Editor's Note: This is the third in a five-part series exploring Judge Sonia Sotomayor's background and life with those who know her, and revealing the experiences that might shape her views as a Supreme Court justice if confirmed.





Sotomayor won the Moses Taylor Pyne Prize, the highest honor given to an undergraduate at Princeton.





PRINCETON, New Jersey (CNN) -- Sonia Sotomayor spent her first week at Princeton University obsessing over the sound of a cricket. Growing up in New York City, her only notion of this insect was Jiminy from "Pinocchio." She tore her dorm room apart looking for the critter every night.





Finally, her then-boyfriend and future husband visited and explained that the cricket was outside the room, where she had been holed up most of that week in 1972.





"This was all new to me: we didn't have trees brushing up against windows in the South Bronx," Sotomayor recalled in a speech to the Princeton Women's Network in 2002.





The freshman who was so taken aback by a cricket's chirping now has a more public challenge: Senate hearings on whether to confirm her as a Supreme Court justice, potentially the first Latina to hold such a post.





At one time, being different may have been difficult -- for it wasn't just Princeton's crickets that startled Sotomayor. The academics and the students on the leafy Gothic campus, with its ivy-covered dormitories and castle-like towers, also made her feel out of place.





Sotomayor, who was on a full scholarship, started "a little more on the shy side," said Sergio Sotolongo, who attended high school and Princeton with Sotomayor.





"She did mention that, as a freshman, she felt sometimes intimidated by others and didn't really raise her hand very much," said Sotolongo, now chairman and CEO of Student Funding Group in Liberty Corner, New Jersey.  Watch classmates, professor remember Sotomayor »





As a first-year student, Sotomayor felt what she's called a "chasm" between herself and her classmates. She really only knew the Bronx and Puerto Rico, while her classmates spoke of European vacations and skiing. She said in 1990 that she felt she was a "product of affirmative action" and questioned whether she would have been accepted into the Ivy League using "traditional numbers" from test scores alone.  See how many of the Supreme Court justices went to Ivy League schools »





She would certainly have looked different to her classmates, with relatively few Latinos or minorities at Princeton during her college years. Even being a woman was different for Sotomayor's class -- the college had opened its doors to women three years earlier, but male students were still superior in numbers and (in some cases) attitudes.





Judith Perlman, who lived down the hall, explained: "I'd go to class and I would say things, and the professor would say, 'Oh, we usually express ourselves in a more gentlemanly fashion here.'"





Perlman and Sotomayor shared "girl talk" but about what they wanted to do with their lives, not about things like fashion, which interested neither.





Academically, Sotomayor also faced a gap. She would later graduate summa cum laude and be awarded the top undergraduate honor, the Moses Taylor Pyne Prize, but she stumbled that first year.





Peter Winn, who taught Sotomayor and was her thesis adviser, said her early writing reflected the fact that her first language is Spanish.





"She could be very assertive and very articulate, but not initially," said Winn, now a professor at Tufts University.





"Sonia was someone who entered Princeton as a young woman with enormous potential, and one of the things that happened at Princeton was, she learned how to fulfill that potential," he said.





Nancy Weiss Malkiel, now dean of the college, agreed with Winn, writing in an e-mail that Sotomayor came to Princeton "with high intelligence and great ability, but without a very sophisticated grounding in the study of history."





Malkiel, who taught history,
Who arrived at Princeton in 1972? who is Sonia Sotomayor?
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