My first week at Stanford

Start time: Sunday, June 29, 2008 3:24 AM
End time: Monday, June 30, 2008 3:50 PM

This time last week I was learning a large disadvantage of having a roommate: he was snoring almost as loud as my dad and also talked to himself during sleep. My first week at Stanford has taught me many things that include, fortunately for my sanity, the fact that snoring is the only characteristic I find annoying about my roommate, Alex.

Although only a week has passed, time seems slowed by events and I feel comfortable enough here to believe that I’ve spent months at Lagunita Court, in Naranja, Room 112. I had great expectations when I arrived, and so far I have not been disappointed. My only real concern at the beginning was the roommate issue.

I did not want a roommate. I felt that I’d be better of alone to study and make myself comfortable, plus roommates can be mean, anti-social, and worst of all, smelly. Luckily for me I was placed with Alexander Richardson, who is a great guy and his company always brings about laughter. We’re both pretty “chill” about things in our room (or in his words, “I can’t find us arguing about anything”), to the point where now he feels comfortable jumping on top of me to wake me up from a nap.

Often David, an Oregonian from across the hall, joins Alex in this wake-up technique. David’s company also brings about snickering, as proof from a little note he wrote to me in my psychology class—I had to suppress my laughter for the last hour of the lecture.

The great thing about this first week is that I’ve never been bored. There is always something to do with someone, whether it’s half a dozen people making an original “song” in my room, a lounge full of kids watching Beauty and the Beast, or twenty athletes and non-athletes alike putting it all out in a game of soccer at Roble field. Along with the variety of activities available is the variety of people here. There’s Jeong (a future rap star), Steven, the half-dozen people named Alex, Audacious Andrew, JT, Austin (from Houston), Batur (Turkish delight), Tommy Tobin (the mentor filled with excitement), Heather, Alice, Shelby, Hannah (the first person I met), Jewish Jeff, Jeffrey the Austrian bastard (he told me the score of two Euro 2008 soccer games that I would watch later), Brett, Allen, Kat (with a “k” and an “a”), and so many more.

The main reason I am here of course, and why anybody comes to Stanford in the first place, is for education. I am enrolled in two classes that combine for a total of eight units: US Foreign Policy (POLISCI 123Z) and Cognitive Psychology (PSYCH109S). Foreign Policy is taught by an aging professor who has been at Stanford for over twenty years, has worked in Washington before, and knows exactly what he’s talking about. I find his lectures incredibly interesting, probably more because of the material then they way he presents it, and I’m excited to hear more from him and read the four books assigned to us (I also have a ten page paper to write by the end of the term).

In contrast, my Psych class is taught by three graduate students whose lectures are based on power-point presentations. The material itself I find interesting (how the brain functions with regard to memory, language, etc.), but after two hours of listening to descriptions of studies done by our teacher’s superiors, I start to clock-watch (which is why I’m so happy that I share that class with David). Plus the textbook that we were giving reminds me of my high school health book in the way that it assumes that the reader has the intelligence of a seven-year old. In the end though, after only two 2-hour lectures in each class, I have no major complaints and am thoroughly excited to go to class again (I only have classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays).

But perhaps the most welcoming part of the High School Summer College program is the freedom we are allowed. The rules: no drugs, no alcohol, no assault, no harassment, and be around Lagunita by midnight. Besides those things, we are left to our own resources to do whatever we please—a staggering difference from my summer experiences at Duke where we weren’t allowed to lay a foot inside a girls’ dorm.

The environment has confirmed a thought long predicted by myself: that I’m ready to leave home and enter a collegiate atmosphere.