Do you need research to get into Princeton?

PPrinceton screens applicants first for intellectual curiosity and academic excellence, as Janet Rapelye, its dean of admission from 2003 to 2018, put it. Families often translate curiosity into research, and research into a lab placement arranged through connections, sometimes at real cost to the summer and to everyone's patience. A former assistant director at Princeton, who read files for three years, said plainly that research is not required.

What he admired instead is open to almost any student willing to spend the time, at any school, and he had a favorite example.