In the academic world of smart students taught by brilliant professors, Princeton brought a great deal to the table for its 4500 undergraduates. I sat in classrooms with luminaries sharing their knowledge along with stories of even-greater luminaries in Princeton's past.
Princeton's commitment to its smart students went the extra mile, at least for me. This is a great story that characterizes what Princeton University meant to me academically. I attended Cheltenham High School in the Philadelphia area and we started doing inter-scholastic mathematics competitions, kids from both schools competing doing math problems with time constraints. We won all the Philadelphia-area competitions so we decided we would challenge Stuyvesant High School, the top math school in New York City.
When Rutgers University found itself winning some football games, they even beat Vasser before it went coeducational (joke), they got a game with Penn State on their schedule. I don't know if it was a joke, I don't know what they thought would happen, but it was a slaughter, the kind of game Bill Cosby made comedy routines out of from his days playing for Temple University.
Well, we had no doubts of how we newbies would fare competing with the top New-York-City math-magnet school on problem similar to those they had trained on for years and, yes, that's exactly how the match turned out.
But here's the good part. Where were we going to have this Philly-vs-New-York competition? Where was a good venue halfway between these two metropoles? Well, not only was Princeton University ideal geographically, they were happy to host us all so they could meet their incoming freshman math weenies a few months early. I remember the fun we had afterward playing frisbee with my next-year classmates next to Joline Hall, one of the campus dormatories.
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