A Lighter View of Bicker? Maybe Eating Club Culture Should Chill Out

In December, amid the warm embrace of dining hall dinners, conversations across my sophomore class began to center around a subject that many Princetonians can remember all too well: bicker. As a student whose decision to attend Princeton was, in part, informed by my fascination with our one-of-a-kind eating club system, I had a growing sense of nervous excitement to finally participate in the experience and all the fun it seemed to entail. But as the week approached, I was disappointed to find that many of my peers felt an anxious stress towards the experience that not only clouded their perspective of bicker, but my own, lighter view.

As a student who has made it through bicker, I come bearing outtakes from what the experience looks like in 2025 — and how it may compare to bicker in the past. In many ways, it remains an exciting, one-of-a-kind hallmark of the undergraduate experience. In others, it’s gotten strangely corporate, a bit preprofessional, and detached from what it makes itself out to be. But perhaps combatting these changes doesn’t demand an overhaul of bicker itself — but rather a perspective shift from both the clubs and the students.

Let’s start from the beginning. In early December, a slew of emails arrived from Prospect Avenue. While I had hoped to find invites to mixers or parties, I actually found invites to coffee chats:

   “Sign up for Ivy pre-bicker coffee chats!!”
   “TI Coffee Chat sign up”
   “COTTAGE COFFEE CHATS”

While I chose to view these as casual conversations to meet a member and learn about a club (they were), many of my friends did not have the same experience. Instead of getting ready to meet people socially, they felt like they were getting ready for a job interview. In defense of the bickerees, these invites did feel a bit … corporate? Why were my first encounters with eating clubs — places that I imagined being fun, interesting spots to have a meal and catch up with friends — presented with the same terminology used by Deloitte recruiters?

As bicker progressed, the preprofessional vibe surrounding it continued to grow — along with stress over whether any given student’s social “resume” was enough to get them into their first-choice club. Friends nervously bantered over lunch about whether they knew enough of the right people in the clubs they wanted to go to — whether they had “networked” enough. Were their affiliations with athletics teams, fraternities, a cappella groups, and improv troupes enough to make them a “lock” at a certain club? Bicker hadn’t even started. When it finally did, people anxiously readjusted their bicker strategies in accordance with any tips from upperclassman friends in the bicker discussion rooms. Decisions to “pref” a certain club over another became less about choosing the club you enjoyed more, but rather the one that could guarantee a spot.

What if they were rejected from their first-choice club, their second-choice club filled up, and they were forced to choose some alternative? Was this even how bicker worked? Did anyone know anything?

I was relieved when I logged on to the Interclub Council website on Friday morning and received my decision — not because bicker was over, but because people could finally stop talking about it. Between coffee chats, networking, and strategizing, I felt like the process had put me through the wringer — and I was someone who enjoyed bicker.

As I reflected on the less enjoyable aspects of the experience, I wondered if it had always been this way. I reached out to Natalia Temesgen ’08, a Cap & Gown alumna and my alumni interviewer from my Princeton application process. When I texted her to ask if she had to go through coffee chats or strategic meetings during her bicker experience, her response said pretty much all there is to know: “Yikes, no, lol.” When we got to talking, though, I realized that the bicker she described sounded far different from what I had experienced.

For one, there seemed to be a lot less stress. “The implication was that you were being judged, but it felt very informal. Most folks were cutting up, teasing, just doing stupid things,” Temesgen said.

It also seemed a lot less network-y. “When we discussed who was bickering, it was informal,” she said. “Of course relationships with teams and outside groups made a difference, but the greater focus was on social stamina and intelligence.” While this may have been Cap & Gown specific, the vibe was that students were a lot less worried about their “network” going into bicker than they are now, no matter the club.

This lack of formality extended to the bicker process itself: “It felt kind of unstructured. We would go to parties — it was a holistic audition. Are you fun in different kinds of settings? It was certainly not an interview,” she said. This part shocked me the most. While mixers and parties are an occasional event during the “pre-bicker” process, they are not a part of the actual bicker process today. Temesgen’s bicker sounded fun. It sounded like everything I hoped bicker would be. It left me hoping that bicker could get back to how it was in 2006.

I think the shift in bicker is indicative of a larger preprofessional focus that has taken hold at Princeton. At a school where consulting and investment banking clubs thrive, aspects of the competitive process driving those selective careers seem to be seeping into the social scene. While the fault certainly falls on the clubs, it also falls on the bickerees. At the end of the day, you are getting to know your peers, not hiring managers who will decide your social fate for life.

A simple prescription is to not take bicker so seriously. I believe I was only able to enjoy bicker when I stopped taking it as seriously as it seemed so many people were and bend it into more of the laid-back experience I had hoped it would be. I understand that it is easy for me, someone who got into the club of his choice, to say that. But I also know that many of my friends who did not take bicker seriously and did not get into the club of their choices ended up enjoying bicker regardless. And I like to think that I would have felt the same way.

But the bottom line is that one that has already been said hundreds of times but still rings true: Bicker does not decide your social fate at Princeton. There are many ways to have a social life — including non-bicker eating clubs! The sooner that students can realize this and develop a healthier, less corporate view of bicker campus-wide, the sooner we can have a healthier bicker.