Adjectives that describe the students

Intelligent, Happy, Diverse, Integrated

Description

Princeton's student body is geographically, ethnically, financially and religiously diverse. This great diversity adds a lot to campus culture and, oddly enough, the dissimilarities between students often bring them together. At Princeton, you'll find academically talented athletes, intelligent legacies, not-so smart legacies, techies, science fair winners, dancers, singers, theatre types, musicians, preppies, and faculty brats. Any of those may also be internationally or locally diverse. They will all be interesting, accomplished, and enthused about something, and engaged in life.

Differences at Princeton often lead to discussion, debate and, oftentimes, more unity through the sharing of interesting experiences that Princeton students from varying backgrounds tend to embrace. As well, regardless of its high level of diversity, Princeton's student body generally shares a motivated intellectual curiousity and drive to learn both from their professors and their peers, who are, more often than not, earnest, friendly, a little wholesome and, most importantly, happy.

Princetonians are consistently among the nation's most academically satisfied students. This is, in part, because Princeton is arguably the most undergraduate-friendly member of the Ivy League. Other prestigious institutions often promote their powerful professional schools in business, law, and/or medicine, but not Princeton. Here, the focus is on the college students, who tend to be both similar and dissimilar to their peers at Harvard, Yale and other top universities.

The Princeton student body as a whole tends to have less of an edge than, say, Brown or Columbia. There are fewer piercings, fewer outrageous dressers, fewer unnatural hair colors--it's a bit more wholesome in its image than some other schools. Some described Princeton as "diverse on paper, but white in reality." While Princeton is ethnically diverse, most Princetonians are "culturally white in every way except skin color" in that they don't have a strong sense of ethnicity or race. This is, of course, good and bad. It's bad because you lose the sense of diversity some of the other ivies offer. People seem to ignore ethnicity; you'll always get the exclusive white cliques and the exclusively black cliques, but most people seem to mingle fairly freely. Thus, Princeton can seem culturally homogenous. However, this breeds an extremely integrated campus community that many students love.

Generally, Princetonians of all backgrounds seem extremely happy with their university and each other. Indeed, there is a slightly reduced sense of cultural diversity; however, this particlar manifestation of diversity is exchanged for a uniquely integrated student body that many celebrate as a hallmark of the Princeton experience.