Avery Rogers – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Tue, 09 Feb 2021 22:36:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Avery Rogers – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Complexity Theory: Public benefit companies https://stanforddaily.com/2020/03/03/complexity-theory-public-benefit-companies/ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/03/03/complexity-theory-public-benefit-companies/#respond Tue, 03 Mar 2020 09:52:44 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1164845 Should more and larger companies file for PBC status if their work significantly impacts social life, the environment, or the political sphere?

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Part of “Complexity Theory,” a column on the tangled questions of our technological age.

On Jan. 29, RStudio, an integrated development environment for the programming language R, announced that it had become a public benefit corporation (PBC). The RStudio mission, it wrote, has always been to provide high-quality, open-source software for data science, scientific research and technical communication. However, before it became a PBC, this was not formalized in RStudio’s charter. RStudio wrote in a public announcement that by becoming a PBC, “we have codified our open-source mission into our charter, which means that our corporate decisions must both align with this mission, as well as balance the interests of community, customers, employees, and shareholders.” 

RStudio joins approximately 3,000 companies across the U.S. that have officially converted from regular corporations into PBCs in the last decade. PBCs are a new concept in the world of business. Maryland became the first state to recognize PBCs in 2010, and 19 states have since followed suit, including California. The difference between a regular corporation and a PBC is subtle: while regular corporations are largely obligated to pursue shareholder value above other concerns, PBCs are allowed to include other missions into their charter, typically those focused on some benefit to their stakeholders or society at large that may not always align with generating maximal shareholder value. 

Many well-known companies have become public benefit corporations, including Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, Eileen Fisher and Kickstarter. These companies are for-profit and do take their shareholder interests into account in business decisions, but also center social and environmental concerns in their work. Patagonia is perhaps the most famous example, excelling not only in worker’s rights and environmental sustainability, but also in popularity and revenue—the company brought in over $200 million in 2017. 

The PBC model may sound like the perfect marriage of social stewardship and capitalism that the world is searching for. Viewing the success of PBCs like Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s and Kickstarter, it is natural to ask: should more and larger companies file for PBC status if their work significantly impacts social life, the environment or the political sphere? Should companies be encouraged to incorporate mission-driven purposes into their charters beyond shareholder value, by tax breaks or other government incentives? 

It may seem obvious that all companies, technology or otherwise, should incorporate social and environmental values into their charters. For some companies, this is undoubtedly positive at present. However, in our world of tech giants, there is one deep potential consequence of large, powerful companies moving over to the PBC structure: it could allow these companies, and therefore corporations in general, to define what is “good” or “socially beneficial,” preempting collective decisions made through democratic processes. 

For example, suppose Google decided to reincorporate as a PBC, and decided that it would augment its responsibility to shareholders with a promise to end homelessness in the places where it operates (in fact, this is not entirely hypothetical; less than a year ago, Google pledged $1 billion to end homelessness in the Bay Area). Let’s say Google decided that the best way to achieve this was to buy up currently undeveloped land along the peninsula and turn it into affordable apartments. This is fine and good, except that it would obliterate the fragile coastal habitat along the peninsula, along with the natural beauty and open park space that many enjoy today for recreational purposes. 

The point here is not that Google would make demonic decisions in the name of “social improvements.” The point is that any decisions involving social welfare tradeoffs are difficult and often come at a high cost, and it is unclear whether we want PBC-Google making these choices instead of elected local governments who represent the people most concerned with housing and protected land around the peninsula. The government may not be a perfect decision maker either—it often fails us, often egregiously—but the government, unlike Google, is controlled by the will of the people. 

Allowing companies like Google to coast on PBC status without further regulation, thus giving them the power to decide the fate of our country’s housing, infrastructure, social welfare policies and sustainability goals, would be akin to handing over our government to the corporate powers that be. 

When it comes to ultra-powerful tech companies, it is unwise to hand them the reins of social responsibility, for all responsibility is synonymous with power and influence. Instead, we should aim for our governments—national, state and local—to more proactively shape our future and the future of corporate actions in this country. Rather than leaving it up to companies to determine what our environmental efforts will look like in the 21st century, we should vote for Congress members who push for environmental reforms that will equally affect all industry players. Rather than applaud Google for addressing housing in the Bay Area, we should elect local officials who expand affordable housing through increased taxation on large companies or through better use of public resources. 

The problem with democracy is that everyone gets a voice, including the people we disagree with. But the beauty of democracy is that everyone gets a voice, including ourselves and those who support our causes. Limiting the number of voices in play may sometimes help us win, but it may also lead us to defeat, without the chance to advocate for our side of an issue. No matter the risks of the democratic process, I prefer to put big decisions into the hands of elected officials, not corporations. 

This is not to say that large tech companies should not sometimes go above and beyond current government regulations to further socially minded goals, particularly those relating to the environment. I am glad that many companies have chosen to continue buying carbon offsets and supporting the creation of renewable energy sources despite the current administration’s animosity toward the reality of climate change. However, it is imperative that large companies, via PBC reincorporation or otherwise, are not able to wiggle their way around regular government regulation because of stated goals in their charters. Governments must continue to do the brunt of the work in producing a healthy, clean, opportunity-filled society by shaping the constraints of the market and allowing the most innovative, efficient companies to flourish. 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Complexity Theory: An introduction to Facebook’s Libra https://stanforddaily.com/2019/11/22/complexity-theory-an-introduction-to-facebooks-libra/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/11/22/complexity-theory-an-introduction-to-facebooks-libra/#respond Fri, 22 Nov 2019 11:44:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1161166 On June 18, Facebook formally announced plans to build Libra, a cryptocurrency available to Facebook users around the world, in partnership with high-profile companies like Visa, Stripe, PayPal, Uber, and Lyft.

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Part of “Complexity Theory,” a new column on the tangled questions of our technological age.

On June 18, Facebook formally announced plans to build Libra, a cryptocurrency available to Facebook users around the world, in partnership with high-profile companies like Visa, Stripe, PayPal, Uber and Lyft. 

To those familiar with Bitcoin’s infrastructure and functionality, Libra will not much resemble a cryptocurrency at all. First, Libra’s value will be tied to several “low-risk” assets, including the US dollar, the euro, the yen, and other stable bonds and securities. In this way, Libra is more like a stablecoin, which pegs its value to some currency or asset to avoid price fluctuations. If and when Libra is established and dominant in the global marketplace, it is unclear whether or not the Libra Association will choose to decouple it from existing currencies. 

Second, Libra will not be administered based on mining activity, in which added value is created by providing computing power to process transactions in the blockchain. Instead, Libra’s value will come from initial investments from its member companies, each of which must pledge at least $10 million in funding to the reserve. As people buy Libra with cash, the reserve will expand, and the interest gained on the reserve will go first to operating and research costs, and then to “pay dividends to early investors in the Libra Investment Token for their initial contributions.” In this sense, too, Libra is nothing like Bitcoin, which promises value only to those involved in mining and trading the currency.

Finally, Libra diverges from other cryptocurrencies because it plans to be, at least initially, a permissioned system — that is, transactions with Libra will be facilitated by servers at the tech companies in the Libra Association. This is in stark contrast to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, where transactions are completely decentralized and handled by the machines of many users. For crypto enthusiasts, Libra’s permissioned system is completely antithetical to the purpose of cryptocurrency, sacrificing privacy and decentralization. On the upside, though, centralization might make money laundering and selling illegal items more difficult with Libra than other cryptocurrencies. 

Libra may be a cryptocurrency insofar as it is entirely digital and not regulated by a national central bank, but in many ways contradicts both the conceptual and practical functioning of other cryptocurrencies. It is tied to low-risk assets, generates investment gains for its early investors and is regulated through members of the Libra Association. Coupled with Facebook’s monopolistic domination of social media and unsavory reputation among legislators, it is no wonder Libra has come under attack by governments across the developed world. 

In the United States, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), chairwoman of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, called for Facebook to halt progress on the development of Libra in June 2019 until legislators could agree to a regulatory framework for the currency. The response in Europe has been even more skeptical; France and Germany released a joint statement in September, stating that “no private entity can claim monetary power, which is inherent to the sovereignty of Nations.” The countries plan to fight Libra’s development and frustrate any efforts to introduce the currency in Europe. 

With so much regulatory animosity, many large companies have withdrawn from the Libra Association. Since Oct. 4, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, eBay, Mercado Pago and Stripe have all left the organization. 

Politically, Libra has proven increasingly fragile along two important dimensions. Those with regulatory power have implicitly pointed at the following questions: First, should Facebook and other Libra Association companies be involved in the creation and management of a global currency? Second, and more broadly, how should governments approach cryptocurrencies that may threaten their own monetary policy while increasing financial inclusion worldwide, as Libra promises to do? 

Concerning Facebook’s majority oversight of the Libra project, it is reasonable for regulators and private individuals to be alarmed. As discussed before in this column, Facebook has a dismal track record of protecting user privacy, from using facial recognition algorithms to targeted advertising and political persuasion. With Libra synced to apps like Messenger and WhatsApp, both owned by Facebook, it is conceivable that Facebook could use Libra to track personal payment choices and sell this information to advertisers, who might exploit payment data in any number of ways. So long as Libra is a permissioned system, these risks remain. Testifying before Congress, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook “may see a positive business impact” — that is, more advertising dollars — from rolling out Libra on its platforms. 

Zuckerberg, however, has also proven unwilling to fight U.S. legislators on Libra. On Sept. 18, Zuckerberg told Congress that Facebook would be “forced to leave” the Libra Association if members decided to push ahead with the currency before receiving U.S. regulatory approval. In the same hearing, he acknowledged that “there are a lot of people who wish it was anyone but Facebook who proposed this.”

With legislators in many countries pouncing on Facebook’s Libra, it is perhaps more interesting to consider the broader implications of a global cryptocurrency developed by a more neutral agent or corporation. Ought a private organization of this kind be allowed to create a currency that competes with well-established fiat currencies on a global scale? Is a cryptocurrency like Libra an appropriate way to implement it? 

There are compelling, welfare-enhancing reasons to introduce a global cryptocurrency with highly accessible banking and low transaction fees across national borders. The 1.7 billion individuals around the world without access to formal financial institutions have a much harder time accumulating wealth. Due to the volatility of many foreign currencies and the risk of theft, many people in developing nations “keep” their wealth in assets like farm animals, jewelry and property. When animals die, jewelry disappears, or property is destroyed in a natural disaster, a person’s life savings may be obliterated. A stablecoin cryptocurrency like Libra might revolutionize finance for the global poor by making banking services affordable and trustworthy. 

A cryptocurrency like Libra would also make wealth transfers across borders much cheaper, allowing immigrants to send money back to their families for much lower fees. Given that about $445 billion were transferred this way in 2016, this could add up to billions of dollars per year going to low-income families instead of accruing to bankers’ pockets. 

The benefits of such a cryptocurrency may be vast, but the potential disadvantages are far more striking. Beyond issues of privacy and illegal purchases, there are formidable monetary theory questions to be answered. Would a globally popular cryptocurrency destabilize the same fiat currencies it is tied to, eroding the value of national currencies and rendering monetary policy useless? 

Here is how such an unraveling might happen. Let us call our hypothetical cryptocurrency Crypto. If Crypto became the common currency of the internet — facilitating most purchases with Amazon, streaming companies, and the online versions of big-box retailers like Walmart — and if online purchases became even more dominant in the United States, Crypto could become the most-used currency for daily transactions in the U.S. and other developed nations. If this were to occur, Crypto might be in a position to break ties with fiat currencies and float on its own, deriving its value not from other currencies but from its own valuation, just as the U.S. dollar is valuable insofar as people believe it to be. 

At this point, with much personal and corporate wealth held in Crypto, the U.S. Federal Reserve and its international equivalents could be rendered unable to set interest rates or adjust inflation to any meaningful ends because the currencies they tinker with simply don’t matter anymore. Nations would no longer have monetary autonomy; all would be at the mercy of Crypto’s rates. 

Whether or not this would precipitate a worldwide financial meltdown or a utopian period of monetary stability is beyond my speculative powers, and is an open question for economists as well. In any case, the risk is enormous: the world’s wealth would rest on Crypto’s probably ill-prepared shoulders, whether run by Facebook or any other organization. 

Is global financial inclusion worth the risk of global financial collapse? It depends on the probability that a collapse would happen, but given how much uncertainty there is at the moment, it would seem the risk is far too high. Any currency attempting to rival the large fiat currencies of the world ought to, at minimum, make detailed plans in conjunction with major central banks about how to coexist without financially destabilizing entire nations. Unfortunately, monetary theory is notoriously complicated and contentious among even the brightest economists of the day, so working out such a plan might not eliminate much risk. 

Perhaps a better solution is to work on increasing global financial inclusion without introducing a new currency. For example, M-PESA in East Africa allows individuals to save and send money from a mobile bank account, and tens of millions of people rely on its services today. Microfinance institutions have had mixed success, but surely their methods can be improved to fund entrepreneurial ventures in the developing world more effectively. 

As fintech matures, there will inevitably be a flowering of new ideas for financial services to help the global poor. Before creating a global cryptocurrency, we are probably better off developing projects with more modest but stable benefits in the short term, and having more in-depth conversations about global monetary policy in the long-term. For the sake of everyone, let us not empower Libra before we are ready for a total unraveling of the global financial order.

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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The thinker or the listener? https://stanforddaily.com/2019/11/11/the-thinker-or-the-listener/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/11/11/the-thinker-or-the-listener/#respond Mon, 11 Nov 2019 20:58:26 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1160243 Stanford is, above all, a place to celebrate the life of the mind. We come here to acquire knowledge and to sharpen our ability to put that knowledge to intelligent and creative use. The goal is that we will leave Stanford knowing how to think and what to think about in our adult lives.  However, […]

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Stanford is, above all, a place to celebrate the life of the mind. We come here to acquire knowledge and to sharpen our ability to put that knowledge to intelligent and creative use. The goal is that we will leave Stanford knowing how to think and what to think about in our adult lives. 

However, for those of us not majoring in psychology, philosophy or perhaps religious studies, we don’t spend our college years learning much about what thinking is. We aren’t forced to introspect about the nature of our own minds and what relationship we have to our thoughts. As such, we also fail to understand who we really are as human beings and how to navigate the human condition. 

What does it mean to think? It means to produce thoughts, of course. But what is a thought? This is not a trick question; the answer is not obvious. Consider all the types of thoughts you might think: perhaps it is an internal monologue narrating a set of choices you have; maybe it is a mental movie replaying a conversation you had with a friend; it could be a wordless, imageless cognitive strain as you puzzle over a math problem. An emotion might even be classified as a wordless thought that affects other systems in the body. There is no one mental object that qualifies as a thought, nor are there many obvious necessary conditions of thoughts other than their appearance in consciousness (as opposed to being subconscious, although some people might count subconscious impulses as “unheard” thoughts). 

More important than the question of what constitutes a thought is this: who or what thinks the thoughts that fill our minds? We usually assume that we are the thinkers of our thoughts. But do we really create the thoughts in our minds? Do we really choose to think anything in particular? 

If this all seems terribly abstract, stop reading for a moment and clear your mind, then notice the first thought that appears. Notice, moreover, how that thought got into your head. Did you get to pick what to think, or did some thought spontaneously arise as you observed your mind? 

If you pay close enough attention to this process, you will probably find that your thoughts have a life of their own, entering consciousness without any decision process on your part. Rather than thinking your thoughts, you are more often listening to your thoughts as they come into consciousness. That is, you are the consciousness observing your thoughts, not the thinker creating them. 

Many profound insights can be drawn from this realization, many of which are explained in Eastern philosophical traditions, including the nature of the self, the existence of free will and other metaphysical issues. However, for the purpose of this article, I will focus on one important takeaway: you don’t have to take your thoughts so seriously. 

You probably have thousands of thoughts a day, many of which are garbage thoughts that only arise because your brain is a neurotic, insecure, confused product of evolution and culture. For example, the thought “I’m a failure.” Perhaps your brain creates this thought because it is feeling ashamed or comparing itself to other brains. In either case, it’s rubbish. Recognizing it as such — as an outburst by an irritated neural circuit rather than truth about you as a human being — allows you to let this thought pass, giving it no power over your self-conception. 

There is nothing wrong with thinking; as Stanford students, we are lucky to use our minds as tools to solve the world’s biggest problems. But we should also remember that our thoughts are just thoughts, and we don’t have to believe all of them. We can think of ourselves as the listener rather than the thinker of our thoughts, and maintain a sense of humor and detachment from the lesser angels of our brains. Not only is this neuroscientifically accurate, but it is the only way to truly live at peace with ourselves. 

Contact Avery Roger at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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The teachings of gossip https://stanforddaily.com/2019/11/03/the-teachings-of-gossip/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/11/03/the-teachings-of-gossip/#respond Mon, 04 Nov 2019 04:20:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1159737 In the last few weeks, I’ve offered relationship advice to three of my friends (it has been a dramatic quarter, apparently), and each of those friends praised my ability to give insightful, thought-provoking relationship advice. It made me wonder exactly why I feel so fluent in the language of romantic love compared to other subjects […]

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In the last few weeks, I’ve offered relationship advice to three of my friends (it has been a dramatic quarter, apparently), and each of those friends praised my ability to give insightful, thought-provoking relationship advice. It made me wonder exactly why I feel so fluent in the language of romantic love compared to other subjects of personal concern. The answer, I believe, starts with my mother. 

I am the oldest of four children, and my mother stayed at home for my entire childhood. Combined with our ultra-similar personalities, this meant my mother and I developed an unusually strong bond that was at once parental and not parental at all; we were most often in conversation as close friends. She knew about the drama in my life, and I knew of the drama in hers. Together, we analyzed the collective drama of everyone we knew. 

For example, my mother and I would often puzzle about the romantic struggles of my aunts and uncles, cousins and other students at my school. We would unpack whatever psychological baggage we’d glimpsed in others and see how it affected their relationships. We would talk at length about what made relationships stable and what made them fail, what feelings were genuinely loving and which revealed underlying selfish motives. With my mother, I must have analyzed dozens of relationships between lovers, spouses, parents, children, friends and enemies. As a completely unqualified pair of psychologists, we were prolific. 

Some might call this gossip. In fact, I’m comfortable to call it gossip myself, but not the kind of gossip that gets spread like a virus. Rather, we engaged in the kind of gossip that allows members of the older generation to pass down wisdom and caution to their successors. 

I think this is a fairly common experience for young girls, both with their mothers and with their friends at school. It’s often looked down upon as petty or cruel to talk about others — and with malintent, it certainly can be — but I believe gossip in small circles can also be a profound source of growth and maturity. Many of us are married by the age of 30, which leaves us each with far too little time to learn the ins and outs of love on our own. Instead, we rely on the successes and mistakes of others to navigate our own paths. The same is true of friendship, parenthood and dealing with relatives. By discussing the complexities of others’ situations with our close friends and family, we build our own encyclopedias of good social behavior. 

Of course, we will never know all the answers when it comes to relationships; every relationship is particular and subject to its own context. Thus, gossiping about relationships offers us another skill: the ability to dissect and make sense of novel relationship challenges in our own lives. We all need to practice the art of talking about love so that we may have fruitful, kind conversations with our own partners, friends and relatives in difficult times. We cannot expect to have productive intimate conversations without many years of preparation and reflection. 

It is my hope that society can make two major changes to the way we approach gossip of the benevolent sort. First, we need to recognize that some versions of gossip are healthy. Many of us were told as children that it’s ‘wrong to talk behind someone’s back.’ We may have ignored the admonishment, but somewhere in our collective psyche, we believe doing so is morally questionable. Let us instead embrace those kinds of discussions with norms about compassion, confidentiality and trust. We will always talk about people ‘behind their back,’ so instead of criminalizing the practice altogether, let’s learn to distinguish between good and bad gossip and teach our children the distinction. (If the word ‘gossip’ is objectionable to you, just use a different word.) 

Second, it is imperative that all people feel welcome to engage in conversations about love and relationships as children, teenagers and adults. In particular, let’s encourage boys and young men to talk about these subjects without fear of emasculation or social shame. It is too late for men to be learning these lessons in college and beyond. The learning process must start young, ideally with a parent, and should continue throughout the life course. We must include boys and other excluded groups in the conversation if we want to improve the quality of love and relationships for all. 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Tension between safety and compassion https://stanforddaily.com/2019/10/27/tension-between-safety-and-compassion/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/10/27/tension-between-safety-and-compassion/#respond Sun, 27 Oct 2019 18:47:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1159297 I am currently studying abroad in Oxford, where every morning I take a walk around the meadows behind the Stanford House. Almost every morning, sitting on a bench next to the river, sits a homeless man smoking a cigarette, grocery bags on either side of him. The meadow trail is sparsely populated at this time […]

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I am currently studying abroad in Oxford, where every morning I take a walk around the meadows behind the Stanford House. Almost every morning, sitting on a bench next to the river, sits a homeless man smoking a cigarette, grocery bags on either side of him. The meadow trail is sparsely populated at this time of morning, so it’s often just me and the man as far as one can see in any direction. 

Conscious of my small, young, feminine self, I at first walked on the path as far away from him as possible and doing my best to ignore him, trying not to draw attention to myself. With so much talk in the media about sexual assault and harassment, I saw this man as a potential threat to my safety. When he smiled and said good morning, I barely looked at him from the corner of my eye and offered only a silent half-smile in return. 

As the days passed by, though, I started to say good morning to this man. He never once moved from his seat, nor did his eyes follow me as I walked away. I still approach him a bit nervously, but I make sure to smile and give him my best. I feel a bit silly now to say I was afraid of him, and a bit prejudiced, too, for assuming he was a creep. 

The man on the bench made me more aware of the many other ways in which I avoid men who appear at all unkempt or unprofessional: staring at the ground, picking up my pace, looking over my shoulder to make sure I’m not being followed. I do this in the interest of safety, of course, but isn’t there a hint of bias there, a reverse-sexist classism I use to “other” people who make me uncomfortable?

I grew up believing that we should be kind to strangers, including those who are less fortunate than we are. I grew up believing that I should say hello to people regardless of whether or not they are wearing a fancy suit or dress. But I also grew up in a world rightfully concerned with keeping me, a petite 20-year-old woman, safe from harm. What ought we to do when these two imperatives conflict with one another? 

This applies not only to women, or young people, or people with clear social vulnerabilities, but to everyone living in an urban, violent, unpredictable world. We all contend with conflicting feelings about safety versus compassion and how we honor the humanity of others without risking our own life and health. Yet we almost never talk about this tension. We like to discuss universal compassion, and we like to discuss safety precautions, but we never bring them up in the same breath. 

This article is not an answer to that tension; it is rather a call for us to be more honest and thoughtful about the times in which we profile others in the service of our own safety and whether or not we’re doing that in a just way. It is a call for us to interrogate what feels threatening and how to redefine ideas about “being safe” that better align with “being kind.” It is not easy, but it is necessary not only for those we interact with, but for ourselves, too, since goodness given comes around as goodness received — a warm hello is rewarded with a warm hello. 

I am glad I’ve opened myself to my morning greetings with the man in the meadow. I feel lighter knowing that I’m acknowledging his humanity rather than ignoring it. I’d like to feel that way more of the time. 

Contact Avery at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Comparing Stanford and Oxford https://stanforddaily.com/2019/10/23/comparing-stanford-and-oxford/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/10/23/comparing-stanford-and-oxford/#respond Thu, 24 Oct 2019 02:30:12 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1159102 In the two years since I started college, I’ve often been asked by friends and family if I think Stanford was the “right” choice of school for me. I’ve never had a good answer to that question. I do love Stanford, but until this quarter, I’d never had any other school to really compare it […]

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In the two years since I started college, I’ve often been asked by friends and family if I think Stanford was the “right” choice of school for me. I’ve never had a good answer to that question. I do love Stanford, but until this quarter, I’d never had any other school to really compare it to. I couldn’t even comment on how good the food is compared to other universities, let alone the academics, social life or school culture. 

I am currently studying abroad in the rain-soaked, castle-strewn town of Oxford, a literal and metaphorical world away from our California campus. Experiencing the Oxford system has already given me many new perspectives on Stanford’s institutional modus operandi. Some of the contrasts between the two universities have made me jealous of the Oxford student body, but I have mostly grown ever more appreciative of my home at Stanford. 

Here are the biggest differences I’ve noticed between Stanford and Oxford: 

1. The Value of Tradition: Founded way back in the thirteenth century as an academic center for monks, Oxford lives and breathes tradition. This is envious when it means having a pet tortoise at your residence. It is less envious when it means navigating uneven, creaky staircases and having to wear formal attire to final exams. With all of the centuries-old artwork and architecture, Oxford can also feel rather like a museum — a place to be seen and respected, not lived in and enjoyed. I have never experienced the same historical intimidation at Stanford.

2. Oxford is made up of forty “colleges,” which are residential buildings with their own dining halls, libraries, sports teams and clubs, each of which houses some fraction of the total student body. Social life strongly revolves around your particular college, and cross-college friendships seem uncommon compared to cross-dorm friendships at Stanford. My college, Corpus Christi, is home to only 250 undergraduates; if you thought Stanford was a small school, imagine having only 80 students in your class year.

3. Oxford is explicitly religious at nearly every turn. As I mentioned, my college is named Corpus Christi, which is Latin for “the body of Christ.” Other colleges include Christ Church College, St. John’s College and even a Jesus College. Every college has a Christian chapel; many of them were founded by Christian leaders. At formal dinners, which are hosted weekly in the colleges, a faculty member or student will say grace in Latin to begin the meal. Of course, Oxford is tolerant and welcoming to students of all religious backgrounds, but its Christian history is far more prominent than Stanford’s. Imagine the Jesus of Memorial Church, but everywhere.

4. I never thought I’d say it, but I miss Arrillaga dining. Oxford’s colleges serve breakfast, lunch and dinner cafeteria-style, where you walk up to the counter and get to choose between two or three pre-portioned entrees, a few sides and a dessert. No longer can I have cereal for lunch or a whole plate of fruit for dinner. No longer can I mix brownies into my preferred serving size of vanilla soft serve. I will do my best to never complain again about buffet-style dining.

5. Oxford is far more urban than Stanford. The colleges are neatly integrated into a bustling town, replete with shops, cafés and little grocery stores. Within a five-minute walk of the Stanford House, which is in central Oxford, you can find at least eight local dining options. The groceries here are also much cheaper than in California. While I do miss my morning walks through the uncrowded, tree-lined sidewalks at Stanford, it’s a real shame we don’t have more city-life around us for entertainment and convenience.

6. Oxford is a haven for the humanities. In the words of an Oxford student, “Oxford encourages you to study subjects that won’t get you a job.” History, English and philosophy feature heavily in the college culture. The computer science department is but a medium-sized building in the science sector of town. Is a humanities culture better than the CS-saturated culture at Stanford? I suppose the answer depends on whom you ask.

7. Last, but not least: rain. Drizzling rain, pouring rain, rain coming in horizontally on the wind. Umbrellas are not optional here. Nor is the fortitude to make it through five days without seeing the sun.

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Learning to grab the helping hand https://stanforddaily.com/2019/10/13/learning-to-grab-the-helping-hand/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/10/13/learning-to-grab-the-helping-hand/#respond Mon, 14 Oct 2019 04:22:19 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1158518 As a toddler, I refused to be treated like a child. I wouldn’t drink out of a cup with a lid; I thought sippy cups were patronizing. I retaliated with cold-shouldering and other methods when my mother tried to put me in time-out. Even though I was a small for my age and a girl, […]

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As a toddler, I refused to be treated like a child. I wouldn’t drink out of a cup with a lid; I thought sippy cups were patronizing. I retaliated with cold-shouldering and other methods when my mother tried to put me in time-out. Even though I was a small for my age and a girl, my mother would warn the mothers of boys at my preschool that I could be very strong and aggressive if messed with. 

Thankfully, my aggression and outright stubbornness did not persist long into childhood, but my independence stayed with me through the years. I never wanted help carrying my backpack or putting my shoes on or, in my teenage years, completing any assignments. I would prefer to embarrass myself struggling to lift a heavy box than to ask someone else to help me. I shopped for groceries and cooked mostly for myself in high school. I didn’t rely on too many people for emotional support, and I prided myself on being highly comfortable with solitude, hard work and self-reliance. 

When I got to Stanford, I was excited to make new friends like anyone else, and I thought the best way to do so would be to help other people with the ins and outs of daily life: carrying luggage, fetching things for them at the store, bringing them food from the dining hall and so on. I thought being a good friend entailed doing favors without asking for anything in return – and since I was so dispositionally independent, I preferred it this way. 

It was not until sophomore year when I was confronted by the problem with my approach. A close friend of mine commented (a paraphrase): “Avery, you have to let friends help you out, too. It makes them feel good and makes them feel close to you. It’s not a real friendship if it’s a one-way street, no matter which way that street runs.” 

I immediately recognized the truth in this statement. If I wanted to make and maintain close friendships, especially with like-minded people, I needed to receive their help as well as offer mine. I would personally hate to be in a friendship where only the other person were doing me favors, so why should I expect that others would be fine with the same arrangement when I was the one doing all the favors? 

People want to feel useful; they want to feel depended upon. People do favors partially to be altruistic, but also to build bridges and intimacy with people. Altruism is always a little bit self-serving, in the sense that cultivating community and closeness benefits the individual as well as others. Some call this a cynical view; I think it’s among the most beautiful consequences of natural selection. We evolved to get pleasure from helping others, and we should feel deeply grateful that evolution did not give us the opposite. 

I did not shift out of my independent mode of living all at once. (That would have been far too much to bear psychologically.) But I gradually learned to ask people for help, to turn difficult individual projects into easier team jobs and to allow myself to accept time and emotional support from others without feeling guilty or obliged to return the favor as fast as possible. 

In a strange sense, accepting help from others also made me more generous. I became more in-tune with the needs of others and the nature of community and relationships. I stopped thinking so much about my own capabilities (“I bet I can do this by myself”) and more about the capabilities of humans working together. 

Many of us at Stanford pride ourselves on rugged independence. In fact, many of us were selected for it. But if you are one of those people who hates to ask for any sort of help, I entreat you to let your friends carry some of your burden. If you have to, think of it as a favor to them; they get to feel important to you, and that feeling far outweighs the inconvenience of the helpful gesture. 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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What do we really value? https://stanforddaily.com/2019/10/09/what-do-we-really-value/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/10/09/what-do-we-really-value/#respond Wed, 09 Oct 2019 10:35:19 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1158278 I’ve never been one to take strong stances on political issues. If there are arguments to be made on either side of a contentious topic, I’m usually able to empathize enough with both viewpoints so as to temper my own leanings. I’m wary of absorbing my parents’ or peers’ values wholesale, and I’m much better […]

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I’ve never been one to take strong stances on political issues. If there are arguments to be made on either side of a contentious topic, I’m usually able to empathize enough with both viewpoints so as to temper my own leanings. I’m wary of absorbing my parents’ or peers’ values wholesale, and I’m much better at playing devil’s advocate than actually standing up for any particular position. 

Recently, I’ve realized that my trouble with taking sides arises not so much from indecision, but rather a series of deep-seated value conflicts. If an issue has two (or more) sides, I’ve noticed, there is nearly always a set of good values in tug-of-war beneath the surface.

Let’s take climate change, for example, since many people write off conflicts around this issue as science-believers versus science-deniers. These two groups, however, are not homogeneous or completely value-aligned. Within the group who believes climate change is real and potentially catastrophic, there is still an inherent tension between climate protection and human development and flourishing. Very few people actually fall entirely on the side of climate protection (i.e. wishing that the human race would go extinct to protect the planet), and few also align purely with the human development side (i.e. “climate change may be real, but let’s burn fossil fuels forever anyway”).  

Most people fall somewhere in the middle: they want people to be healthy and taken care of, but they also want to put some protections in place to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. They want developing countries to raise living standards without doubling the amount of fossil fuels consumed globally. Most people are navigating a tricky balancing act between climate protection and human well-being. And until we have perfect substitutes for fossil fuels, plastics and other environmental irritants, the value conflict will continue to play out, often unacknowledged, underneath debates about carbon taxes, clean energy standards, global development and other climate-adjacent arenas. 

When it comes to climate change, what do I believe? Where do I fall on the spectrum between climate protection and human needs? I honestly have no idea. I don’t know exactly how much environmental damage I’d be willing to accept to bring reliable electricity and sanitation to the poorest parts of the world. I don’t know how much technological progress I would give up to save a species of endangered mollusk. 

I ran the same thought experiment across many of today’s pressing issues: wealth inequality and the social safety net, education, immigration, even abortion. I hoped that some universal value might jump out, some utilitarian principle by which to calibrate all my opinions. In doing so, I discovered something surprising: I don’t even know what values I’d want to permeate an ideal world, let alone the one we’re dealing with. 

Would I want us to have a maximally happy world? Not if it was achieved by implanting electrodes in the pleasure-producing parts of our brains. What about a maximally equal world? Certainly there is a strong tension between equality and fairness (equal pay for equal work requires that everyone does equal work). A world without pain? No, because pain often brings meaning to our lives. 

I don’t have a proper answer to this question, but rather hope that you, too, perform this exercise. Think about issues around you and what deeper values, all well-intentioned, are at work in bringing about the tension. Consider what might be your closest-held values and how they work against each other. If nothing else, this is an exercise of empathy: an understanding of how well-meaning people might so vehemently disagree on important issues. 

As children, we are led to believe that all of the good values and morals we are taught can coexist harmoniously in our daily lives and our societies. This implies that people who disagree with us hold bad values and morals since anyone who shares our values should share our vision of society. This simply isn’t true, and accepting the premise of total value-harmony is sickening to us and to society. 

So be thoughtful about what your values are, why you hold them and any strange cases (e.g. brain electrodes) that would make you change them. Think about situations in which your ideals oppose each other and how you reconcile them. And, most of all, think about how others might come to a different conclusion with good minds and hearts, and how we might all use conversations about deeper values to propel our society in a more productive, empathetic, self-aware direction. 

Contact Avery at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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On post-freshman year exploration and revelations https://stanforddaily.com/2019/09/25/on-post-freshman-year-exploration-and-revelations/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/09/25/on-post-freshman-year-exploration-and-revelations/#respond Thu, 26 Sep 2019 06:24:14 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1157687 I had long ago declared economics as my major as I began my spring quarter of my sophomore year at Stanford. At the time, I was seriously considering pursuing a PhD in economics right out of undergrad, and I was advised by many economics faculty members that I should take a computer science class in […]

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I had long ago declared economics as my major as I began my spring quarter of my sophomore year at Stanford. At the time, I was seriously considering pursuing a PhD in economics right out of undergrad, and I was advised by many economics faculty members that I should take a computer science class in Python, since many economists used the language for data analysis. 

Never before in my life had I been interested in computer science. I enjoyed writing, psychology, public policy and any number of disciplines that would broadly fall into the category of “social sciences.” I ended up studying economics at Stanford because I loved Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and imagined myself on the road to behavioral science. Computer science, I believed, was orthogonal and even antithetical to my passion for questions about human nature and society. 

I enrolled in CS106AP with the intention of picking up a useful skill and getting on with my life. Within two months, however, I realized that CS106AP was my favorite class, better even than the incredible health economics elective I was taking concurrently. CS106AP whispered in the back of my head during the day, and my code even entered my dreams at night – never before had I dreamt about class content. Annoying while I was trying to sleep, perhaps, but evidence that my brain was intrigued by the types of problems and problem-solving strategies used in computer science, even at the most elementary levels. 

Over the summer, I spent many, many hours studying ahead for CS106B and reading my way towards a basic understanding of the current state of computer science, especially in AI. To my astonishment, the technical and ethical problems in computer science fascinated me as much, if not more, than my beloved social sciences. In fact, the big picture of computer science and Silicon Valley dealt with many of the same questions facing psychologists and philosophers, only with different implications and paths for action. 

Rather than turn this article into a pitch for computer science – Stanford has plenty of momentum in that direction already – I’ll trace back to the central point: I am now a junior with a wildly new set of interests and postgrad aspirations. Remember (or notice, if you’re a freshman) how insistently they urged us to explore during our first year at Stanford? Well, I’m grateful to say that exploration need not end once you’ve left for your first Stanford summer; it need not end even after you’ve declared and nearly finished your major. Of course, senior spring is not the ideal time for academic revelations of this kind, but the clock ticks slower than you think. 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Connections in unexpected places https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/30/connections-in-unexpected-places/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/30/connections-in-unexpected-places/#respond Thu, 30 May 2019 08:00:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1155620 Last summer, I worked at a nonprofit organization in the Bay Area through a Haas Center grant. The grant was called the Spirituality, Service and Social Change fellowship awarded jointly with the Office for Religious Life. The fellowship itself was not explicitly religious, but sought to deepen our service experiences through spiritual reflection in once-a-week […]

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Last summer, I worked at a nonprofit organization in the Bay Area through a Haas Center grant. The grant was called the Spirituality, Service and Social Change fellowship awarded jointly with the Office for Religious Life. The fellowship itself was not explicitly religious, but sought to deepen our service experiences through spiritual reflection in once-a-week seminar meetings. Through the fellowship, I got to know several of the Associate Deans in the religious life office, who encouraged me to apply to the Rathbun Fellowship for Religious Encounter (FRE), an interfaith fellowship on campus run through their office.

For me to join an interfaith group was, by any traditional metrics, a bit of a stretch. I was not raised in any particular religion, and I do not believe in God. Rather, I grew up reading a bit about Buddhism here, a bit about Christian mysticism there, thus cultivating a distant curiosity about religion. I loved the existential and moral language of religions viewed through a godless context, but had never participated in an actual religious community. I knew religion in the same way I knew Europe or Africa; I had read about it, but I’d never been there and seen it for myself.

Nonetheless, I joined the fellowship out of curiosity and admiration for the Associate Deans of Religious Life. For our first event, the other ten members and I attended University Public Worship on a Sunday morning in October. Invited to church for the fellowship, I felt awkward and out of place. Was I supposed to cross my legs? Was I allowed to smile? Should I have sung even if I was off key? Would others in the audience notice my naïvete and disapprove of a pagan like myself attending their morning service?

Of course, none of my worries came to pass. We spent the rest of the day conversing over lunch and walking the labyrinth outside of Windhover, all the while challenging ourselves to enter a more contemplative, vulnerable state of mind. By the end of the day, we were already sharing our reflections on purpose, meaning and emotional tensions with each other.

From that day on, FRE became the only community on campus where I felt wholly known and listened to. Despite being non-religious, other members of the group and our lovely Associate Deans absorbed my ideas and opinions with the utmost open-mindedness and respect. Though the goal of the fellowship was to promote interfaith dialogue, I was pleased to find that we shared many of our values, concerns and moral attitudes. We all wondered about the meaning and actualization of love, what it meant to be a servant of humanity and how to best integrate our own spiritual ideals (be they divinely related or not) in our day-to-day lives. We also wished each other luck on midterms, made lighthearted fun of each other and even occasionally gossiped about our romantic lives together. Once a week, every quarter, we came together, shared a meal and made a point of being present, open and compassionate no matter what was going on in our lives outside of our dining room.

FRE ended this week, and with its conclusion, I have come to realize how central the Office for Religious Life has become in my otherwise non-religious life. When I am anxious about the future of humanity, confused about how to balance aspiration and wellbeing or otherwise in need of wisdom, it is the people in the Religious Life office that I talk to. They do not provide therapy, but something better: a thought partner with whom to talk about my internal conflicts, full of both religious anecdotes but also personal stories. It is rare that I meet an adult on campus willing to be vulnerable in front of students; in the Office of Religious Life, such discussions are commonplace, and make this office the sanctuary it has become for me and others.

The purpose of this article is not to convince every one of you to get involved with the Office of Religious Life (though I’m quite sure they would appreciate your visit to the third floor of Old Union!). Rather, it is to say that we should all be open to finding meaning and connection in places where we least expect it. I came to Stanford with no intention of exploring religious community; I will leave Stanford counting among my closest relationships a rabbi, a Muslim leader and several Christian deans at the university, who accept and care for me regardless of my belief or lack thereof.

So do not limit yourself to connections within the bounds of your own identity. Venture into unfamiliar spaces that spark your interest, and have the courage to be the odd one out. You may not always feel accepted, but you may form connections you never thought possible, and open your world to a whole new set of people and ideas. For as much learning as can be done in the classroom, the deepest experiential learning that Stanford has to offer is in its people.

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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A social take on Alternative Spring Break https://stanforddaily.com/2019/04/05/a-social-take-on-alternative-spring-break/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/04/05/a-social-take-on-alternative-spring-break/#respond Fri, 05 Apr 2019 08:00:37 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1151926 This spring break, I traveled to rural Illinois on an Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip meant to explore the rural-urban divide. Much could be said about the content of the trip and everything I learned about rural issues. For the purpose of this reflection, however, I want to focus instead on the people I traveled […]

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This spring break, I traveled to rural Illinois on an Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip meant to explore the rural-urban divide. Much could be said about the content of the trip and everything I learned about rural issues. For the purpose of this reflection, however, I want to focus instead on the people I traveled with, and what the ASB program offers in terms of social bonds.

ASB trips require all participants to take a one-unit class during winter quarter, prior to their travel. Each Tuesday evening, my ASB group met in the anthropology building to learn about a different challenge in rural America. Our trip leaders came to class each week with snacks and impeccably researched PowerPoint presentations. We had a handful of interesting guest speakers, and each week a different student would give a five-minute presentation on an issue of their choice.

I enjoyed the ASB class for its educational benefits, but it also made me a bit nervous; I’d joined the program three weeks late, and by the end of the quarter, I still didn’t know everyone’s name. I was about to embark on a weeklong journey to a rural town with 13 people I hardly knew. Were we going to spend the whole week on our phones, awkwardly crammed into two minivans, minding our own business in between activities?

Thankfully, my fears were not realized. On the contrary, my ASB trip turned out to be the most positive social experience of my sophomore year at Stanford.

My time in Illinois was pervaded by a universal eagerness to know one another beneath the surface. This was reflected on our minivan rides and in our late-night conversations, as well as organized activities like Spotlights. People chose to be authentic, unbridled and generous in their respect and interest in one another. I learned about students’ families, romantic lives, mental health and many other topics that we so rarely breach with acquaintances. After only a week together, I came out of the trip with several close friends who know me on the same level as the casual friends I made at the beginning of freshman year.

Our ASB trip reminded me of that giddy, socially connected feeling I experienced during my freshman fall, back when so many of us let down our protective mental walls in the service of making lifelong friends. Being on an ASB trip seemed to flip a switch in my mind, from reserved, self-contained Avery to communal, mutually-dependent Avery. The whole experience made me nostalgic for freshman year, when this version of myself was the rule rather than the exception.

Perhaps the social orientation of freshman year isn’t sustainable; it takes a massive amount of effort and loses importance once solid friendships have been established. There’s no need to rush around trying to make close friends when you already have a handful by your side.

That being said, my ASB trip proved that it’s important, for mind and spirit, to create little opportunities for vulnerable socialization. It is important to have stable, close friendships, but it is not sufficient to really embrace the wonder of humankind. We must occasionally plunge ourselves into communal social situations to remind us of our respect, care and appreciation for the people around us, friends and strangers alike. In essence, we must find ways to awaken ourselves to others’ stories and the connections that are formed through open-minded trust.

If any of this makes you nostalgic for more social days, consider doing an ASB, a Sophomore College or any of the many group programs that Stanford has to offer. Don’t worry about the subject or location too much; at the end of the day, it’s about the people.

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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On approaching social impact in a complicated world https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/29/on-approaching-social-impact-in-a-complicated-world/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/29/on-approaching-social-impact-in-a-complicated-world/#respond Thu, 29 Nov 2018 09:26:11 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1147353 Consider the following proposition: You have $10,000 to donate to a charity of your choice, and two charities to choose from. One gives merit scholarships to children in sub-Saharan Africa and one offers them deworming treatment. Your goal is to improve educational outcomes in the region. Which do you choose? It turns out that offering […]

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Consider the following proposition: You have $10,000 to donate to a charity of your choice, and two charities to choose from. One gives merit scholarships to children in sub-Saharan Africa and one offers them deworming treatment. Your goal is to improve educational outcomes in the region. Which do you choose?

It turns out that offering deworming treatments is almost 50 times more effective at improving school attendance than giving merit scholarships is, according to a breakthrough study that turned into the Deworm The World Initiative, a high-impact charity operating across Africa and Asia. Merit scholarships aren’t a bad thing – they still improve school attendance – but they’re significantly less cost-effective than deworming.

If you’re like me and relatively ignorant about public health interventions, this probably comes as a surprise. Deworming is 50 times as effective as scholarships, dollar per dollar? Better donate my money to deworming campaigns, then.

In the case of deworming and scholarships, this is an easy and obvious trade-off: Rigorous randomized control trials have been run by expert development economists on the issue, and the results are clear and replicable. Unfortunately, not all causes have received equal scholarly attention, nor have the intricate issues of our personal lives. Most of our decisions are made without evidence and without knowing whether or not we will do more harm than good when trying to help.

Through social science classes and my own reading on philosophy, rationalism and public service, I’ve been increasingly feeling paralyzed by indecision. Is my time better spent doing direct service through the Haas Center or working campus jobs and donating a portion of my earnings to high-impact charities overseas? Should I take classes about social change to broaden my perspective or focus on quantitative classes that give me hard skills to apply to the social sector after graduation?

I try to weigh the possible options and perform my own cost-benefit analysis, but the truth is, I have no evidence to suggest one path or the other. I can’t perform a randomized control trial on my own life, and I can’t possibly predict all of the direct and indirect effects that my actions will have today or in the future. As humans, we simply can’t know which choice will be best for the world. We can’t know if a well-intentioned action we take today for one cause will have negative consequences for a different cause tomorrow.

When there is no ideal path to be uncovered, it is easy to become paralyzed. How can you do anything responsibly without fully understanding its benefits and costs?

I don’t know the answer to this question. I don’t know that anyone does; the world is too context-dependent to give any universal prescription for how to have the most positive impact possible. However, this does not mean we must sit idly and wait for perfect information to come along (it never will). Even with imperfect information, you can still do your best to serve the world, whether through direct service, advocacy, donation or your education. You must only be cognizant of the fact that you do lack important information and make an effort to stay updated on new research and developments in your cause area. It is not irresponsible to do inefficient service when the inefficiency is unknown. It is, however, irresponsible to bury your head in the sand and continue doing “service” even when it has been broadly discovered to be useless or harmful.

So whatever it is that you do to better the world, do what you can to educate yourself about the scholarship around your issue of choice. Far too many people dedicate themselves to well-meaning service projects that ultimately do little for the populations they claim to serve. This does not have to paralyze you, but it should make you skeptical of any effort you undertake to make an impact. This kind of skepticism, when paired with a belief that we can always do better and increase our knowledge, is healthy and necessary to be effective.

Ask your student leaders why your service group is effective, and what evidence exists to prove the program is worthwhile. Be a skeptical donor, and read up on the benefit-per-dollar of the charities you support. Understand what skills and perspectives your classes offer you, and how they can be applied to social good. All of this takes extra effort – but this effort, in addition to the money and time we give, is the price we pay to do real good for the world. In my opinion, it’s a fair price.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Beyond experience https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/14/beyond-experience/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/14/beyond-experience/#respond Wed, 14 Nov 2018 10:00:12 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1146816 I often hear, particularly at Stanford, from people who have built a life philosophy around “living for experiences.” The philosophy goes something like this: Life is finite and transient and ultimately lacks a defined meaning. As young people with so much of the world to explore, our goal ought to be gaining as many unique, […]

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I often hear, particularly at Stanford, from people who have built a life philosophy around “living for experiences.” The philosophy goes something like this: Life is finite and transient and ultimately lacks a defined meaning. As young people with so much of the world to explore, our goal ought to be gaining as many unique, novel and sometimes wild experiences while we can. We can achieve meaning in our lives, as the theory goes, through exposing ourselves to as many aspects of human existence as possible.

In many ways, I agree with this philosophy. College is the peak time in our lives to try new things, push ourselves into unfamiliar situations and engage with the world’s diversity in all its dimensions. I also endorse the (rather depressing) conclusion that life is not inherently meaningful, so we must create meaning for ourselves.

Where I differ from my experience-driven peers is in my evaluation of how to give life meaning and what qualities make up a good life. Isolated experiences may be inspiring, mind-blowing and beautiful, but they last only a few hours, a few days at most. A concert, a hiking trip, a midnight trip to the coast to watch the stars — all incredible and worthwhile experiences but all transitory. You can’t sustain wellbeing on a one-time trip to go skydiving or light fireworks in the middle of nowhere.

Experiences are important, no doubt, but they must be supplemented by low-excitement, long-term sources of happiness and meaning in order to have a good life. In my own life, I find this stable happiness largely through relationships and places. For example, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have lunch with my best friend at the same time in Casper Dining. We don’t add much excitement to each other’s lives, but we discuss all of the exciting, stressful and variable things that do go on and provide an anchoring support system for each other regardless of the week’s events.

I find a similar sense of low-energy contentment in my walks around campus. Almost every day, I wander some portion of Campus Drive; this season, I admire the falling leaves. There’s nothing novel or stimulating about Campus Drive, but its familiarity gives it a homey quality and allows me time to slow down and collect my thoughts.

It’s important to meet new people and have fascinating interactions with strangers, but it’s also important — arguably much more so — to have close friends who stick around month after month, year after year, who may not always be entertaining but will be there when you need support. It’s wonderful to travel and see all the corners of the globe but also necessary to establish places where you feel at home, unexcited but utterly familiar and safe. It’s about balance: coupling the novel experiences with familiar ones and building a foundation of intimacy that you can go back to in between the highs of once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

I see many people veer too far to one side or the other of this equation and most often towards the experience side. They go to parties, events in San Francisco, on wild adventures and with a vast network of interesting people, but they struggle to find closeness and meaning in the quiet moments of life. Outside of their transient experiences, life lacks a sense of continuity and narrative.

Think of life like a novel: You want to see action scenes and climactic moments, but in order for a novel to have substance, emotional appeal and meaning, it must have dull moments: moments that set the scene, build connections between characters, explain the buildup to and aftermath of intense moments. In fact, the intense moments are only intense because of the buildup and aftermath; a disconnected series of wild events would get boring very quickly.

So, if you are an experience-oriented person, I encourage you to consider the balance of novelty and familiarity that you strike in your life and how your place on the spectrum influences your wellbeing. Are you too heavy on one-time experiences? Too comfortable in familiar but dull patterns of life? Do you cultivate enough close relationships while putting yourself out there to meet new people and learn about their stories?

Having experiences creates momentary meaning, but having a narrative thread to your life — a narrative composed of people, places and activities — is imperative for finding a deeper, temporal meaning that follows you from the highs to the lows. This is the kind of meaning that humanity is built on, the kind of meaning that we’ve spent thousands of years pondering, practicing and recording. It is why Zen masters may spend hours meditating or why spending time with your family is such a strong predictor of mental and physical health. So give value to this quiet sense of contentment. The wild experiences may be to die for, but the stuff in between is the stuff worth living for.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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From mariachi musician to tour guide: My journey in finding a community at Stanford https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/13/from-mariachi-musician-to-tour-guide-my-journey-in-finding-a-community-at-stanford/ Wed, 14 Nov 2018 07:50:43 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?post_type=tsd_magazine_post&p=1145014 As a child and adolescent, I was severely underexposed to the idea of community. Thanks to my dad’s shifting job opportunities, I lived in 11 different houses in five different regions of the country by my 18th birthday. East Coast, West Coast, Rocky Mountains — I’ve been all over, never for more than five years […]

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As a child and adolescent, I was severely underexposed to the idea of community. Thanks to my dad’s shifting job opportunities, I lived in 11 different houses in five different regions of the country by my 18th birthday. East Coast, West Coast, Rocky Mountains I’ve been all over, never for more than five years at a time. We never lived in my parents’ home states, or in any proximity to my grandparents or other relatives. Consequently, geography and locality never provided a sense of community for me. In only one house did I know the names of my next-door neighbors (and only the people who lived to our right; I never even laid eyes on the couple who supposedly lived in the house to our left).

From mariachi musician to tour guide: My journey in finding a community at Stanford
(JULES WYMAN/The Stanford Daily)

School wasn’t much better for building community. Not only did I switch schools often as a result of moving, but I was never good at integrating myself into social groups. I made close friendships with certain individuals here and there, but I only felt like part of a group for a short stint in seventh grade (before I moved out-of-state midway through the year) and during freshman year of high school. Even these groups weren’t really “community” in any meaningful sense of the word because they contained only four or five girls at a time. As for my grade more broadly, I felt no particular connection. I was advanced in many subjects and took classes with the older students, so I missed most of the classroom bonding that happened within my grade. Unfortunately, the older students never took me in as one of their own, either. I was in perpetual limbo, stuck between and thus separate from the communities I was supposed to join.

This lack of belonging (augmented by a breakdown in my few close relationships) led me to leave my high school altogether and do my senior year online, from the comfort and isolation of my own home. There were days when I didn’t leave the house, and most of my non-familial interactions were with cashiers and grocery clerks who never knew my first name. I didn’t spend time with another teenager for 10 months straight.

Arriving at Stanford last year was my first real opportunity to find community in my life. As such, I had a lot of questions and concerns about how I might go from isolation to belonging, about what kind of community would make me feel at home. Or was “feeling at home” even the right criteria for a true community? What was community really about solidarity, intellectual stimulation, mutual talents, identity, shared passion, a common cause? What was the difference between a community in name and a community in spirit?

During fall quarter of freshman year, I joined a few extracurriculars on campus. Most conducive to building community among them was the Stanford Mariachi Band. I had no prior experience playing mariachi music (or, for that matter, listening to mariachi music I genuinely thought it included maracas), but I did play guitar, and they needed more players for the rhythm section. Thus, I became one of the freshman recruits, another of whom had played mariachi in Carnegie Hall.

Mariachi was a wonderful experience. I loved the opportunity to get lost in the simultaneous technical difficulty and beauty of the music. I met great people, one of whom is still a close friend today. I never missed a practice, and I delighted in the opportunity to practice my Spanish.

But it never felt to me like my community. Perhaps this was partially a linguistic problem, since I often felt left behind when the Latin American students made jokes in Spanish that I couldn’t understand. But I was not the only non-fluent speaker in the group, so it was not entirely a matter of language. I believe my greatest challenge in finding community had to do with the structure of the instrumental groups. Once a week the rhythm section (guitar, guitarrón and vihuela) practiced together separate from the violins. When we did practice together twice a week, the violinists all stood on one side of the room, and the rhythm section stood opposite them. This physical divide, for an introvert like myself, acted as a genuine barrier to meeting and befriending people from the violin section. It’s hard to feel a sense of community when you’ve never spoken a word to some of its members.

For schedule reasons I permanently left mariachi in the winter. My next extracurricular community came in the spring, when I was hired as a tour guide. Being a Stanford tour guide is, as any tour guide will attest, a strange hybrid of campus job and social group. Guides get to know each other through training, office shifts, monthly meetings and informal socializing (regular nacho lunches at the GSB, for example). The tour guide group prides itself on being a real community, and in many respects, they succeed. Every guide I’ve met even briefly waves and says hello to me around campus and for an 80-person group, that’s a genuine feat. I feel comfortable making small talk at the Visitor Center, something I usually go great lengths to avoid.

Is the tour guide group my community? In some ways I’d say yes, but again, the group is large enough that I don’t know everyone’s name, let alone their personal histories. I am optimistic that time will deepen my nascent sense of community at the visitor center, but I’ll have to wait and see.

Of course, I have thus far omitted the obvious freshman community: my freshman dorm, West Lag. As we all know, freshman dorms are a unique sort of community. You share your Stanford acceptance in common, but beyond that, you’re just a random group of 18-or-so year-olds from across the world, without a single other thread connecting you. You join people from many countries, religions, interests, talents and personality types, some of whom would never come into contact otherwise. There is no self-selection and thus nothing real to bond you to each other the whole “community” is completely artificial and exists only because of proximity and convenience.

From mariachi musician to tour guide: My journey in finding a community at Stanford
(JULES WYMAN/The Stanford Daily)

If community rested on shared identity, values or interests, then West Lag should not have been a community but it was. Thanks to the aggressive bonding agenda of freshman resident assistants, I knew everyone’s names and at least a few things about each freshman resident by the end of Week 2. After a month I called a few of the fellow residents my best friends. A year later, I’m still living with one of my same roommates, and those best friends are my best friends to this day.

Unlike any other group or class, West Lag pulled me out of my shell and reminded me what it felt like to have friends and belong to something bigger than my own family. I wasn’t part of the dominant social group in the dorm, and I didn’t go to many dorm events or parties; I was (and still am) more of a “Friday night in my dorm room” kind of person. But in West Lag, I discovered that a community is not necessarily a space for socialization; it is more importantly, in my opinion, a space for safety of all kinds. West Lag gave me a home, physically and emotionally, to return to each evening, and inside of West Lag I felt comfortable being myself (including the self with wet hair and wearing pajamas). Everyone said hello to me as I walked down the hall or passed them on the way to class, and everyone would have been there to comfort and console me if they were, by chance, put to the task. I believe I speak for everyone when I say that we cared for and respected each other, no matter how attached we were to the social pulse of the dorm.

West Lag taught me that community isn’t necessarily about having something in common with the people around you. It is, rather, about having in common the desire to be a community. You have to put in the effort to learn people’s names, to promise each other safety and security and to spend time with one another. You have to let your guard down, whether by wearing ugly pajamas or sharing secrets, and put down real emotional roots in a group. You must organize around some principle value, even if that value is simply having a functional college dorm.

Learning this was beautiful for several reasons. It affirmed for me the reality of a common humanity that transcends borders, beliefs and abilities. It also showed me that I do not have to limit myself to people or groups who resemble me in order to find a sense of belonging. Finally, it gave me hope for the future, that I will be able to find communities here at Stanford and beyond when I need them, as long as I make the effort to take part.

Community is not complicated; if people want community, community will arise. All you need is intention, patience and kindness — which, though effortful, are universal capabilities.

So remember that when you’re searching for community of your own, the most important ingredient is your own commitment. Be a community member, and you’ll make community.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Down to the core https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/07/down-to-the-core/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/07/down-to-the-core/#respond Wed, 07 Nov 2018 10:00:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1146398 I am an economics major, which means I’m quite familiar with the idea of core requirements. In the Econ department, you are required to take six classes towards the beginning of your academic career — ECON 1, 50, 51, 52, 102A and 102B — before you can take many of the electives and upper-division classes […]

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I am an economics major, which means I’m quite familiar with the idea of core requirements. In the Econ department, you are required to take six classes towards the beginning of your academic career — ECON 1, 50, 51, 52, 102A and 102B — before you can take many of the electives and upper-division classes in the department. For freshman and sophomores, this means a long slog through budget equations, supply and demand graphs, and deriving complicated formulas about interest rates and growth models that seem to include as many variables as there are letters in the Greek alphabet. (You know it’s bad when the professor has to spend time trying to come up with a Greek letter that hasn’t yet been added to an ever-growing equation.)

The core has its peaks and valleys. Among the peaks for me were those moments in the statistics requirement when I understood, in a flash of p-set success, just how powerful regressions and confidence intervals can be. At the other end of the spectrum, I have spent many evenings staring at equations, eyes glazed over in total non-comprehension, wondering how economics can call itself a ‘rigorous discipline’ when its fundamental models assume things like zero population growth, total rationality and two-item economies. If an alien arrived on Earth and found only a p-set from ECON 50, it would think our world was a land full of robots who only consumed apples and bananas.

After talking to other students about core requirements, it seems fair to say that the Economics department is not the only department with a difficult and sometimes overly abstract core curriculum. We are all in some form or another — through PWR, if nothing else — subjected to classes that we may not find intrinsically interesting or meaningful all the time.

This surprised me when I first arrived at Stanford. College, I thought, was supposed to be about learning for the sake of learning, about the immediate gratification of world-expanding insight being taught in the classroom. I was supposed to spend class periods learning about how the Fed responds to labor shocks, how tax structures determine social outcomes and why communism doesn’t work so well in practice from an economic perspective. Instead, lectures often involved people named Bob and Jane, who often lived alone on islands where the only thing they could produce was coconuts. Not exactly the Keynesian response to the 2008 recession I was hoping for.

It was not until this quarter, when I enrolled in my first elective — Development Economics — that I began to see what the Econ core had taught me about the world. During the core, concepts like marginal utility and omitted variable bias felt theoretically logical but practically disconnected. Once I got to Development Economics, however, I saw many of those concepts resurfacing in very real-world applications: the marginal benefit of an additional year of schooling in Uganda, for example. Doing my p-sets, I watched as STATA crunched real numbers about population, health outcomes and gender. Suddenly, all the abstract apples-and-bananas nonsense of the core was not nonsense at all; it was the fundamental structure on which education, public health and microfinance stood.

So, if you are a freshman or sophomore (or junior or senior) still plowing your way through your own core sequence and starting to wonder what it all amounts to, don’t despair. Maybe coconut production on a hypothetical desert island seems a bit too removed to have any instructive value, but as soon as you start thinking about Nobel-Prize winning models for economic growth, coconuts on a desert island will suddenly be the difference between confusion and comprehension. Whatever the subject, remember that the abstract and dry material in your classes exists for a reason: to act as scaffolding for the intricacies of planet Earth and all its people, institutions and inventions.

If you still aren’t convinced — or if you’re simply excited to see what’s ahead — ask your professors about the real-world implications of the theories and models they present in class. I guarantee they will be more than happy to explain how their class material relates to real problems; after all, the intersection of theory and reality is what our faculty have dedicated their lives to. I recently went to an office hours appointment with my macroeconomics professor and asked about how a certain model of utility (Cobb-Douglas utility, for all the Econ people out there) could be used in the real world. She proceeded to explain, with great excitement, that this model happens to closely mirror the behavior of Americans when deciding how much to spend on housing (though interestingly, it differs in her native country of Germany). Had I not gone to office hours and asked the question, I would have gone on thinking that Cobb-Douglas was yet another simplification for undergraduate classes that had no real-world value.

So ask questions, stay engaged and trust that Stanford’s pedagogical approach is not all based on confusing fluff. Core curricula are not perfect, but they exist for a reason. Take advantage of your time here and find out what that reason is.

 

Contact Avery Rogers with your core requirement complaints at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Front and center https://stanforddaily.com/2018/10/29/front-and-center/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/10/29/front-and-center/#respond Mon, 29 Oct 2018 08:00:12 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1145727 I am that girl who sits in the first row of class. Unapologetically. Whether it’s an introsem or a 250-person lecture, whether I’m alone or in good company, I will be seated in the front of the room, as close to the center as possible. I’m well aware of the social stigma against sitting in […]

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I am that girl who sits in the first row of class. Unapologetically. Whether it’s an introsem or a 250-person lecture, whether I’m alone or in good company, I will be seated in the front of the room, as close to the center as possible.

I’m well aware of the social stigma against sitting in the front row. Sitting up front means you’re a try-hard, a teacher’s pet, the obnoxious student who asks a million questions and thinks the whole lecture revolves around her. People who sit in the front row are just trying to get attention and mark themselves as intellectual superiors (which probably means they suffer from a hideous inferiority complex). Those who sit up front aren’t cool, and — even worse — they aren’t making an effort to hide it.

I’ve heard the stereotypes; I’ve even believed the stereotypes. Even as I sit in the front row, I look around at the people on either side of me and wonder what their problem is. Who do they think they are, claiming territory in the front of the auditorium?

I’m not much of an activist, but I do think it’s about time we stop stigmatizing the front row and start celebrating its benefits. Yes, the front row problem is completely trivial and hardly worth writing an article about, but it does speak to something deeper in our culture: We weigh social norms more heavily than learning benefits. We are quick to box people into inferior identities for “infractions” as small as sitting in the front row. Even at a school like Stanford — or perhaps because we are at a school like Stanford — we feel a splash of contempt when we perceive others as trying to “get ahead” by sitting up front.

So, to combat the front-row stigma and hopefully draw attention to a variety of absurd social norms beyond it, let me list my reasons for sitting in the front row.

  1. I pay attention better. When I’m sitting in the back — or even in the second row — it’s much easier to covertly check my phone and gradually slip into the technologically-induced daze that subsumes the entire lecture. My professors all have no-technology policies in the classroom, so when I sit up front, I’m usually too scared to check my phone for fear of being called out and humiliated in front of the whole class. Sitting up front is thus a way to protect myself from my primitive desire to scroll through Instagram instead of following algebraic derivations on the board.
  2. My professors are more likely to recognize me and know my name. I suppose this does qualify as a “teacher’s-pet” motivation, but let’s be utilitarian for a moment: When your professor knows your name and recognizes you as “that kid up front,” they’re likely to think you’re interested in their subject. Professors, by virtue of being in academia, are also very interested in their subject, and they love students who share their passion and aren’t just in it for the analyst position at Goldman Sachs. By sitting up front (and asking questions), you signal to your professor that you care, which will make them more amenable in office hours, possibly be the difference between a B+ and an A-, and increase your chances of being offered a research position, a glowing recommendation letter or any form of help in the future.
  3. Leg room. Leg. Room. Sitting in the front row gives you so much more space to spread out. I’m only 5’1″, and the back rows feel cramped to me, so I can’t even imagine what the rest of you tall people experience back there. In the front row, you get to stretch your legs, put your backpack comfortably on the ground in front of you (or probably on the seat next to you since no one else sits up front) and have a much, much easier time getting up to go to the bathroom mid-lecture. If nothing else convinces you that the front row is the place to be, this reason should.

So, against all social norms, against the contemptuous glances from strangers and friends, I implore you to spend a lecture in the front row. Does it make you feel embarrassed or exposed? Engaged or more connected to the material? Could you get used to it (and all the leg room it provides)?

Let’s de-stigmatize the front row for the benefit of everyone who likes paying attention, knowing their professors and being able to get up to pee without disrupting the whole auditorium. Hope to see you there.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Trade-offs: Using the counterfactual to improve your mindset https://stanforddaily.com/2018/10/18/trade-offs-using-the-counterfactual-to-improve-your-mindset/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/10/18/trade-offs-using-the-counterfactual-to-improve-your-mindset/#respond Thu, 18 Oct 2018 09:00:23 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1145094 I’ve written about gratitude for this newspaper, and I stand by my claim that gratitude can radically alter your perspective on failure, setbacks and accomplishments. However, I also recognize that having a gracious mindset is not always feasible, especially in times of stress, frustration and regret. Sometimes, the rose-tinted glasses are off, and it’s hard […]

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I’ve written about gratitude for this newspaper, and I stand by my claim that gratitude can radically alter your perspective on failure, setbacks and accomplishments. However, I also recognize that having a gracious mindset is not always feasible, especially in times of stress, frustration and regret. Sometimes, the rose-tinted glasses are off, and it’s hard to channel and attitude of peaceful appreciation for the circumstances of your life.

When I occasionally find myself in the anti-gratitude mood – annoyed, tired and/or spilling over with bitter sarcasm – I’ve struggled to brighten my spirits and recalibrate my mindset. I can tell myself that my life is good, but the cloud of irritation still hangs over me, and the words of gratitude feel empty. I’m hit with that all-too-familiar adolescent attitude: Yes, yes, life is beautiful, but screw everything anyway.

In times like these when gratitude is untenable, I’ve learned that the only useful countermeasure to negative thoughts and emotions is considering trade-offs. Others call this considering the counterfactual, a popular concept in philosophy. Essentially, a counterfactual is whatever would have happened if different choices had been made in the past. For example, if I hadn’t stayed up until 3 a.m. last night, I’d currently be sitting in my Econ section instead of writing this Grind article. (Purely hypothetical, of course).

The counterfactual shows us what the trade-offs were for our decisions: If I weren’t where I am now, where would I be? Would I be better off or worse off? This line of reasoning is often used to evaluate policy decisions – what would happen if we did nothing versus implemented the policy? – but it’s highly relevant to our personal lives as well. In fact, we all weigh trade-offs all the time: go to the gym or take a nap, join a new club or use that extra time to get ahead on assignments. We’re masters of thinking about future trade-offs; the entire discipline of economics is built on the assumption that we make these utility-maximizing calculations all the time.

However, we’re a bit less inclined to think about past trade-offs. What if I hadn’t taken a nap yesterday and instead went to the gym? What if I hadn’t joined this club? The further in the past an event is, the less likely we are to interrogate the counterfactual attached to it. Going far back and considering the trade-offs of events that happened months or years ago can be very helpful in framing current misfortunes.

Take, for a universal example, the fact of being here at Stanford: What if you hadn’t been accepted here? Would you be at a different school? Living in a different state or country? What would the quality of your life be like right now, and what would you have missed out on by virtue of never coming to Stanford?

Perhaps life would have been better if I didn’t come to Stanford, but I doubt it. If I hadn’t come to Stanford, I would not have met my best friend, taken classes from world-class professors, stretched my mind in ethics classes, become passionate about economics, received $5,500 dollars to do service work over the summer or fallen in love with one of the most wonderful people I know. If not for Stanford, I’d probably be at a much colder school with many less opportunities and funding sources, and I probably would not have met as many brilliant and engaged people as I’ve met here. Maybe life would be better somewhere else, but the odds are slim, and another life path might have led me to sickness, death or any other terrifying place.

When I can’t rally myself to be intrinsically grateful for the life I lead, I like to practice this trade-off exercise and remind myself that other roads could have taken me to dark places, or if nothing else, led me to grow into a shallower and less wise version of myself.

When I’m feeling negative about my life, I ask myself: Given the chance, would I take the risk and reroute my life course? The answer is always no.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

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When I grow up https://stanforddaily.com/2018/10/01/when-i-grow-up/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/10/01/when-i-grow-up/#respond Mon, 01 Oct 2018 09:00:05 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1144101 This summer, I interned at a homelessness organization located in the Bay Area. I worked in the administrative offices in the education department, which create and coordinate both child and adult programming for the various shelter sites. The curricula focus on financial literacy, employment search, technology skills and personal improvements for adults, as well as […]

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This summer, I interned at a homelessness organization located in the Bay Area. I worked in the administrative offices in the education department, which create and coordinate both child and adult programming for the various shelter sites. The curricula focus on financial literacy, employment search, technology skills and personal improvements for adults, as well as tutoring and enrichment opportunities for children.

Unfortunately, my internship experience was not devoted to generating curricula or problem-solving to improve outcomes for adults or children. Rather, I spent my productive time sending scheduling emails, placing low-stakes phone calls and organizing resource information. I also spent a significant portion of my working hours reading or skimming the internet, waiting for my supervisor to assign me tasks. I left the organization nine weeks later with a better understanding of homelessness but little else to show for my personal involvement.

As many people know through experience or anecdote, interning at a nonprofit is a slow affair; non-profits are generally understaffed and struggle to take on new labor regardless of the intern’s enthusiasm or experience. However, despite knowing this as I entered the nonprofit world, I was still shocked by the lethargy and banal bureaucracy of day-to-day work. Fresh out of an 18-unit quarter at Stanford, my pace of life came to a screeching halt. Arriving at work each day, I imagined the eight hours ahead of me as an abyss of Facebook and bathroom breaks.

Working at this nonprofit and experiencing the lowest points of the nine-to-five grind shocked me into deep reflection about the kind of career I hoped for after college. Clearly, this would not sustain me intellectually or emotionally in the long-term, but what fields would be better suited to my disposition and interests? Public policy? Government and politics? Academia? Private practice in psychology?

Over the course of the summer, I entertained these and many more career prospects, pivoting my life plan every 48 hours as I scrambled to envision a career that would both help the world and suit me in the day-to-day. I read hundreds of articles on career advice and what it’s like to work in dozens of fields. I came up with blissful plans and then crushed them in doubt. Most of all, I agonized about where I wanted life to take me and how to prepare for it.

Back on campus the saga continues, jumping from one 10-year-plan to the next. My mind is like an iPod that only plays the first 10 seconds of each song — in other words, it’s an absolute cacophony in there, enough to drive me mildly insane.

Of course, the problem is not that I lack a definitive life plan. Most of us do, and that’s probably for the best; it takes many adult years to chart the territory of the working world, and there’s plenty of time to hem the sails and readjust as we navigate the workforce during our twenties. The problem, rather, is that I feel so compelled to lock in a life plan for myself already that I feel like I’ll fall behind if I’m not working towards something concrete and specific. I see all the premeds and born-to-be-coders around me and can’t help thinking that I’m already a mile behind and losing ground.

I’m beginning to realize now, two months into my career-path agonizing, that I simply don’t know yet, and no amount of ruminating is going to flip on the light switch and illuminate the rest of my professional life. Unlike the children who decided they would be doctors in the fourth grade, I’ve always been unsure and explorative, and that’s okay. Plenty of the world’s most successful and influential people had no defined direction in their college years or for many years after. Some of us just need more time to explore all the options, to experiment, to try and fail and try again until we find the work that fulfills us.

So, if you’re also feeling behind in the rat’s race towards your profession, I implore you to accept your uncertainty and embrace it. Believe that your professional life will turn out all right — and you’re here at Stanford, so it will — and appreciate your undergraduate years as a time to see all that the working world has to offer. Appreciate the opportunity to learn about yourself in the process. I know it’s not easy to sit with uncertainty; I go to great lengths to avoid it. But it’s the uncertainties that give us the narrative of our lives. After all, what fun would life be if you already knew exactly what was going to happen?

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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A month of summer monotony https://stanforddaily.com/2018/09/27/a-month-of-summer-monotony/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/09/27/a-month-of-summer-monotony/#respond Thu, 27 Sep 2018 09:00:32 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1143900 After working for nine weeks in Menlo Park, I returned home to San Diego for the last month of summer. My internship had been slow and a bit lonely, and I was ecstatic to be returning to a month with my family. It would be my first extended trip home since I began college last […]

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After working for nine weeks in Menlo Park, I returned home to San Diego for the last month of summer. My internship had been slow and a bit lonely, and I was ecstatic to be returning to a month with my family. It would be my first extended trip home since I began college last fall, and I wanted to suck the proverbial marrow from my unstructured time with the people I’d grown to miss with a dull ache, a back-of-mind longing for home.

I drove the eight hours back to my house and was greeted by my family and a few other things: new plastic cups in the cabinet, my books moved from my room to my parent’s bookshelf and a new insistence that all food be quickly cleaned up and carefully wrapped, since the house was now under periodic attack by garden ants.

Once I’d hit my few nostalgic landmarks the beach, my favorite consignment store, the local Starbucks life quickly reverted to normal. My days were filled with folding laundry, reading, playing frisbee with my siblings in the backyard, covertly discussing my brother’s college application process with my mother and driving my sister to soccer practice. I spent one afternoon killing about 200 ants who’d come in through a crack in the kitchen wall.

After many months at Stanford, I had forgotten what it was like to be at home. I realized that perhaps the most striking difference between my life in high school and my life at Stanford is domestic. That is, at Stanford, my only chores involve doing laundry every other week and occasionally vacuuming my room or taking out the trash. I check my PO box about once every three weeks and have to restock shampoo every other month. There are no dishes to wash, no grocery runs to make, no dogs to walk or siblings to be driven to sporting events. Stanford removes the domesticity from our lives, allowing us to hyper-saturate our time with academic, extracurricular and social endeavors. Your life inevitably moves faster when you don’t have to spend half an hour cutting meat and vegetables for dinner.

You would think, given the lightning pace of life at Stanford, that I would have loved the slow routine of home life. I certainly thought so as I anticipated my trip home. But despite how much I’d been longing for the lazy afternoons and access to a fully-stocked kitchen of home, domestic life quickly grew boring. Sixteen-hour days stretched ahead of me, and I struggled to fill them with reading, cooking and running errands. Moreover, after such an intellectually and socially stimulating year at Stanford, domestic life suddenly felt trivial. Loading the dishwasher, while necessary, lacked the excitement and importance of learning microeconomic theory or writing for a newspaper. Stanford taught me — or misled me to believe that each day can be a 16-hour marathon of classes, jobs and friends. At a quarter of that pace, I felt restless.

Going home and experiencing the tedium of domestic life, while unexciting, did provide me with important perspective on my life at Stanford. During my freshman year, I would often daydream about a life with no responsibilities, spent reading and cooking and strolling through a park all afternoon. I longed for a respite from the eight-to-eleven grind that Stanford imposes. But after a month at home, I’ve come to appreciate that grind for its excitement, intellectual stimulation, community and variety. Life at Stanford is difficult, but there’s also a certain joy and energy in the pace of life here. So, while I’m young and driven, I should appreciate the dizzying speed of life at Stanford, knowing the alternative has its own challenges.

My month at home also taught me to be more grateful for the people at Stanford who take on the domestic burden for us the dining hall workers, the janitorial staff and the many thousands who restock the printers, sweep the sidewalks and perform all of the often unseen tasks that allow us to dedicate our time to other pursuits. It also made me grateful for my own mother, who has spent so many thousands of hours doing the unseen work that has allowed me to focus on my education. Each day, dozens of people do the domestic work of our lives so that we don’t have to; without them, none of us would succeed at Stanford.

Someday, I know I’ll be ready to return to a slower pace of life, with domestic life taking up a large portion of the day. But for now, I’m grateful to move through the world at this pace, with my mind focused on learning and meeting people instead of considering how to most efficiently kill a swarm of ants.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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The universal week one fear https://stanforddaily.com/2018/09/17/the-universal-week-one-fear/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/09/17/the-universal-week-one-fear/#respond Tue, 18 Sep 2018 05:24:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1143608 Here you are, finally. Stanford University. For six months or more, you’ve been counting down the days until NSO, reading everything you can find online to prepare. Your family, your friends, your entire society has been hyping up this moment: according to the cultural script, you are now embarking on the greatest four years of […]

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Here you are, finally. Stanford University. For six months or more, you’ve been counting down the days until NSO, reading everything you can find online to prepare. Your family, your friends, your entire society has been hyping up this moment: according to the cultural script, you are now embarking on the greatest four years of your life.

What makes these four years so great, they tell you? A number of things the classes, the clubs, the study abroad opportunities but mostly the people. Yes, these four years will be the years when you build the deepest, most exhilarating friendships of your life. At Stanford you will finally “find your people,” explore new romantic experiences and have those 4 a.m. conversations during which you reveal the murkiest, most turbulent contents of your soul.

Talk about high expectations.

These expectations, of course, feed an intense anxiety an anxiety which I know you, Class of 2022, are no stranger to. Back in April, right after Admit Weekend occurred, I asked some of my dorm’s ProFros to post a Guide to Stanford that I’d written in the 2022 Official Facebook page. At the end of the tip guide, I left my email address, entreating any anxious freshman to reach out to me for consolation and advice. In the last few weeks, I’ve received a flurry of emails from nervous freshmen, mostly centering on social life. Here’s a representative quote: “I’ve been so afraid that I won’t make friends [at Stanford], I won’t be able to fit in or be myself, I’ll be all alone, I won’t be able to catch up to all the people who already seem to be besties on Facebook (!??)”

Reading this email and others, I remembered my own NSO and the similar fear that I felt arriving on campus. I had struggled a lot socially in high school, particularly towards the end, and I came into college without a single friend to my name. I was afraid that my isolation in high school was a symptom of some deep-seated disconnect with members of my generation, a disease that I bring with me to Stanford. I wanted connection more than anything, but how could I compete with all these other students, these suave socializers, these pop-culture-aficionados who had been selected Prom King and Queen at their high schools? I already felt a mile behind.

I thought I was unique in my fear, given how socially miserable my high school experience was. However, after a year of getting to know other Stanford students, I’ve come to see that my fear was not personal, but universal. Nearly every single person I’ve talked to, introverts and extroverts alike, has told me they were nervous about making friends at Stanford. Some, like me, were afraid their introverted and serious personalities would make them unfit for the high-energy social life of college. Others, more extroverted types, worried that Stanford students would be unlike anyone they knew in high school and that they wouldn’t know how to navigate such an intellectual and socially atypical environment. Some felt alone during high school and feared solitude would follow them to Stanford. Others feared that they’d never be able to recreate the close, loving friendships they’d spent so many years building at home. No matter what the flavor of their anxiety, everyone started with a fear of meeting people and building relationships at Stanford.

Whether you’re mildly nervous or paralyzed by panic, I promise that you aren’t alone. You’re actually in the vast majority of students who feel afraid. This fear means that you care about people and value close relationships, and that you have the sense to know that meeting people is difficult and includes a certain amount of risk.

I can’t promise that you’ll make friends the second you arrive on campus, or even during the course of NSO; you will make friends, but the timeline is highly individual, and you shouldn’t rely on a specific deadline for making connections. Friendship takes time.

What I can promise, though, is that everyone is in exactly the same boat as you are nervous, awkward and convinced that everyone else is making friends faster and more easily than they are. It’s so easy to look around and see clusters of people laughing and chatting and assume that they’re all a mile ahead of you on the road to Platonic Happily Ever After. But look closer: half of those people (or more) are laughing nervously, trying to keep up with a conversation they’re only half following, afraid everyone else will see through their panicked grin. Everyone is “faking it until they make it,” and afraid that they aren’t faking it well enough.

Everyone is afraid, and everyone is looking for some kindness and closeness in this sea of unfamiliar faces. So rather than meditating on your own sense of panic, you have the opportunity to be that kindness and closeness for someone else. Assume everyone is as scared and desperate as you are because they are and start a conversation there. You’ll probably change that person’s day, and perhaps, with a little luck, their next four years at Stanford.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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How to be alone https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/01/how-to-be-alone/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/01/how-to-be-alone/#respond Fri, 01 Jun 2018 08:00:41 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1141917 Summer is fast approaching. Back in high school, that meant three uninterrupted months of hanging out with your friends. Maybe you worked a day job or went on vacation for a few weeks, but summer was probably your greatest opportunity for unstructured time with friends. In college, however, the summertime dynamic changes for many of […]

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Summer is fast approaching. Back in high school, that meant three uninterrupted months of hanging out with your friends. Maybe you worked a day job or went on vacation for a few weeks, but summer was probably your greatest opportunity for unstructured time with friends.

In college, however, the summertime dynamic changes for many of us. Our college friends live hundreds or thousands of miles away, and many return home or to work at far-off internships over the summer months. High school friends also scatter and get caught up in job or travel opportunities. Whether you yourself are headed home for the summer, staying around Stanford or planning to work elsewhere in the world, it’s likely that the next three months will bring some periods of social isolation.

However, social isolation does not have to be synonymous with loneliness. It is possible to be alone without feeling an acute sense of lacking or at least to manage those feelings with grace and optimism.

My high school experience was defined in large part by solitude. During my junior year of high school, I lost my friends and spent most of my lunch periods alone in the library or tucked away in a discrete corner of campus. As a result of my isolation and frustration with the social life at my school, I decided to take my senior year of high school online — in other words, from the solitary comfort of my bedroom. Aside from interacting with my parents and siblings in the evenings, I spent the majority of my day alone.

During this period, I was lucky to be a natural introvert, content with my own company. Nonetheless, it was difficult to sustain my spirits and sanity in such an isolated environment. For most of my life, my entertainment and meaning had come from relationships and social life more broadly. With so much time spent alone, I had to create other ways to fill my time and my desire for a coherent, meaningful life.

I found that my prolonged period of solitude was especially conducive to learning, creativity and spirituality. I found both knowledge and an artificial sort of social interaction in podcasts, books and audiobooks. I got to interact with some of the brightest, most compassionate minds in the world, undistracted by any immediate social concerns. With lots of time to dwell on the contents of my own mind and no pressure to speak, I also experienced a much higher quantity and quality of creative ideas, primarily related to writing. I filled a notebook with ideas for writing projects and kept a comprehensive journal. Finally, the solitude gave me ample space and time to experience nature in silence and awe. Even the trees around my neighborhood, when I had no better entertainment to distract me, became objects of biological and artistic fascination. It is amazing what you see when you have nothing better to do than look.

Solitude can be lonely, but it can also be a welcome time to notice the parts of the world — and of yourself — that usually make up the background and periphery of a socially-minded life. If you expect long periods of solitude this summer (and even a week can feel like a long time to be isolated), try to fill the quiet hours with the interests and experiences you’ve been pushing to the bottom of the priority list. Pick up a novel. Take a walk in a park or around a city block. Write a poem or a song or a piece of code (excuse my tech-ignorance). Replace socializing with enrichment of other forms, and you’ll likely feel full in a way that erases the loneliness even in isolation.

Of course, don’t shun all forms of human communication for the purpose of achieving an artistic or spiritual revelation. I am not advocating a monastic transformation. Call your friends and your mother, talk to your colleagues and teammates, meet strangers in whatever city you end up in. Just remember that, when you do feel isolated, there are ways to fill the silence that don’t include other people.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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The introvert’s dilemma: greeting acquaintances https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/30/the-introverts-dilemma-greeting-acquaintances/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/30/the-introverts-dilemma-greeting-acquaintances/#respond Thu, 31 May 2018 01:00:39 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1141785 Among the many dichotomies in human behavior, I believe one of the most telling is a person’s willingness — or lack thereof — to greet an acquaintance. There are those that will shout “Hey, Avery!” across a crowded courtyard to get my attention, even though we haven’t spoken since mid-winter quarter. There are others, such […]

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Among the many dichotomies in human behavior, I believe one of the most telling is a person’s willingness — or lack thereof — to greet an acquaintance. There are those that will shout “Hey, Avery!” across a crowded courtyard to get my attention, even though we haven’t spoken since mid-winter quarter. There are others, such as myself, who will only say hello to an acquaintance when direct eye contact is made and there’s no way to avoid a “hello” without being rude. For those like me, who truly want to be friendly but struggle to socialize with acquaintances, casual greetings can be a source of legitimate stress, especially at a place like Stanford.

After a year at Stanford, I have built up a small circle of good friends, but a massive circle of peripheral acquaintances. Students I’ve met in classes, at meetings for clubs I never joined, at speaking events and sorority rush, pop up at every corner. Some are people I once spoke to frequently in class and know by first and last name, while others are simply familiar faces without name or context.

By now, I believe there are hundreds of people on this campus who fit on my spectrum of acquaintances, and each encounter with one of them is its own moral and social dilemma. With those who I know from class and once spoke to semi-regularly, the question is: should I strike up a conversation, leave it with a nice hello, or just offer a friendly smile? Would they be annoyed if I tried to engage in conversation, or offended if I didn’t? The situation is even worse with distant, one-time-interaction acquaintances, since it’s unclear whether or not they remember me. Inevitably, I give them an extra-long stare, trying to remember where I met them. When they meet my eye contact, my heartbeat speeds into full gear: should I say hello or smile? Will they think I’m creepy if they don’t remember me, or think I’m cold and awkward if I look away and they remember me better than I remember them?

Though I am constitutionally a quiet person, I’m also inclined to smile and say a quick hello to anyone I recognize. After all, how could someone be annoyed to get smiled at? But I am also conscious of my upbringing: I was raised in a mixture of California and Colorado, two places known for their friendly, greeting-oriented populations. In my neighborhood, it is perfectly normal to smile and say hello to a complete stranger walking down the street. In fact, it is expected that you smile at strangers. I know this is far from the cultural norm in other states, let alone other countries, where many Stanford students come from. I cannot rely on my Southern California greeting instincts to lead me through social interaction at Stanford.

At the same time, it seems far more damaging to tend in the other direction, towards ducking my head or assuming a neutral expression when passing by an acquaintance. Sure, an overzealous greeting towards a Manhattan native might leave us both feeling confused or awkward, but an underperformed greeting towards an outgoing and genuine acquaintance might leave them feeling ignored and discouraged by my coldness. Is it worth pushing myself to offer friendly greetings to everyone, at the risk of embarrassment, to avoid hurting anyone with indifference?

Unfortunately, I don’t know the answer. But to all the introverts and shy people out there who also struggle with the Stanford acquaintance greeting syndrome, you are not alone. My inclination, and one I am trying to practice myself, is to be the friendliest and most outgoing version of yourself within your comfort boundaries when dealing with acquaintances. After all, I always appreciate it when someone shouts across the courtyard to greet me. Maybe that’s my Southern California kicking in, but it seems reasonable to believe that it’s the universal principle of human kindness.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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A belated thank you: Why it’s always the right time to give appreciation https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/16/a-belated-thank-you-why-its-always-the-right-time-to-give-appreciation/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/16/a-belated-thank-you-why-its-always-the-right-time-to-give-appreciation/#respond Wed, 16 May 2018 08:40:02 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1141080 If you’ve been keeping up with spiritual trends or the recent positive psychology literature, you’ve probably noticed an uptick in the usage of the word gratitude. Religious leaders and psychologists alike recommend keeping a daily journal of things we are grateful for and appreciate, from the feel of the spring sun on your skin to […]

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If you’ve been keeping up with spiritual trends or the recent positive psychology literature, you’ve probably noticed an uptick in the usage of the word gratitude. Religious leaders and psychologists alike recommend keeping a daily journal of things we are grateful for and appreciate, from the feel of the spring sun on your skin to the office hours meeting that saved your latest p-set grade.

Among the countless things that we have to be grateful for, perhaps the most important is the people who we depend on to teach us, inspire us, console us, and lift us to our full potential. Some of these people are professors, some are mentors, and some are peers. Regardless of who you put on that list, there is someone here at Stanford – probably many someones – who have helped you arrive at this moment.

You’re probably already aware of this, and already know that there are many people around you who you appreciate internally. The question is not whether or not we feel gratitude, but whether or not we express it to the people we value most – whether those people are tenured faculty members or our next-door neighbors.

I think most of us can agree that we don’t express all of our appreciation to all of the people who matter to us. In fact, we probably only express a fraction of the gratitude we feel, and could reasonably be much more grateful to others. I don’t think this is because we are ungrateful or uncaring. Rather, I think many of us struggle to decide when it’s appropriate to express gratitude, and when it would be awkward or “too much.” Should you really write a letter to a professor or a kid a couple doors down? Is it too much to stop a TA in the hall a quarter later to thank them for their help in office hours?

I will take the radical position and say that you should always express appreciation, no matter how weird, delayed or irrelevant it may seem now. I didn’t always feel this way; there was a time when I would have balked at the idea of writing a letter to someone I hadn’t seen in a year to thank them for their positive impact on my life, of all things. I believed there were boundaries to the normalcy of gratitude.

Perhaps there are boundaries, but as a senior in high school, I broke them. I went to a local high school through junior year, but for a variety of reasons left the school to do an online high school program for senior year. I didn’t have the best relationship with my high school, and I only went back to visit when my younger brother forgot his lunch at home and I had to go bring it to him. I went completely AWOL, and never spoke to anyone – I mean truly anyone – from my grade after leaving.

Sometime that April, 10 months after I’d last attended classes at my high school, I decided to do something radical, something that would stretch my soul a bit. Online school was monotonous and solitary, and I wanted to re-engage with people my age. So I wrote down a list of 10 students who, for large or tiny reasons, had made my time in high school a little bit brighter. I wrote each student a two-page, handwritten letter about how, many months and years later, I still remembered their kindness and generosity. Then I found their addresses in the school’s directory and mailed the letters to their homes, most of which I’d never seen.

Not all of the students got in contact with me afterwards, but a few of them did. One of them said she cried when she read it, and then showed it to her mother, who also cried. Another said it was one of the nicest things she’d ever received. A third texted me right away to see how I was doing. Weird as it must have been to receive a letter from me, a distant acquaintance, they were all touched to be recognized and remembered positively, especially for the little things they’d done, like simply saying hello in the hallways.

Since then, I’ve made a much more active effort to appreciate people. For me, this is best done through writing; I’ve written letters to both students and professors here who I appreciate, all of whom (including the professors) have reached out to me to thank me for the recognition. Because here’s the thing: being appreciated is one of the greatest honors and highest pleasures of the human experience. No, it doesn’t cause a crazy adrenaline rush, but being appreciated helps people remember the goodness and connectedness of humanity. I’m hard-pressed to think of many things more intrinsically heartwarming than that.

So write a letter. Say something, even if it’s months delayed. Make the extra effort even when it’s awkward or ill-timed. No one will ever be annoyed with you for appreciating them (if they are, send me an email and I’ll revise my view). Gratitude is good for them, good for you and good for mankind as a whole. So, whether someone helped you an hour ago or a year ago: say thanks.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Note from an anti-sorority sorority girl https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/08/note-from-an-anti-sorority-sorority-girl/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/08/note-from-an-anti-sorority-sorority-girl/#respond Tue, 08 May 2018 08:00:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1140679 Entering college this fall, I knew that my value system and perspectives would change during my time at Stanford. Everyone grows and changes during their four years of exposure to new ideas and people from across the world. Still, there were attitudes so deeply ingrained in me, so central to my identity that I could not […]

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Entering college this fall, I knew that my value system and perspectives would change during my time at Stanford. Everyone grows and changes during their four years of exposure to new ideas and people from across the world. Still, there were attitudes so deeply ingrained in me, so central to my identity that I could not imagine having a change of heart, regardless of the circumstances. One of those attitudes was being anti-sorority. I was never going to join one.

This attitude, of course, was largely based on sorority stereotypes that had originated in big state schools. I associated sorority life with superficial Instagram smiles, dancing on tables in short skirts and drinking — lots of drinking. As someone who doesn’t drink, doesn’t use Instagram and doesn’t like to dance in public, sorority life offered me nothing but a reason to feel a pathetic mixture of contempt and insecurity in my own social community.

A few weeks before Rush, I told my mom off-handedly that my roommate was rushing. My mom had not joined a sorority during college — she too felt like she wouldn’t belong — and told me it was one of the biggest mistakes of her college experience. (She went to school in rural New England, where the only thing to do from November to April was participate in fraternity life.) She implored me to rush, just in case I wanted the option to join — better to have the choice than no choice.

So I rushed. I went in with a humored distance, expecting to leave Rush with a few funny anecdotes and an insider view on Greek life that I could share with my non-rushing friends after the whole event was over.

I ended up dropping out of Rush on the second day, but I received a bid anyway. When they called me on the phone to ask if I’d accept the bid, I hardly had time to think it through, so I said yes. Did I want to join? Not exactly. But I reasoned that I only had to stick with it for the spring, and if I hated it, I could always drop out two months later.

It has been less than a month since I joined so I write this cautiously, but I am coming to believe that sorority life at Stanford really can accommodate a wide range of people — even those stubborn anti-sorority types like myself. Many of the girls drink, but there is no pressure to. In fact, there’s very little pressure to attend drinking events at all — there are enough sober daytime activities and study nights to fill your social calendar without having to endure long nights of beer pong and tipsy conversation with strangers. I’ve also been surprised by the lack of pressure to fulfill the image of a sorority member. There is no dress code, explicit or implicit, and people dress according to their preferences. I do not feel left out because I’m not active on Instagram or following everyone’s Snapchat stories.

Of course, there are still little things that I object to. The national chapter enforces new member traditions that sometimes feel like they were pulled from the first 20 minutes of a Hollywood documentary about cult ceremonies (taking oaths, for instance). I’m supposed to refer to fellow members as ‘sisters,’ which I rebel against with every cell in my body — my only  sisters are eleven year-old twins who live back home in San Diego.

Perhaps my stubbornness will erode with time, or perhaps not. Either way, though, my experience within a sorority has been positive beyond expectation. A sorority really is a conduit for social life, in any way you conceive of it. The sheer volume of Greek events means you can select your own social scene from the list, and curate your sorority experience according to your preferences. And no matter what you choose, people will like you and want to get to know you simply because you’re part of the same community. For a more introverted person like myself, this is a huge relief and an unparalleled opportunity to expand my social circle beyond my freshman dorm.

So, to all the prospective sorority members and sorority haters alike — as my mom did to me, I implore you to rush. Give yourself the opportunity and keep an open mind. I’m the last person I’d expect to join, and here I am, glad to be on my way to chapter meeting tonight.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Why take ethics? https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/02/why-take-ethics/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/02/why-take-ethics/#respond Wed, 02 May 2018 08:27:53 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1140364 This quarter, I enrolled in two ethics classes: one on effective altruism and the other about ethical questions “on the edge,” particularly those pertaining to technological advances and modern social problems. I had decided during winter quarter that I wanted to minor in ethics in society, simply because the classes sounded interesting. While I got […]

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This quarter, I enrolled in two ethics classes: one on effective altruism and the other about ethical questions “on the edge,” particularly those pertaining to technological advances and modern social problems. I had decided during winter quarter that I wanted to minor in ethics in society, simply because the classes sounded interesting. While I got a “practical” education through my economics major, I would enjoy debating 25 units worth of puzzling ethical questions.

In the first four weeks of classes, though, my ethics classes have offered much more than entertaining debate. In effective altruism, we have interrogated our charitable giving, career choices and the morality of having a child. I have revised my outlook on my own career and completely reformed the way I understand my own value in a global context. As effective altruism shows us, we can put a monetary value on the price of saving a person’s life, and we can determine the most cost-efficient ways of doing it. The class has exposed me to my own life-saving potential as a highly educated American, and has given me a sometimes uncomfortable but ultimately meaningful sense of responsibility towards the global poor.

In my Ethics on the Edge class, we have dug deeper into the fabric of corporate ethics and data management, the fundamental problems plaguing Title IX investigations and the philosophical concerns we will face when (not if) humans begin marrying robots. From AI to global labor ethics to gene editing, such ethical questions will pervade the background — and hopefully the foreground — of our workplace experiences. As the world’s emerging leaders, they are questions we will likely have to tackle ourselves, without precedent to rely on for guidance.

In these classes, I have learned that ethics is not merely an interesting field of philosophy, but a ubiquitous presence in our lives, public and personal. We not only make ethically charged choices when we tell a lie or sacrifice our time to help someone in need, but also in our day-to-day decisions about the places we learn and work, the way we spend our money and the way we interact with technology. The more power we have in companies and organizations, the more high stakes our choices will become.

Regardless of your major and career aspirations, I believe it is imperative that you take an ethics class in your subject during your time at Stanford. You don’t need to complete a philosophy double major or an ethics in society minor to understand ethical questions. Of course, the more the better, but even a single class on the ethics of computing, assistive technology, biological experimentation, journalism or political campaigning could inform the decisions you make for the rest of your life.

An ethics class will not give you all the answers to moral questions–many answers don’t exist–but should give you frameworks by which to make ethical decisions on a case-by-case basis in the future. When should a company be transparent with its consumers, and when can they ethically hide internal information? How much should technology imitate human behavior? Should neuroimaging be used in courts of law? Such questions are not black and white, but determining boundaries and grey areas will help us all to address these issues consciously and systemically.

Chances are, our campus is now home to the founders of the next Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, the next head of Volkswagen, the next Stanley Milgram. We, of all people, must go into the world with ethics at the front of our minds. Most unethical behavior is not deliberate, but simply careless, and the only way to protect us from careless ignorance is ethical knowledge. So please, take an ethics class, whether it is required by your major or not. I’m convinced you’ll find it interesting, and it just might change your decisions twenty years down the line in a way that benefits us all.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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When nothing matters https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/24/when-nothing-matters/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/24/when-nothing-matters/#respond Tue, 24 Apr 2018 08:00:20 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1139858 I didn’t know what prompted my descent into existential anxiety, and I didn’t know how to stop it.

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For most of my childhood and adolescence, I quietly avoided thoughts of my own mortality. Every once in a while, the futility of life would hit me with such dizzying horror that I sometimes threw up just from the fear. Luckily, though, this was rare, and I was good at shoving those thoughts to the periphery of my mind until they melted into the otherwise happy, curious fabric of my interior life.

During November of my senior year of high school, thoughts of my own demise resurfaced. One panic attack followed another, and instead of fading, the thoughts became amplified. Walking, driving, showering, attending class, the impending doom drummed on. Nothing would last. Nothing mattered. Nothing was even real, objectively speaking. All this work and love and suffering and happiness for nothing. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

I didn’t know what prompted my descent into existential anxiety, and I didn’t know how to stop it. I never watch television — I haven’t watched a single episode of a show since arriving at Stanford — but I watched six seasons of “The Office” in two months just because I needed a comical distraction to make it through the day. I couldn’t sit still with my own mind for fear of falling into a self-made black hole. It got so bad that I started calming myself with the assurance that I could, if worse came to worst, end my time on the planet prematurely. Ironic, since my fear of death was the cause of my distress in the first place.

Months went by. I watched more TV and confronted my anxiety on Quora and Reddit threads like “How do I stop thinking about death?” and “What is the point of living if it all ends?”

As you can imagine, some answers were more helpful than others. I never found the philosophical panacea I was seeking — alas, God has not yet weighed in on Reddit — but I noticed a common theme. Many commenters suggested that the fear of death is really a fear of meaninglessness in disguise. We do not fear the end, but we fear arriving at the end with nothing to show for it. These commenters suggested pursuing love, family, a meaningful career or simply an appreciation of aesthetics as a remedy for the existential anxiety I was experiencing.

At first, I was skeptical. Nihilism, after all, would laugh at such a sentimental cure: Do what you will, but it still doesn’t matter on the cosmic scale! You’re still just a momentary speck in space!

I couldn’t argue with nihilism, but I gradually learned it wasn’t an argument worth having. Of course, life is objectively meaningless; unless you believe in a divine creator, there is no organizing principle to the universe. Death is death, and even if there is reincarnation, the sun will explode someday and the universe will collapse after that and no life will endure.

Convincing, but there’s a paradox in this line of logic: Believing in nihilism and indulging thoughts of death and infinity and meaninglessness scares me. But in order to be scared, I must not really believe in nihilism or meaninglessness. If I truly were a nihilist, then nothing could scare me. Life and death would be neutral, and therefore I’d have nothing to worry about.

Evidently, something mattered to me: my life. And why did my life matter to me? I thought about this question for a long time and to some extent still do. My brush with nihilistic despair erased all assumptions of meaning from my life, leaving me to decide which things I truly value and which things I only took as important because of external expectations. Looking back on my 18 years, I decided that love was more important than knowledge, but knowledge was more important than social status. I stopped caring so much about grades and started focusing more on my oft-neglected relationship with my siblings. I reconsidered all my career aspirations and whether they would bring me true joy and engagement or just an extra dose of ego.

You don’t have to go through a nihilistic downward spiral to clarify your values, of course. Nihilism forces a transformation, but you can choose to interrogate your own value system without months of depression. I do recommend, however, that you begin with the idea that nothing objectively matters. Recognize that all your accomplishments and accolades are transient and will someday be forgotten. That doesn’t mean accomplishment is completely futile; it just means that you don’t have to focus on achievement for life’s meaning if you don’t find it intrinsically valuable. You choose what matters while you’re here. There’s no wrong choice; life’s meaning is a question without an answer.

And if you’re in the throes of nihilistic thinking, remember: You’re upset because you care. And as long as you care about fear, you have the capacity to care about other things, too. Give it time, watch a full TV show if you have to, and you’ll find that life is meaningful, after all — just, perhaps, not in the ways you expect it to be.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu

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Confronting old age, now https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/17/confronting-old-age-now/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/17/confronting-old-age-now/#respond Tue, 17 Apr 2018 08:00:01 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1139497 On Sunday afternoons, I bike three miles to a quaint wooden house in a quiet neighborhood in Menlo Park. The house is adorned with pink shutters and a turquoise door, and the front yard garden is overgrown with lavender bushes and beautiful trails of flowering vines. Each week I park my bike in the driveway […]

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On Sunday afternoons, I bike three miles to a quaint wooden house in a quiet neighborhood in Menlo Park. The house is adorned with pink shutters and a turquoise door, and the front yard garden is overgrown with lavender bushes and beautiful trails of flowering vines. Each week I park my bike in the driveway next to an old mailbox and an animal cage and ring the doorbell. I’m greeted by a caretaker, who punches in a four-digit code to unlock the front door and let me inside.

It smells like urine inside, and I am not sure if the odor comes from the cats or from the people who own the house. I take a seat at the living room table on a cushioned window bench. On a good day, both of my companions are seated at the table, eating a snack or reading the cartoons in the newspaper. Sometimes, one lies prostrate on the couch, taking a nap in an uncomfortable-looking position. For the next hour, we chat, listen to music and make a puzzle or play with dominoes or assemble paper airplanes.

My companions are an elderly couple who suffer some of the worst symptoms of aging. The wife has late-stage dementia, and her husband has Parkinson’s disease. The husband, though evidently suffering cognitive decline, is able to hold a cogent conversation on personal topics — he explained to me that he once worked as an auto mechanic, and later as a computer technician at the Stanford Bookstore. His wife, however, has unfortunately lost all touch with reality. She may be seen having an argument with a rocking chair one minute and criticizing the police for a fabricated criminal mishandling the next. She oscillates between contented babbling and overt irritation at my presence in her home.

Working with this elderly couple has been a difficult experience, both practically and emotionally. On a practical level, it’s hard to navigate a relationship with a person who is no longer able to understand that you, too, are a human being. How do you talk to someone who can’t understand the words you’re saying? How do you respond to their incomprehensible requests and comments? How do you assert your authority as the “adult in the room” while respecting their human dignity and autonomy?

These are questions that I have yet to answer for myself, which must be answered on a case-by-case basis. As an eighteen-year-old with far less life experience than my clients, playing an authoritative role can be hard to do; it feels disrespectful and wrong to assert myself as the “adult in the room” when, according to age, I’m clearly the child. I am still learning how to negotiate the balance between respect and authority, deference and firmness, child and adult.

On an emotional level, working with an elderly couple has also given me ample opportunity to reflect on the reality of aging, mortality and meaning. Despite coming advances in medicine, it would be naïve to assume that dementia, Parkinson’s and other age-related diseases will be obsolete by the time I reach old age. As such, I have been forced to consider the fact that I too may be reduced to a mentally-impaired existence months or years before I actually die. This brings up a number of questions, namely about my identity and the things I care about beyond cognitive aptitude. When I am no longer able to do math or discuss social science research or even remember what I ate for breakfast, what will endure to give my life meaning?

I do not know what it is like to have dementia, so I cannot answer this question definitively. However, from my experience working with the elderly, I can provide two possibilities: aesthetics and relationships.

Thanks to the way music is stored in the brain, both husband and wife have extensive musical memory and can sing along to songs they probably haven’t heard in decades. Both have an appreciation for flowers and natural beauty and are proud of the interior decoration of their house. Though their minds have decayed with age, their senses are very much alive and receptive to all sorts of beauty. Building an appreciation for aesthetics and music early in life, then, may be a key to finding meaning and pleasure in life after cognitive decline.

Unsurprisingly, they also exhibit a tenderness towards each other that allows me glimpses of their married life before the diseases of old age. They do not always speak to each other lovingly — the wife in particular is prone to irritation — but they still address each other using playful nicknames and offer to help each other in the ways they know how. They are lucky to have each other to lean on through this process of aging, and I hope to have a network of long-loved individuals around me when I too near the end of life.

There is nothing romantic about aging. It is painful, humiliating and depersonifying. But I do not believe it has to be completely devoid of meaning. Just as we find beauty and happiness within the strain of everyday life, so too do the wife and husband I visit. Those moments of goodness may be more rare for them, but I hope that makes them all the more special.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

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Exploring outside the classroom https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/11/exploring-outside-the-classroom/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/11/exploring-outside-the-classroom/#respond Wed, 11 Apr 2018 08:00:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1139016 At the beginning of freshman year, we were all encouraged to “explore.” This was mostly in reference to our academics–with major declarations far on the horizon, we were encouraged by Academic Advisors, professors and RAs to take classes in a variety of departments, trying them on for size. Having taken classes here in economics, psychology, […]

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At the beginning of freshman year, we were all encouraged to “explore.” This was mostly in reference to our academics–with major declarations far on the horizon, we were encouraged by Academic Advisors, professors and RAs to take classes in a variety of departments, trying them on for size.

Having taken classes here in economics, psychology, sociology and creative writing, along with requirements in math, THINK and PWR, I would advocate for exploring different departments. However, I am also glad to be well along the way to completing the core for my major, Economics. This year, I will complete five core classes towards the major, and thus have limited opportunity for breadth in the classroom, particularly this spring quarter.

For those who have already identified a passion for a unit-heavy major, or simply want to get ahead on their major requirements so that they can complete theses and research in the area, robust academic exploration during freshman and sophomore year might be unrealistic. But that doesn’t mean all exploration is off the table. A less-discussed but equally valuable way to learn about a wide variety of fields and subjects is through exploring extracurricular opportunities at Stanford. As I’ve learned, there is nearly endless opportunity to expand and adapt your extracurricular involvement. Activities Fair at NSO is not the end-all-be-all of club recruitment, and each quarter offers new opportunities in research, employment and athletics.

Fall Quarter, I joined the Mariachi Band and The Stanford Daily staff. Winter Quarter, I began working as a tutor on Saturdays for Tutoring for Community, took a research position at the Early Life Stress and Pediatric Anxiety Program through the Psychiatry department and started working as a companion to a wife and husband with dementia in Menlo Park. I also played Indoor Soccer for my dorm’s intramural team, and sat on a panel for the Stanford Mental Health Outreach club. Now, in Spring Quarter, I am in the process of training to be a Stanford Tour Guide, and I attended my first meeting of the Stanford Effective Altruism club. I am not involved in all of these activities today–I dropped Mariachi and my research position along the way because, though I enjoyed them, I wanted to explore other activities during my freshman year.

Through these experiences, I’ve learned and experienced so many things that, even with a diverse academic course load, I could not have learned in the classroom. In Mariachi, I learned what Mariachi music actually is, and I learned to play guitar with a pick (I was previously a classical player, which meant I picked with my fingers alone). As a research assistant, I learned about mindfulness programs in East Palo Alto elementary schools, and how to conduct ethical, confidential research. Through tutoring, I developed a wonderful mentor relationship with the 10-year-old son of a Stanford cook. Being a companion to a couple with dementia and Parkinson’s has given me unprecedented perspective on the fragility and value of a human life, and has given me the opportunity to practice compassion in the face of debilitating and frustrating mental decline.

Extracurricular involvement does not have to be a static aspect of your Stanford experience. Some clubs require year-long commitment starting fall quarter, but many allow new members to join each quarter. As you meet new faculty members and get more familiar with your departments of interest, research opportunities may arise throughout the year. If you’re looking for a job, Arrillaga Dining is always hiring–and at a pretty generous starting salary. No matter what opportunities you take–whether intellectually challenging or physically laborious–you will learn something, and you will grow. That is equally true of a fancy-sounding biochemical research position or a job swiping student IDs at a dining hall, as long as you are trying something new and pushing yourself to improve each day on the job.

So, whether you are an incoming freshman in the Class of 2022 reading the Daily online or a current junior nearing the end of your Stanford career, you have countless opportunities ahead of you to find a new extracurricular pursuit. Explore when and where you can, and don’t be afraid to change direction or drop activities that you haven’t sworn commitment to. We’re here in college to expand ourselves, to gather experiences that will inform us in our personal and professional futures and to have a good time. This can and does happen in classes, but it happens outside of classrooms as well–so don’t despair that your chemical engineering degree is preventing you from having a wide range of experiences here.

So this quarter, whatever club you’ve been eyeing, drop in on a meeting and see where it takes you; whatever faculty member you admire, ask if they’re conducting research and what kind of help they might need. Yes, Stanford has a million opportunities, and you can’t do more than scratch the surface of extracurricular life here. But don’t let that stop you from scratching it.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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THINK and PWR: a review https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/05/think-and-pwr-a-review/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/05/think-and-pwr-a-review/#respond Thu, 05 Apr 2018 12:00:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1138729 At the end of this quarter, many other freshmen and I will have completed the first-year THINK and PWR requirements that constitute Stanford’s closest analogue to a core curriculum. Unlike the WAYS requirements, which can each be satisfied in thousands of ways, THINK and PWR are relatively streamlined, all following a set of predetermined learning […]

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At the end of this quarter, many other freshmen and I will have completed the first-year THINK and PWR requirements that constitute Stanford’s closest analogue to a core curriculum. Unlike the WAYS requirements, which can each be satisfied in thousands of ways, THINK and PWR are relatively streamlined, all following a set of predetermined learning goals, lecture and discussion schedules, and, in the case of PWR, paper assignments. In many ways, THINK and PWR are the heart of undergraduate-specific education at Stanford, and their strengths and weaknesses reveal much about Stanford’s pedagogical aims and shortcomings.

I took THINK 50 in the fall with Professor and Dean of Religious Life Rev. Jane Shaw. Our topic was Empathy, and our readings spanned the fields of biology, psychology, religion, philosophy and aesthetics. Empathy, as you can imagine, has been defined in countless ways by different scholars and public thinkers, and can carry strikingly different connotations in different circumstances. By the end of the quarter, my classmates and I were apt to cringe at the word empathy used in casual conversation, resisting the urge to dive into a philosophical tangent about what empathy really means (or I was, at least). This is not to criticize the class, but to attest to the depth of inquiry and nuance represented in our reading list and class discussions. Empathy class did not give me one clear answer, but a range of responses to the question: “What is empathy and how should we use it?” Perhaps the Empathy curriculum is an outlier because of its ambiguous topic area, but I thought THINK excelled in its ability to weave together an interdisciplinary syllabus that introduced us freshmen to a host of new fields to explore.

From my experience, THINK was also well-structured and capitalized on the presence of teaching fellows during discussion sections. Lectures often summarized reading material, which could feel repetitive, even though Prof. Shaw was a skilled lecturer. Discussion sections, however, gave us space to analyze our readings beyond summary. Our fellow regularly asked us to criticize the authors we read, forcing us to shift from a passive, information-absorbent role to an active, information-creating role in the classroom. Sessions were organized and goal-driven, and our 50-minute periods generally went by fast.

Overall, I thought THINK was a great introduction to Stanford. It taught me how to participate in university-level class discussions, how to critically read a variety of texts and how to think about disparate fields in an interdisciplinary fashion. I might revise the lectures to include more thought-provoking material rather than summary, but otherwise found both lecture and section to be valuable uses of my time. Deadlines and expectations were clearly laid out before each project and paper, and the workload was intense but manageable.

This quarter, I am about to finish PWR with a fairly different taste in my mouth. I’d heard from fall quarter PWR students that PWR was the bane of their existence, but written off this assessment as the lamentations of CS majors who felt lost in an English classroom. As an aspiring writer, I was excited about PWR, hoping it would mirror my THINK class experience with an emphasis on writing.

Unfortunately, though, PWR failed to deliver on my expectations from THINK. Unlike THINK, my PWR class lacked substance, but rather focused on ushering us from one paper to the next with deadlines thrown together at the last minute. Despite the heavy top-down regulation of the PWR curriculum, I often felt lost as the quarter progressed, not sure what I should be completing and when. The papers are, from my experience, what you make of them; if you can find an intriguing topic, the research might be fun, but otherwise the writing process is largely a scramble to understand what is being asked for in a Rhetorical Analysis, Texts in Conversation or Research-Based Argument according to the PWR gods (the administration).

I expect that the huge number of available PWR classes makes it hard to provide engaging curriculums for each. In terms of organization, the culprit is less easy to pinpoint. Maybe my experience has been largely shaped by my teacher, who, though a wonderful person, has struggled to keep us on track and provide us with clear guidelines. But perhaps she, a PhD student and mother of three young children, also received minimal direction from the PWR administration and felt lost herself.

In any case, I believe PWR falls short of THINK in terms of content, organization and learning outcomes. That is not to be entirely negative; in many ways, it’s more of a compliment to the THINK curriculum than a criticism of PWR. However, I would ask the current undergraduate administration to consider how they might model their PWR classes more like their THINK classes, providing more structure, deeper inquiry and more easily understood expectations for the quarter.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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The existential Stanford housing crisis https://stanforddaily.com/2018/03/07/the-existential-stanford-housing-crisis/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/03/07/the-existential-stanford-housing-crisis/#respond Wed, 07 Mar 2018 09:00:40 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1137859 Back in the dark days of college applications, when official university websites filled my search history, I remember poring over information about residential life at the country’s top schools. There were residential colleges at Harvard and Yale. Princeton had freshman-only dorms, which fed into mysterious societies called eating clubs that seem to be coed fraternities […]

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Back in the dark days of college applications, when official university websites filled my search history, I remember poring over information about residential life at the country’s top schools. There were residential colleges at Harvard and Yale. Princeton had freshman-only dorms, which fed into mysterious societies called eating clubs that seem to be coed fraternities in everything but name. There was Rice, with its residential colleges that had completely eclipsed Greek life on campus.

And then there was Stanford: some freshman dorms, some four-class, and a collection of fraternities, sororities, upperclass dorms, co-ops, self-ops, and apartment style living, among others. There was FroSoCo and ITALIC and a smattering of other programs like EAST house for the upperclassmen. Like most things about Stanford, residential life sounded exciting but overwhelming. Also like most things, I hoped to gain clarity once I arrived at campus in the fall.

I did gain clarity about most aspects of Stanford once stepping onto campus. I internalized the campus layout, figured out how to register for classes, decided on a major, and grasped the ebb and flow of the social scene here. Unfortunately, though, housing is still a mystery to me. From my conversations with upperclassmen, it seems that the structure of Stanford housing remains a confusing, unstructured system that works out to varying degrees come June.

Coming up on spring quarter, many of my friends and I have already begun to discuss our dorm community in nostalgic terms. I live in West Lagunita, a dorm of sixty freshman and sixty upperclassmen. I’m a relatively quiet person, outgoing only among close friends, and often shy about starting conversations with acquaintances. Nonetheless, thanks to NSO dorm programming and the social exhilaration of freshman year, I’ve developed friendly and comfortable relationships with most of the freshman in my dorm. I say hello and ask how they’re doing in the halls, and try to remember what people are studying and how many siblings they have. West Lagunita has evolved into a sort of massive household of extended relatives. I don’t know everyone like a brother or sister, but there’s a familiarity, respect, and goodwill that reminds me of a house full of cousins, aunts, and uncles.

But all of that will disappear next year, when we disperse in a mile-and-a-half radius around campus. And as much as we might want to imagine otherwise, the sad truth is that we won’t all remain in contact in the new year. At best, I’ll see perhaps ten of my freshman dorm mates on a regular basis. Everyone else will become a passing hello from a bike seat.

Ripped from the proverbial womb, we will be thrown into a melting pot of dorm draw groups in an unfamiliar building. Maybe we’ll have some dorm programming at the beginning of the year to facilitate introductions, and maybe we won’t. Maybe I’ll make friends on my hall, and maybe they will forever remain familiar but unknown faces.

Then there’s the issue of draw groups. The draw reminds me a lot of elementary school PE class: our gym teacher would tell us to get in groups of three or four, which inevitably forced us to exclude a friend or two. Sometimes the fallout from gym class group-selection lasted for weeks, and that was for a twenty minute game of dodgeball. This is an entire year of living, eating, and sleeping.

Of course, we aren’t elementary school students anymore, and hopefully we’ve all moved beyond the petty vendettas that plagued us as ten-year-olds. But exclusion still hurts. The draw is, in effect, a system of preferentially ranking friends and hoping your friends will rank you among their top three, too. So far, this has been a messy and often awkward process of asking and politely declining offers for draw groups. I haven’t lost any friends over the draw, but I’ve experienced a mixture of guilt and sadness at the prospect of losing proximity to some of my favorite people on campus.

Sometimes I wish Stanford used the residential college system, leaving our freshman community intact for the next three years. At such an enormous, overwhelming institution like Stanford, why can’t we be guaranteed a familiar home base for four years? Why do we have to split up and scatter, sacrificing the communities we just spent a year building?

But maybe there’s something to be said for forcing students to live in a range of environments. For one, it heightens the probability of encountering a diverse set of people and experiences while at Stanford. It also forces you to take some initiative over your living situation, and to be proactive about what you value in a community; since you have to leave your freshman dorm anyway, why not check out a co-op and see what it’s like? Finally, the haphazard nature of Stanford housing might also prevent us from reaching social burnout, as I and many others felt leaving high school, sometimes with populations of less than five hundred students.

Am I nervous about the draw and the future of my social life? Absolutely. But unfortunate circumstances have a way of yielding unexpected benefits. So before we all curse the draw, let’s see where it takes us.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

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Best places to walk after dark https://stanforddaily.com/2018/03/02/best-places-to-walk-after-dark-3/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/03/02/best-places-to-walk-after-dark-3/#respond Fri, 02 Mar 2018 09:00:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1137591 Most nights, I take a long walk around campus. It’s good for my insomnia, my body, and quite likely my soul. There’s something ritualistic about walking alone after dark, when nobody is around to see you and bind you to social conventions. You become self-conscious; not in a negative, socially comparing way, but in an […]

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Most nights, I take a long walk around campus. It’s good for my insomnia, my body, and quite likely my soul. There’s something ritualistic about walking alone after dark, when nobody is around to see you and bind you to social conventions. You become self-conscious; not in a negative, socially comparing way, but in an explorative, fruitful state of reflection and relaxation. For me, walking allows me unparalleled access to my basic, uninhibited inner monologue.

Sometimes the inner monologue is painful, of course. But, at least in my experience, walking at night gives me the space and time to work through the pain and find peace with those thoughts in a way that no other activity can. The quiet, the anonymity of the darkness, and the movement puts me in a fluid state of mind that allows me to question and challenge negative thoughts, while the sheer bigness of night–the balls of fire burning thousands of lightyears away–puts everything into its cosmic perspective.

I think the key to achieving this state of pensive relaxation is aloneness–not loneliness, which is a feeling, but aloneness, which is physical isolation from other people. So, at the risk of sacrificing my own solitary places, here’s a list of my top three walking destinations for a nighttime stroll.

 

***Note: I can’t guarantee that any of these places are 100% safe at night. As a small, young-looking female, I’ve never felt unsafe anywhere I’ve been, and Stanford’s campus is pretty well-lighted throughout. Nonetheless, venture out at your own risk, and please don’t sue me if you get mugged or, more likely, trip and break your arm on one of these routes.***

 

The Energy Facility: If you live on West Campus, you may be familiar with the energy facility that sits next to the Educational Farm, just north of the Equestrian Center and golf course. If you walk a little ways south on Campus Drive from Santa Teresa, you’ll see a street that runs parallel to the tennis courts and Educational Farm. Walk down that street until you see the fencing for the Energy Facility. There’s a little cul-de-sac there between the power lines and the golf course, with a picnic bench sitting next to the golf course fence.

It’s not beautiful in the conventional, Yosemite Half-Dome sense of the word, but there’s something eerily aesthetic about industrialization at night. I imagine the power lines and energy machinery as the skeletal, apocalyptic remains of humanity that an extraterrestrial explorer might happen upon millennia after our species goes extinct. A little depressing, perhaps, but aren’t beautiful things always poignant?

A friendly heads-up: there are security cameras surrounding the facility; if you’re going to engage in delinquent behaviors, this probably isn’t your place.

 

The Cactus Garden: This is my all-time favorite place to go alone after dark. The Arboretum isn’t lighted, so it’s a bit creepy in there after 7 PM, but more than a dozen nighttime trips have left me unscathed. The cactus garden is stunning during the daytime, the many shades and shapes of cacti growing together into a desert mural of sorts. At night, you can’t see any of the color or geometry of the garden; it’s simply a mound of greyish shadows. There is a bench on the southwest corner of the garden in between two trees, facing a spindly, leafless bush that casts black stripes across the dark blue of the sky. Other than the occasional car lights cutting through the trees, the cactus garden is entirely isolated and quiet. As a bonus, you can take the long way home and say goodnight to the Stanfords at the Mausoleum, only a few dozen yards away.

 

Town and Country: If you’re in need of a grocery run, this is a two-for-one route to reflect on your life and restock your dorm room pantry. Trader Joe’s and CVS stay open until 9 and 10 PM respectively, so make sure to arrive a bit before then if you want to shop (bring a reusable bag for the environment and/or for a self-esteem boost). I typically walk the route past Encina Hall on the right, then the Alumni Center on the left, and past the Visitor Center and the football stadium.

This walk isn’t quiet and solitary–there are always cars driving by–but you’re unlikely to pass many other pedestrians. I always enjoy watching the car lights zip by from the sidewalk, imagining where everyone is rushing off to. I like to think watching cars has a sort of angsty, 1980’s coming-of-age film quality to it. Or maybe I’m just overly sentimental; but regardless, it’s a nice walk after dark, and you’ve got Trader Joe’s snacks waiting at the finish line.

 

Happy walking, and maybe I’ll see a few of you out there.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

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Why read memoir? https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/21/why-read-memoir/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/21/why-read-memoir/#respond Wed, 21 Feb 2018 09:00:05 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1136972 You probably didn’t read many memoirs in English class in high school. If you’re still taking English at Stanford, you probably haven’t read many memoirs here, either (ExploreCourses confirms that some ethnic studies and English classes do include memoirs in their syllabi, but they hardly represent the mainstream English curriculum). Historically, memoir was considered a […]

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You probably didn’t read many memoirs in English class in high school. If you’re still taking English at Stanford, you probably haven’t read many memoirs here, either (ExploreCourses confirms that some ethnic studies and English classes do include memoirs in their syllabi, but they hardly represent the mainstream English curriculum). Historically, memoir was considered a “lower” form of writing, not worthy of being labeled real literature. It was too personal, too self-absorbed for the critics of decades past. Even in the last few decades, memoir has been considered a popular genre rather than a literary genre, often treated with the same amusement as John Grisham novels among literary types.

However, the past two decades or so have seen a renaissance for the memoir form. Authors like Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr and Cheryl Strayed have inserted the memoir into the front and center of literary conversations, merging humor, self-critical honesty and epiphany into books that not only keep the pages turning, but change minds, hearts and — perhaps more importantly —perspectives about the world we inhabit, past and present.

I used to be, per the mainstream literary-snob opinion, skeptical of the memoir. For the first half of high school, I had a “War and Peace”-or-bust mindset towards my reading list (not that I’ve ever read “War and Peace,” but perhaps that’s precisely the point). I wanted to read the books that had shaped our wisest minds and our culture at large: the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the Morrisons of the bookstore shelves. These books, lauded as the defining artifacts of their respective generations, would teach me about the world in a way that only fiction could.

I did read some of these books, and I did enjoy them. Some of them moved me deeply, sometimes to tears (other times, I was simply moved into confusion, followed by an existential crisis about my intellectual and emotional capacity to appreciate great literature). Books like “A Farewell to Arms” broke my heart, taught me about the past and showed me what unique, brilliant prose looked like on the page. Fiction transfixed me the same way that one might be transfixed by the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

But I have a confession to make: through all of the great novels I’ve read, I rarely felt myself, my life and my experience of American culture represented on the page. Partially, this was due to the age of the novels I read, but there was more: fiction had a heroic depth that, quite frankly, did not align with the slightly-amusing banality of my daily existence. My misfortunes did not feature battle scenes or brutal miscarriages, but things like losing friends, negotiating petty family grievances, juggling self-criticism and self-compassion and thinking about what the hell I was going to do with my life.

Not exactly the stuff of great literature, last time I checked. But it just might be the stuff of great memoir.

First, to clear up a common misconception: memoirs are not autobiographies. Autobiographies cover a person’s whole life, hinging on a person’s career success. Famous people write autobiographies because others actually care about their formative years, their professional experiences and their reflections on an entire life well (or infamously) lived. Memoirs, on the other hand, articulate the lives of normal civilians. They focus on particular themes or periods of a person’s life, telling a story through an almost fictitious narrative frame. Facts and historical moments take a backseat to lived memories, as they’ve been contoured over years of personal growth and reflection. Memoir is the gritty stuff, the little shards that may not fit together perfectly because life doesn’t, either.

Memoir does not tie up all the loose ends and does not glide along a plot arc like a work of fiction. It is not always profound or brilliant or tragic. But it is real life, or as close to real life as you can possibly get in the form of a paperback book. It is the closest we can get to living another person’s real story, and the closest we can get to walking a mile in another’s shoes.

Memoir is, in my experience, the best way to immerse yourself in a new perspective that really existed, or exists, in the same world we all inhabit. Particularly in this political and cultural moment, I cannot think of a better medium for helping us understand and and empathize with one another than the memoir. Whether it’s Mary Karr’s “Lit” or J.D. Vance’s stunning “Hillbilly Elegy,” memoir has the power to bring us together and unearth our mutual humanity in a way that newsreels and 800-word articles fail to do.

Memoir may not be literature in the canonical sense of the word, but if literature’s primary purpose is to help humans understand each other — and I believe that it is — then memoir deserves a front-and-center place on the literary shelf. So take a break from reading the same unintelligible paragraph of “Ulysses” for the fifth time over and crack open a bestselling modern memoir. Even the literary snobs out there, I believe, will not be disappointed.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

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A word on opportunity guilt https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/08/a-word-on-opportunity-guilt/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/08/a-word-on-opportunity-guilt/#respond Thu, 08 Feb 2018 13:00:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1136314 Freed from homework by the holiday, two friends and I made our first trip to the Heart and Home Women’s Shelter on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We arrived at the church—a clean, modern brick building—and were invited into the kitchen through a back door by the staff member on duty. Having cooked most of […]

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Freed from homework by the holiday, two friends and I made our first trip to the Heart and Home Women’s Shelter on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We arrived at the church—a clean, modern brick building—and were invited into the kitchen through a back door by the staff member on duty. Having cooked most of my own meals back at home, I volunteered to work at the stove, and made an improvised beef chili without salt, pepper or a recipe. I pulled the potatoes from the oven, tossed a salad—lettuce, pepitas and raisins with half a bottle of ranch—and put it all on a cart for the women.

They arrived one at a time through a side door, bundled up in coats and scarves. My friends and I, along with a lead member of the Heart and Home group at Stanford, waited near the door to greet the women as they trickled in. We shook hands, introduced ourselves and recited the night’s menu. Once the whole group was inside, we grabbed our plates, served ourselves from the buffet table and sat down for the meal around two rectangular tables, sharing little stories and learning about each others’ days.

I wish I could say that I was at ease that first night, completely comfortable sitting across the table from women who had, for one reason or another, lost or been kicked out of their homes with little notice. But the weight of our different life circumstances tugged at me, preventing me from being truly authentic. When the women asked about college, my major and my career aspirations, I couldn’t shake the feeling that below the surface, all of us were contemplating the socioeconomic canyon separating us beyond the church walls.

It wasn’t that I’d never been exposed to poverty before. Working at a restaurant the summer before Stanford, I managed to find my way into a romantic relationship with a Guatemalan refugee who lived in a tiny apartment with his sister, brother-in-law and their four children in one of the lower-income pockets of East San Diego. He spoke no English (we conducted our relationship in Spanish), had previously worked in tobacco fields, pine forests and milking cows and was struggling to support his mother back in Guatemala working 16 hours a day, six days a week. I’d seen his poverty up close, how it affected the little aspects of his life day in and day out.

And then I left for college—Stanford University, no less, where I was practically guaranteed a full-time job with twice his annual salary and half the work hours straight out of college. I had always felt guilty about the inequality of our lives but never so much as when I arrived here and realized the gulf between our future opportunities. At Stanford, I have the potential and resources to do nearly anything with my future. He, on the other hand, will forever be limited to manual labor and low-wage work. Upward mobility is a dream for his children’s generation, not himself.

At the homeless shelter, I felt a similar pang of shame and distress at the magnitude of my opportunities compared to theirs. But I also knew that feeling was fruitless, if not selfish—worrying about my own guilt was ultimately a self-indulgent narrative, not an empathetic connection with the women we served. Yes, there was an underlying inequality in that room that I could probably never understand in its fullest sense. But there were also twelve people eating dinner and having a friendly, lively conversation, happy to be with company and a half-decent plate of beef chili.

I went back to the shelter again last week, this time with my guitar to share a few songs with the women. I’d played at retirement homes in high school and was excited to bring back some of my favorite classic songs to a new audience. Unlike at the retirement homes, the women sang along with a jubilant spirit that made me appreciate music in a way I never quite had before. Despite the hardship and the injustice, there was the desire to enjoy life in the moment, to sing along to its music.

Coming to terms with the Stanford bubble and all it entails has been, and will continue to be, a process for many of us, especially those of us who grew up with significant opportunity. I believe that process begins with getting out of our own heads for a moment and recognizing that privilege-guilt is merely a psychological sickness, not a remedy for injustice. To the extent possible, I will try to rid myself of self-indulgent worries and focus my energies instead on making the world a better, fairer place in the ways I can—by going back to the shelter, working towards a social-impact career and being a kind person along the way.

No amount of shame will undo inequality, but some amount of goodness can tip the scales back towards a more equitable, kind society. Don’t feel bad; just do good.

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Stanford: Expectations vs. reality https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/01/stanford-expectations-vs-reality/ Thu, 01 Feb 2018 18:53:29 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?post_type=tsd_magazine_post&p=1135891 Driving up to my house for winter break — the first time I’d been home since September — I felt that same feeling I’d get after coming home from a family vacation: Well, that was fun. Back to real life now. Except this was different: Stanford was real life. My house, the yellow walls and […]

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Driving up to my house for winter break — the first time I’d been home since September — I felt that same feeling I’d get after coming home from a family vacation: Well, that was fun. Back to real life now.

Except this was different: Stanford was real life. My house, the yellow walls and the olive trees that stained the sidewalk, the canopy bed and the books lining my desk: That was the vacation now. Fall quarter had been a whirlwind, a summer camp on intellectual steroids. But it had also been a time of learning, of familiarizing, of turning Stanford from a palatial dreamland into a reality.

Stanford had become more than the pictures of the Main Quad church at night, the hundreds of advertised clubs and groups, the professors who were often invited to speak on NPR. Stanford still is those things, but it’s also the little, real things: the basement laundry room, the weekend walk to Trader Joe’s, the dining hall hours, the weekly reflections for an introsem.

Back at my house for winter break, I realized how much my perspective of Stanford had changed. Two years before, it had been a five-percent-acceptance-rate school for which I’d never make the cut. One year before, it had been the honeymoon phase of my acceptance letter and all the incredible but overwhelming daydreams that came with it. Now, it was my life, only partially lining up with my clueless preconceptions.

Reflecting on the past quarter, I wondered how my expectations of Stanford had differed from those of my peers and how those differences had shaped our transitions from Stanford-as-daydream to Stanford-as-reality. It was in this spirit that I conducted the following interviews with students from each class, trying to understand how Stanford has evolved in their minds since their admittance — and how they have evolved, too.

Angie Lee ’21

Stanford: Expectations vs. reality
Angie Lee ’21 (MELISSA DU/The Stanford Daily)

I can’t pinpoint a moment when I found out what Stanford was. To the extent of how much of a serious dream school it was, I saw it in “High School Musical 3,” and I saw that Gabriella goes here, and I love “High School Musical,” so I was like “hey, that’s a cool school.” But then I came here for a summer camp the summer before sophomore year for a screenwriting class, and I loved everything: the campus, the energy, the whole vibe. I hate to admit that I had a dream school because I feel like that’s really petty, but it was my dream ever since then.

Of course, I didn’t think I was going to get in. I remember on the day I came home from school and the results were going to come out at 5 p.m., so I watched “Harry Potter” until 5:01. Then I saw the results, and I freaked out, and my parents and I were crying.

I have a disability called Spinal Muscular Atrophy, which puts me in an electric wheelchair. For this reason, I live with caregivers on campus. My parents also moved out to Hayward, California from Chicago so they could be close in case of an emergency or if a caregiver couldn’t come. It was interesting because I left my home in Naperville, a suburb of Chicago where I lived for 16 years, yet I have a new home in Hayward where my parents moved and also a home here in my dorm, West Lag. So I think the hardest part of the transition for me was deciding where home is, and I’m still struggling with that. Is it here at Stanford, or in Hayward, or back in Naperville?

There was also a culture shock in terms of the kinds of conversations here. It’s not that the people back in my high school didn’t have any intellectual vitality, but it was a huge public high school, and not everyone cared as much about academics or things in the world that I’m passionate about. It’s been really cool to be thrown into an environment where everyone cares and wants to learn and have deep conversations. So that also shocked me, but in a good way.

Fall quarter was kind of a whirlwind of meeting people and adjusting to the classes. But now in winter quarter, the whirlwind is gone, and I’m getting used to life at Stanford, which sometimes makes me catch myself being less thankful to be here. Like, school is school — I don’t want to be doing my homework. I catch myself being less thankful than I was fall quarter. Then I take a minute to think about it, and I’m thankful again.

Cristina Brentley ’20

Stanford: Expectations vs. reality
Cristina Brentley ’20 (MELISSA DU/The Stanford Daily)

Growing up, I never knew about “good schools.” I’m from a predominantly low-income and Hispanic community, and the only “good school” you knew of was Harvard. In middle school, I remember my principal being like, “If you get into Harvard, then you can go to college for free.” So going to Harvard — that was the dream. That’s where I was going to go.

For me, though, I’ve always been a part of a relatively small community, and I’m really used to being a part of something collaborative and something open to discussion. I think when I visited Stanford during Admit Weekend, I felt a much bigger presence of the Latino community than at other schools and more of an open area to discuss and meet people. I thought it was really interdisciplinary, like the HumBio major, which is what I’m majoring in now.

For me, moving away from home was really hard. I grew up and lived my whole life in a town that’s super unique, being a border town. In my entire schooling experience, all of my teachers and classmates were Hispanic, and I was used to constantly being surrounded by the culture, the food, always hearing Spanish. I think that was the biggest adjustment for me, as was leaving my family.

For me, being in The Leland Scholars Program (LSP) was one of the greatest parts of the transition. A lot of people had similar experiences and worries, and a lot of my closest friends now came from LSP. But the classes were still a big adjustment. In high school, I often had the same teachers over and over again, so I really knew them. At Stanford it’s harder to get in contact because of the big lectures, and even if you do meet them and talk to them, they’re not the one who’s in charge of your grade.

I was really excited before coming here to be somewhere where people were going to be passionate about school because I was always the odd one out in high school. I was into really random intellectual, niche things that the average high schooler doesn’t really know about, like public health. I was excited to be able to learn exactly the stuff I wanted to learn, and I knew there were people doing research here that I’d be really interested in. I think getting onto campus freshman year, I was surprised at how quickly I was able to find opportunities to do things. Freshman year, I worked at a research lab, and I think that was one of the best experiences I’ve had.

There’s always something happening at Stanford, and life moves really fast. But I think that I’ve found and surrounded myself with the people that make me remember all the little things.

Sean Volavong ’19

Stanford: Expectations vs. reality
Sean Volavong ’19 (MELISSA DU/The Stanford Daily)

I grew up in a low-income household in Arkansas, where not a lot of people know how to get out of the state to go to other places. Growing up, I was coined as the kid who was going to get out of Arkansas — it was actually my superlative in the yearbook. In high school, I stumbled upon this program called Questbridge which connects high-achieving, low-income students with scholarships to places like Stanford. Questbridge is a ranking system, so I ranked about seven colleges, even though I never had the opportunity to visit for financial reasons. I just looked on Google Maps and was like, “ooh, cool campus!” and I would think I would want to go there.

I actually ranked Pomona College first. I wanted to go to a school like my high school where I kind of dominated the social scene, and I was really close with my professors, and so I ranked all these liberal arts colleges first. Then, in the final round, Questbridge gave you the choice to change your rankings. It’s a really bad thing, but being low-income, my parents’ expectations were a key priority, and I really wanted to make them proud. I didn’t know if my parents would be innately happy if I went to a place like Pomona, so at the last minute, I changed all my rankings. A few weeks later, I got a little email, and I knew I was going to Stanford. It was exciting. Stanford wasn’t my first choice, I’ll admit, but the fact that I got in persuaded me enough to highly consider this place.

When I came to college, I had a lot of expectations. Although I knew I was the one to get out and wanted the world to revolve around me, my family stressed to me to be very humble about my backgrounds. I came to college to have fun, sure, but also worked to keep my southern hospitality and my roots with me, and to remember my home back in Arkansas and to have a mission. A lot of people here are persuaded by the grandeur that is Silicon Valley and making a lot of money, which is true, but it’s not necessarily my cup of tea to do so. Which is ironic, given that I’m low-income and definitely want to make a lot of money, but the current pathway that I’m on — work in urban planning or city management back in Arkansas— is not going to make me very much money.

I think the problem with Stanford is that it can be toxic for your life’s mission. So I tell new students: You don’t have to pursue something to validate your own background or identity. You don’t have to take three years of French to validate that you can speak French. You don’t have to take a certain course load to validate that you can handle it. So stay true to your passions, and don’t become intoxicated and unfocused by all of the other opportunities here at Stanford.

Emily Koufakis ’18

Stanford: Expectations vs. reality
Emily Koufakis ’18 (MELISSA DU/The Stanford Daily)

My dad had always been a really big fan of Stanford, although he went to school in Queens. He had always dreamed of going to Stanford, but he didn’t grow up very privileged, so he didn’t think he could afford a private education. Growing up, my dad would always put on the Stanford sports games, and I kind of inevitably became enthralled by Stanford through my dad, even though he didn’t even go there.

When I was becoming extremely competitive in sports, specifically lacrosse and field hockey, that’s when I learned more about Stanford, and it was actually the first school I visited. The first time I walked on campus, that’s when I knew I was definitely going to apply here.

The transition was not easy. I had always been very competitive in sports and balancing a rigorous schedule, as most students here do before they get to Stanford, but the expectations were still extremely high. Stanford recruits arguably the most competitive lacrosse players and students, and you have to have that ability to balance your sport with your academics. We would wake up before class to lift in the morning and practice another four hours in the afternoon. When I was exposed to the Olympic-style lifting, I really struggled because my body had never been exposed to that kind of conditioning before. Overall, the expectations were very high, but Stanford also made them transparent from the beginning, which I appreciated a lot.

Trying to find an outlet from the team was also hard, since it’s 20-plus hours a week year-round, and I was really craving a break from the sports side of it. I wanted to be involved in a bunch of activities by the time I graduated Stanford and really put academics first. Having played lacrosse my entire life, I was honestly drained in a way, and I felt like I was really defined by the sport and nothing else. I was always “Emily the Athlete,” and I realized after my freshman year that I really wanted to do something else for the first time in my life, and I was lucky enough that Stanford was the place to do it.

I don’t like to say I quit the sport because I’m still a coach for a girls’ lacrosse travel team in Palo Alto. Lacrosse gave me so much in my life — I knew I was coming to Stanford by the time I was a sophomore in high school, which is crazy — so I’m still connected to the sport.  Leaving Stanford lacrosse was by far the hardest decision of my life, but it really made me grow up. After quitting lacrosse, it was an entirely different world. I was like: What do I do first with all this free time? And it’s funny that I say that because now I feel like I have the same amount of free time as when I played lacrosse, I’ve just found other ways to occupy that time, but I feel just as busy.

Francisco Lopez ’18

Stanford: Expectations vs. reality
Francisco Lopez ’18 (MELISSA DU/The Stanford Daily)

I was a Questbridge pre-scholar, which meant I got to be in a Facebook group for low-income students that had a massive amount of resources about a bunch of schools. In that Facebook group, Stanford was talked about a lot, and after doing my own research, I realized I wanted to apply there restrictive early action. I’d never been to California; I had no idea. I’d only seen the pictures of Stanford when I first applied, but what I saw about the resources they have here was such a massive gap from what I had in high school. So massive that I could do anything here.

Now I think back to freshman year, and I realize I made many mistakes. Honestly, I thought Stanford was going to solve all my problems. Not that I had problems, but I thought Stanford was going to solve everything for me, all of my worries, and everything was going to be figured out completely from being here. But that’s not true. Over time, my freshman year became harder and harder. Cutting off my family was not healthy for me, and having this perspective that Stanford was the solution to everything was also unhealthy. I realized that, yes, I had a lot of resources, but it was very much up to me to realize how to utilize them to the fullest extent. It’s not paradise — that’s what I realized. You make the most out of it.

I became a lot more focused on my studies in sophomore year. I came here with such anxiety about not having a family or community, so that was my priority. I cared about my studies, but there was definitely a gap there. So I found a balance sophomore and junior year, picking what I liked and not doing everything at once. I also got a lot closer with my family the summer after my freshman year. We talked about what that year had been like for everybody and what the expectations were now that I’d experienced Stanford that year.

If I could say one thing to my freshman self, I would have said to myself to ask for more help, in every sense: emotional stability, mental stability, homework, especially going to office hours. Now I live there sometimes, and it’s great. I almost never went my freshman year because I had that anxiety, of course, that I wasn’t good enough. I realized that it’s hard here, and the homework is meant so that you go and ask for help. The resources are here, but it’s up to you to go and use them.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Off the social grid https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/08/off-the-social-grid/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/08/off-the-social-grid/#respond Mon, 08 Jan 2018 09:00:16 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1134665 At the beginning of the summer, I deleted my Instagram and Snapchat from my phone. Both of my accounts are technically still active, but I don’t check either on a regular basis (in fits of extreme boredom, I occasionally pull up Instagram on my computer, but otherwise ignore it). There was no sudden life change […]

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At the beginning of the summer, I deleted my Instagram and Snapchat from my phone. Both of my accounts are technically still active, but I don’t check either on a regular basis (in fits of extreme boredom, I occasionally pull up Instagram on my computer, but otherwise ignore it). There was no sudden life change that prompted me to delete the apps – no Appalachian hike, Buddhist retreat or international trip. I simply decided that I was better off interacting with people face-to-face, immersed in reality, or not interacting at all.

At the end of my sophomore year of high school, my friend group broke up and left me friendless and ungrounded. During my junior year, I typically ate lunch alone in the library, and I rarely saw people outside of school – when I did, it was for group homework assignments. Not wanting to return to another year of social isolation, I took my senior year of high school through an online program.

Practically speaking, this meant I spent every day sitting in my bedroom, sometimes wearing my pajamas for multiple days without changing. My only contact with the outside world, my old world, was through Snapchat and Instagram. Every night scrolling through my Instagram feed, I was inundated with pictures of friend-dates over fancy lattes, bikinis and ocean sunsets and group prom photos. Snapchat offered the same pictures in real time, documenting the day-to-day I’d left behind.

Evidently, Snapchat and Instagram were unhealthy social media platforms for me during my year of social isolation, and deleting them was a welcome relief. I was never depressed by the content, but it made my loneliness acute and comparative in a way that disappeared when the apps left my phone. I enjoyed being completely cut off from the outside world — at least while that world excluded me.

Of course, my social position changed when I got to Stanford. After over a year of isolation, I was happily thrown into the world of teenagers once again, this time living in close proximity to sixty others my age. By the end of NSO, Instagram usernames and Snapchat groups had been well established. I still didn’t have either downloaded on my phone, but I gave out my usernames in order to seem normal, and in case I decided to re-download the apps for college.

To this day, though, I haven’t re-entered the world of picture-based social media. I did download Snapchat at one point, to please a well-meaning friend, but deleted it a few days later. Others have told me to get back on Snapchat and Instagram to avoid “missing out” on some of the highest quality humor produced by our dorm. Still, with the exception of Facebook messenger for one-on-one communication purposes, I’ve remained off the social media grid throughout fall quarter.

Of course, life does not become magically authentic and meaningful when you delete your social media apps. You don’t suddenly stop comparing yourself to others or gain an immediate sense of self-confidence and rid yourself of social pressures. Social media may augment the need to appear attractive, cool and popular, but only because those pressures already exist in real life. At first, deleting social media may even make those expectations feel more acute and painful, since you’ve removed yourself from our generation’s prime method of asserting social and personal status to a large audience.

Being off social media can make you feel smaller, more isolated, and less socially relevant than other people. You won’t experience the funny moments and bonding memories that come from Snapchat stories and Instagram feeds. You’ll feel like you’re missing out on something fundamental to the dorm community, and you’ll wonder if you’ve set yourself up for social isolation.

But, if you ever make a brief return to social media like I did, you’ll realize something else: your connections with people face-to-face are infinitely more valuable than what you learn on Instagram or Snapchat. Leaving social media behind, you’re forced to get to know people through a mutual relationship, not a passive viewing of a screen. You get to meet people as they are in real life, not as they portray themselves in pictures and 15-second videos. You worry less about group dynamics and more about your individual connections with others. Most importantly, especially in a large college community, you get to know people without the preconceived notions derived from the contents of their feeds.

I am not condemning social media as the root of all modern evils; certainly it has its social benefits and connective abilities. I only suggest you try, for a few weeks, to live without photo-based media, and see how it changes your social perspective. Whatever you decide — to re-download or never go back to Snapchat — you will get a chance to see people purely, without knowing their lives through their posted photos. I challenge you to give it a try.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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On repeat https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/29/on-repeat/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/29/on-repeat/#respond Wed, 29 Nov 2017 09:00:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1134051 In the age of Youtube and Spotify, it is conceivable that you could listen to music every minute of your life and never hear the same song twice. Within reason, a person might assemble playlists that together include thousands of songs, each for a different mood or social setting. The key, it seems, is variety: […]

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In the age of Youtube and Spotify, it is conceivable that you could listen to music every minute of your life and never hear the same song twice. Within reason, a person might assemble playlists that together include thousands of songs, each for a different mood or social setting. The key, it seems, is variety: To listen to the same music over and over sounds to many like a punishment worthy of Greek hell, not unlike the eagle pecking at Prometheus’ undead liver.

So, when I tell people that I’ve been listening to the same 50 or so songs for the last three years, they tend to stare at me open-mouthed, eyebrows raised in critical disbelief. I’ve been asked how I’ve avoided going crazy, and if I hate music beyond a few select, nostalgic songs. I’ve been pitied, told that if I only had greater exposure to more genres, I wouldn’t be condemned to the same repetitive playlist. Most often, I’ve been dismissed with a shake of the head, an unspoken, judgmental, “you do you.”

None of this bothers me – it’s just music, not a moral position – but I’ve often felt the need to explain my musical preferences, and I’m seldom given the opportunity to. Until recently, I didn’t even understand my musical tastes myself. “I just like the songs I like,” I would say. Why only five of them at a time? I had no clue.

I only began to realize my reasons for my limited playlist when I arrived to Stanford and started listening to music while walking to classes and before going to sleep. For an hour or two each day, I put in my headphones and let music fill in the background to my thoughts and observations, not unlike the transition scenes in a movie.

Some mornings, I listen to one band’s calm songs on repeat; the next morning, a mix of three upbeat songs. Some days, I listen to the same song eight times in a row, mouthing the lyrics all eight times. I began to notice, a few weeks into school, that my songs were not interchangeable; yesterday’s song, which I listened to 10 times, no longer sounded good the next morning. My favorite upbeat song made me cringe at night. Even one sad song could not be exchanged for another.

Every song, particularly the older ones, evoked a specific emotion, not only because of its melody and lyrics but also because of its history. Each of my songs has its origin story in my memory – not always as a scene, but as an emotional fingerprint. After many listens, different songs have taken on complex topographies in my mind and heart, patterned specifically for different moods and situations.

I not only know every lyric, but every lyric brings up a wealth of emotional data from my past. By listening to those songs now, I can relate back to my past self, giving me both a feeling of continuity and a sense that my life has always had its ups and downs, and nothing is permanent. No song could be the backtrack to every moment of my life, which proves the inevitability of change. Knowing each song so intimately makes me aware, through my daily song choices, of my fluctuating emotions and attitudes towards life.

Since I arrived at Stanford, I’ve added five new songs to my playlist, and listened to them over and over on the way to class, walking around Lake Lag and lying in my bed before sleep. They are each beginning to take shape in my memory like statues for my interior experience here at Stanford. I can’t wait to listen to them in 10 years and look back on this place, filled with the same range of emotions I’ve gotten to experience here.

There’s nothing wrong with listening to lots of different music; variety has its many positives, too. For me, though, music serves a specific function: to supplement my emotional understanding of the world. For me, 50 or so songs perform that function best.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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The dangers of comparative stress https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/16/the-dangers-of-comparative-stress/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/16/the-dangers-of-comparative-stress/#respond Thu, 16 Nov 2017 09:00:16 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133521 You’re drowning. A midterm on Friday, a paper due on Wednesday, a lab report due by noon on Sunday, three meetings at office hours, two clubs and a required screening of a movie for your language class – and that’s not to mention the p-sets. This was the typical answer to “what’s going on for […]

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You’re drowning. A midterm on Friday, a paper due on Wednesday, a lab report due by noon on Sunday, three meetings at office hours, two clubs and a required screening of a movie for your language class – and that’s not to mention the p-sets.

This was the typical answer to “what’s going on for you this week?” in my dorm during Week 7. Half of the conversations revolved around comparing levels of academic nuclear threat, and most people had reached DEFCON Two. There was a strange sense of camaraderie born of the mutual stress in the dorm, a filial bond based on the intensity of everyone’s course loads.

And then there was me: Finished with my homework for the week by Monday night, already studying for a midterm the following Monday. It was a light week of reading for most of my classes, and my papers had all been turned in the previous week. This was great for me, except when I relayed this information to my friends. When I shared about my relaxed week, they responded with a mix of shock and good-humored envy. “I wish I’d taken your courses,” they might say, cursing Math 51 or CS106A afterwards.

My friends, of course, were happy I had avoided the week’s stress. But my lack of stress also left me feeling a bit inadequate: Why weren’t my classes as difficult as everyone else’s? Had I slacked in the course selection process? Was I not pushing myself hard enough? Was I falling behind? Did everyone else think I lacked the intellectual drive to challenge myself here at Stanford because I’d weaseled my way out of the Week 7 grind?

We often talk about duck syndrome here at Stanford: The phenomenon of people appearing happy on the outside, but secretly paddling like mad just to stay afloat. While I do see the duck syndrome, I’ve noticed more acutely its converse: People expressing the stress of their academics, their all-nighters and the number of midterms they have left to take, as if to fit into the high-powered, overachieving crowd that makes this place both incredible and overwhelming.

When you don’t feel that level of stress and intensity, if even for a week, it can feel like you’ve failed to push yourself here at Stanford. Whether it’s because you are taking “fuzzy” classes, cool electives, or simply less time-intensive intro classes, this anti-duck syndrome can make you question your own intellectual vitality and dedication. It seems like a minuscule detail in the greater scheme of the Stanford experience, but in this carefully selected world of academic, athletic and artistic powerhouses, any hint of inadequacy threatens to expose the higher-than-high bar set here and how you stack up against that expectation.

In the last several weeks, I’ve reflected a lot on my own experience of feeling inadequate because of my course load. My first instinct was to sign up for math and CS next quarter, “balancing out” my lighter load with a heavier winter quarter (needless to say, this is an unhealthy response). Then, within a matter of days, my workload ticked up and my friends’ workloads lightened up, and I was suddenly the one with the homework-packed weekend. My worries were, after all, baseless; my ebb and flow of work, for whatever reason, just didn’t align with the CS, math and hard sciences’ syllabi. I didn’t quite match my dormmates in midterms and p-sets, but the tide had turned that week in my direction.

This rapid turn of workload made me realize that it’s not only psychologically destructive to compare my work load to that of my peers, but also a useless way to measure my relative motivation and intellectual challenge. Unlike in high school, we are all on different trajectories here. We start at Point A (acceptance) and end, for the most part, at a similar Point B (graduation with a degree in our chosen field), but in between, our paths will crisscross, zigzag and refuse to line up for comparison. We will have light quarters and heavy quarters, weeks of intense stress and mellow relaxation, days of feeling on top of the world and days of feeling drowned in salt water, a thousand feet below the ocean’s surface.

When we do not align on those days, weeks, and quarters, that is never a reason for comparison and existential crisis. The light weeks are simply an opportunity for us to appreciate the chance to take a deep breath, knowing that we are all here at Stanford because we are motivated and intellectually passionate by virtue of arriving here. Stress levels and course loads will never reflect our relative academic motivations. Only exploring, working hard and following our authentic passions can do that.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Religion as a metaphor for non-believers https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/09/religion-as-a-metaphor-for-non-believers/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/09/religion-as-a-metaphor-for-non-believers/#respond Thu, 09 Nov 2017 09:00:44 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133036 On Saturday morning, I walked across the desolate, puddle-covered campus to the Li Ka Shing Center for a live video chat with a man named Father Thomas Keating. Father Keating’s speech was organized by the Contemplation by Design program here at Stanford, and it was the first event I signed up for when the list […]

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On Saturday morning, I walked across the desolate, puddle-covered campus to the Li Ka Shing Center for a live video chat with a man named Father Thomas Keating. Father Keating’s speech was organized by the Contemplation by Design program here at Stanford, and it was the first event I signed up for when the list of events became available.

A Trappist monk by practice, Father Keating also created the framework for Centering Prayer, a contemplative, mystic-influenced form of prayer drawing on both the Catholic tradition and ideas from Eastern spirituality. I couldn’t wait to hear him speak and, if I was lucky, ask him a question myself.

I am not the person you’d expect to be the only undergraduate at a talk by a Catholic monk. I’m not Catholic, or even Christian; the last time I went to church, I was 8 years old, and the only time you’ll hear God or Jesus Christ mentioned in my house is in the form of an expletive. My mom and I occasionally discuss Buddhism and non-religious spirituality, but God has never factored into our conversations.

I sat down in the Li Ka Shing lecture hall among a crowd of 50+ people, Father Keating’s aged and smiling face staring down at us from a huge projector screen in the front of the room. I didn’t know quite what to expect, but I’d read good things about his prayer method, and wanted to expose myself to the practice even though I didn’t believe in the religion itself.

To my pleasant surprise, Father Keating began with a discussion of developmental psychology, walking us through the psychological disappointments, traumas and episodes of neglect that form our insecurities and repressed anxieties later in life. He talked about how, later in life, we may turn to a plethora of distractions to avoid the deeper sadnesses and angers that reside in our minds – not only drugs and alcohol, but unhealthy relationships, overworking and expensive travel experiences, too (we can probably all relate to at least one of those).

Father Keating then made the leap into religion, explaining how the centering prayer method – essentially a meditation using a focus word – can help us become aware of our unconscious anxieties and, with enough time, put us in touch with the bottomless and steady love of God himself.

“The love of God,” for a non-believer, may be easily dismissed as a pointless sentiment for those without faith. At first, I had a similar reaction: I appreciated meditation, but how could I benefit from the concept of divine love? Nonetheless, I had come to the session with an intentionally open, creative mind, and decided to think about how God might be useful for me as a metaphor.

In the days following the talk, I believe I’ve deciphered a meaning for “the love of God” that can be applied to secular thinking with a bit of imaginative symbolism. In my mind, I replaced the word “God” with the sum total of the universe – all the observable things, from planets to single-celled organisms to our fellow humans (and this is not so far off from the religious meaning of God). “The love of God” became “the love of the universe” during my prayer. And it clicked.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much the universe has transpired to make my life livable and meaningful. The sun provides energy and warmth for our planet; the plants and animals provide me with oxygen and food; even bacteria allow me to digest my food. Fellow humans give me connection and a sense of purpose in the greater good of mankind. I am alive and healthy, thanks to all these factors and many more, and my life is neither tortuous nor completely unstable. If that is not a reflection of the universe’s love – the universe’s care for me, intentional or otherwise – then I do not know what is.

I believe that God and religion can provide those of us without explicit faith with important metaphors and frameworks for bringing more peace, joy, and gratitude into our lives. I encourage you to be open to religion and what is has to offer, adapting the teachings to whatever you believe in. If you are a Buddhist, attend a Jewish service; if you are Christian, attend a Baha’i service; if you do not affiliate, attend an Islamic service.

See how different ways of framing God, humanity and the mystery beyond resonate with you. Religion, ultimately, does not have to be a set of beliefs, but has the opportunity, through its diversity of teachings, to be a portal into a better self and society. Be open to what all religions have to offer, and you might be surprised that “God,” as metaphor, can change your perspective on life, too.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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The gift of uncharted territory https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/01/the-gift-of-uncharted-territory/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/01/the-gift-of-uncharted-territory/#respond Wed, 01 Nov 2017 08:00:23 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1132237 Of the many events I attended at this year’s NSO, the most impactful was undoubtedly the Latinx festival. I am not Hispanic or Latina, but I very much enjoy speaking Spanish and learning about Latin culture, and I went to the festival looking for an inclusive cultural organization to join. Wandering through the club booths, […]

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Of the many events I attended at this year’s NSO, the most impactful was undoubtedly the Latinx festival. I am not Hispanic or Latina, but I very much enjoy speaking Spanish and learning about Latin culture, and I went to the festival looking for an inclusive cultural organization to join.

Wandering through the club booths, I noticed a pair of musicians playing at the end of the line of tables. Out of mere curiosity, I approached the table and asked about the group. It was the Mariachi Band, they told me.

When they asked if I’d heard Mariachi music before, I said yes, which was only a half-lie: Surely I’d heard it sometime before, though off the top of my head, I had only the vaguest idea of what Mariachi was. I knew it was Mexican, and I knew it involved guitars. A few minutes later, my name was on the email list as a potential guitarist and singer for the group.

In the next two weeks, I received the typical 700 emails sent to new undergraduates about clubs and organizations they’d erroneously signed up for at the Activities Fair. Of the few emails that caught my attention, one was for the Mariachi auditions.

I figured I’d show up, be identified as a totally inexperienced player and promptly be dismissed from the group. So on the first day of practice, I arrived with every intention of eating the free pan dulce and never returning to the Casa Zapata basement again.

The group leaders talked to us about the group, the performance schedule and the practice times. They handed out sheet music and I fumbled through the chords, without a pick or any sense of the strumming rhythm. After two hours of cheek-burning incompetency, they dismissed us, with instructions to come back the next day for sectionals. That night, the four of us new members received a formal practice schedule and invitations to join the GroupMe, at which point I realized that there was no audition and that I’d actually been accepted into the group.

I was, to be generous, unsure of my place, but I showed up to all three practices that week, and I have shown up to all three practices each week since. At first embarrassed and shy, I played quietly and apologized often for my mistakes. Nonetheless, thanks to the encouragement of the more experienced band members and lots of practice, I began to improve. More importantly, I began to look forward to rehearsals each week.

Mariachi, to this day, is the highlight of my week at Stanford. The band has offered me two principal gifts: The experience of flow state and a united community.

Flow state, in psychology, is the state of being totally immersed in an activity, mentally and physically, so that you lose track of time and temporarily forget all the other concerns and anxieties of your life. In a state of flow, there is no mental chatter, no ruminating about yesterday or worrying about tomorrow; flow is a connection with the present moment, in all its sensory and intellectual fullness.

When I am at Mariachi, I experience flow as the total concentration on the sheet music, the sound of my guitar and how well I am harmonizing with all the other instruments in the group. Perhaps because I am a beginner, my focus is particularly heightened during practice; I am released from all other mental preoccupations except for the music itself. Being totally immersed by necessity, I get to hear every instrument with an acuity that I’ve never experienced before as a solo musician. At Mariachi, there is no room for p-set anxiety – just chords and lyrics.

I am also grateful for the community and interdependence I’ve found in Mariachi. Being a new student at Stanford can be destabilizing: The rug of home has just been ripped out from under you, and your “new home” is a behemoth institution of over 7,000 undergraduates – not to mention graduates, faculty and staff – each pursuing their own goals independently of one another.

Though there are certainly virtues of being autonomous and independent, human beings also need a sense of community and dependence upon one another – somewhere, somehow, we need to be needed. That is what Mariachi has offered me: A sense that I belong to a group that needs me, even in a tiny capacity. To merely be expected to show up and contribute six hours a week has anchored me here at Stanford, thanks to the kindness and inclusivity of all the members.

During your time at Stanford, whether you’re a freshman or senior, I encourage you to find a club or group that is wholly unfamiliar to you. Ideally, find a group with some sort of creative goal, whether that’s coding, singing, dancing, or writing poetry. Regardless of your skill level, simply show up and give your full attention and commitment. If you’re lucky, you might find your own flow state and an incredible, dependable community while you’re at it.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Walking as meditation https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/26/walking-as-meditation/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/26/walking-as-meditation/#respond Thu, 26 Oct 2017 08:00:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1131845 In my first month at Stanford, I’ve used my bike five times: once to go to CVS in Palo Alto, twice to go to the grocery store, once to go to a doctor’s appointment off campus and once to get to Wilbur on short notice. I have never biked to a class or meeting, and […]

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In my first month at Stanford, I’ve used my bike five times: once to go to CVS in Palo Alto, twice to go to the grocery store, once to go to a doctor’s appointment off campus and once to get to Wilbur on short notice. I have never biked to a class or meeting, and of the three times I’ve been to Trader Joe’s, I’ve only biked once. Normally, I walk.

This fact — that I own a bike but rarely use it on campus — baffles most of my friends. Why would you ever endure the trek over to the Graduate School of Business on foot? Isn’t that, well, a waste of time?

If walking had no purpose other than getting from point A to point B, then it would be a waste of time. But I do not walk to class simply to get from dorm to lecture hall. The walking itself, not the destination, is the reason why I walk whenever possible.

As Stanford students, finding time for ourselves to relax and reflect can seem impossible. When I’m with friends, I can’t turn into myself for calm and introspection. When I’m in my dorm room, I feel a constant itch to get something done, to finish a reading or get ahead on a paper due next week. I value meditation, yoga and mindfulness practices, but with all of my activities and academic demands, setting aside time to simply sit and relax has become a low-priority item on a constantly expanding checklist. With midterms and papers approaching, it can feel hard to justify a 30 — even 15 — minute break.

That’s where walking factors into my life. Walking is not empty, unproductive time; it gets me to my classes, the library, and my dorm. Nonetheless, it is not entirely a means to an end. Walking can function as a sort of meditation, a mindfulness practice to fit into the nooks and crannies of your day — fifteen minutes here, fifteen minutes there, and you’ve got an hour to relax and introspect.

Of course, it takes effort and practice to be mindful while walking. Walking meditation requires present-moment awareness and turning off the mental static that drives our stress response and anxiety. In order to turn walking into a spiritual practice, it’s important to notice both the world around you and the sensations of your own body.

Walking as meditation
Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh stresses the importance of mindful walking. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

“We combine our breathing with our steps,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh, a renowned Buddhist monk who advocates walking meditation. “When we walk like this, with our breath, we bring our body and our mind back together.”

Once you have centered yourself in your body, aware of the harmony in your breath and steps, you can expand your focus to all your senses. “Listen to the birds” is a worn-out cliché, but for good reason: bird song is one of the most pacifying and magical sounds I’ve ever heard.

Notice the sounds, natural and man-made, along with the plants, the cracks in the sidewalk, the smell as you walk by freshly mowed lawns. Focus on a single tree, each distinct leaf, the way its trunk curves and knots around the edges. Breathe.

When you are calm and present, walking can also be the perfect opportunity to reflect, imagine, and simply notice your feelings and thoughts about yourself and other people. Some of my most profound insights about how to be a kinder, better human being have occurred to me while walking. Listening to music, in my experience, facilitates this process well, giving you your own introspective space, separate from the world.

I walk to class because it is my way of integrating meditation and reflection into my otherwise busy, mentally scattered life. Therefore, while bikes are sometimes necessary, I encourage you to try to walk to one class, club or meeting a day. Notice how you feel and what sticks out to you in your environment as you walk.

According to Thich Nhat Hanh, “Each mindful breath, each mindful step, reminds us that we are alive on this beautiful planet.” That, I believe, is why I walk: for the space and time to receive this reminder.

So walk to class, walk to dinner, walk to the post office, but take each step with the purpose of walking and nothing more.

 

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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