Somehow, I felt this grouping to be a dubious honor and was slightly disturbed at being sin- gled out as an interestng statistic. In addition, since we women were the only visibly distinct group, our group status was doubly emphasized. For several months there- after we were known as the Fourteen. A group spirit did exist among us by second semester- created, perhaps, by virtue of our group label and by the fact that we had many classes together. (Freshman engi- neers take primarily the same courses.) Personally, I felt the need to be with other female engineers and to de- velop an identity as such. For whatever vague and vari- ous reasons, we banded together to form a student chap- ter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) in February of 197,3. Sophomore year brought about several significant changes. The character of the group changed as a few women decided engineering was not for them and as sev- eral new women transferred into engineering. The group ' s spirit seemed to dissipate as we scattered our- selves among the four departments. Our group associa- tion now focuses itself primarily within our separate de- partments. Due to the isolating influence of our departmental courses, we each generally see only the women in our own department. 1 am most struck by the apparent dramatic reversal in attitude toward SWE. Support and interest in the chapter by the women in my class has virtually died out. Perhaps it is because we are scattered among the departments and because we no longer have the time to get involved. Or, perhaps we ' ve already outgrown the need for such a group. For example, I personally am now secure in my identity as an engineering student. I find my sex irrele- vant to engineering and sense no speical consideration or treatment because I am a female. Male classmates accept me as an engineering student like themselves. At present, I would say their attitude is prevalent among Princetonian engineers. ' Virtually no notice is taken of our female gender, especially among the classes with the largest number of women. It is the upperclass nonengineers who continue to comment upon the rarity of women engineers. During Bicker, after I answered the inevitable What ' s your major? , I always received some variation of Really! Wow. That ' s unusual. There aren ' t many girl engineers, are there? I had virtually forgotten that my field of study and my career choice could be con- sidered out of the ordinary until the fact was repeatedly pointed out to me. Thus, according to outside opinion, being a woman en- gineer is a unique Princeton experience. But as far as I ' m concerned, it is not. terri pauline