Our commencement was last month. Since then, I've been traveling -- visiting with friends and relatives in California -- and moving my possessions and the detritus of the past four years from California back to New York. I just got home on Tuesday, at some ungodly hour of morning. I've spent most of my time since unpacking and rearranging my room (and evicting my sister from it, as she's apparently taken up residence while I've been in school). It's more complicated that one might think, given that I have to consolidate/shift/toss a lot of my old stuff to make room for everything I've brought back. It's probably the most thorough cleaning my room's ever gotten. I got bored (of course) and consequently nostalgic, so I thought I'd take a break and begin setting down some of the mad whirlwind of thoughts that I have regarding my time at Stanford.
It was not an easy journey, both in terms of my pursuits and my direction. I had, at various points of these past four years, been tested on all fronts: academics, extra-curriculars, people, career. (The Stanford Duck Syndrome, if you will -- paddling furiously to stay afloat, while appearing mostly calm above the surface. The acronym, SDS, also somewhat ironically doubles for the Stanford Debate Society. Go figure.) Looking back, I'm not completely satisfied with my college experience -- there are things I would have done differently, things I wish I'd known going in -- but it was a tremendous period of personal growth.
Academics were challenging throughout, much more so than high school. It seems like a no-brainer, but as one of my grade school friends likes to point out, college is often easier than high school for the specialist and harder than high school for the generalist. I was a jack-of-all-trades in grade school, equally comfortable in the humanities and the sciences (I was, for example, simultaneously captain of the math and debate teams). If only because my high school had more of a humanities bent -- it ran a bit like a small liberal arts college -- I was considered quite good at the sciences among my peers (big fish in a small pond, as it were). I actually got to Stanford thinking that I would be pre-med -- mostly because my parents thought that it suited me -- and considered majoring in math or biology. The best example: I remember taking -- and then dropping -- the hard freshman math class (the H in 51H variously stood for "honors" and "hard" and "hellish," I'm told). It was very interesting material and I met some of my closest friends there, but I just didn't have the time and energy necessary to really do well, what with the other courses I was taking (yes, even as a first-quarter freshman I insisted on maxing out my course load) and the world-class calibre of students in the class (several of them math campers, including a few who did
SUMaC, both my year and other years). Dropping the class was a surprisingly difficult choice to make. It was the first time I'd really encountered what I considered to be massive failure, and I felt as though I were giving up -- that completing the class could simply have been a matter of will. Accepting personal limits was never something I've done well, or gracefully, so that in itself was a learning experience.
For most of my freshman year, my courseload consisted of techie classes punctuated with the one series of humanities classes that all of us were required to take, known as IHUM (Introduction to the Humanities). My IHUM sequence was called "Ancient Empires," covering the civilizations of antiquity and taught by the wonderful archaeologist and professor
Ian Morris. I quickly discovered that IHUM was my favorite course of the year, my sanity break from all the maths and chemistry and such. I should have realized then that I wasn't doing what I really wanted to be doing -- but I didn't know what it was that I actually wanted out of my college career, and for my future beyond.
My sophomore year consisted of change -- lots of it. I was learning myself, learning my strengths and weaknesses, figuring out what it was I wanted to do with the rest of my time at Stanford and my life thereafter. I had something of a personal crisis in the middle of my sophomore year, after having already taken four quarters of pre-med classes: I realized that pre-med just wasn't for me. By then, I'd tried all of the so-called "Asian" professions at least once; I'd interned over the past few summers at a hospital, on Wall Street, and at a law firm. While I enjoyed each of the internships (more as learning experiences than as career options), I couldn't quite see myself in any of the above industries for the rest of my life. Learning what I didn't want was important -- I'm just glad that I figured out what I
did want, just in time (see
this post from the end of sophomore year).
I'd begun taking history and creative writing classes for fun. I wanted to do more of it, but wasn't quite ready to give up premed and dash all my parents' hopes for me. But over the summer, I found myself working at
Penguin as an editorial intern, and really absolutely loving it. It was something of a coincidence -- I'd applied because I liked the idea of working with books, but I didn't know anything about the industry going into the job. By the end of the summer, I didn't want to leave.
And so I went back for seconds in 2011. In the interim, I declared my history major at the last possible moment in my junior year -- I asked Prof. Morris to be my advisor, because he's awesome and because it was fitting. His class was what first made me consider majoring in history, after all. I began taking more English classes and wanting to do that as well. It wasn't a creative writing course, but ultimately a short story class (which I may have mentioned
here), that sold me on the English major. (It seems that there is a recurring trope in my life where I am convinced to declare a major after taking an
amazing class in the department, and end up asking the instructor to be my advisor.
Elizabeth Tallent became my English faculty advisor.)
If all of that hadn't convinced me that publishing was right for me, one particular episode of my second Penguin summer did. One day towards the end of my internship, I was very casually handed a shiny new hardcover of
Those Across the River -- a book I'd first read as a submission the previous summer, which I'd really liked and talked up to a few editors I worked with. I reread it that very night. The incredible rush that comes from holding in my hands a book that I, in some tiny way, had a part in bringing to fruition -- it's a pretty heady feeling.
That's how I ended up where I am, now. A job (and hopefully a career) in publishing, a degree in history and English, and back in New York City, my hometown. It's been a wild ride, to be sure -- not all of it went as smoothly or as well as I would have liked, but I survived, and am a more complete human being for it.
More to come. (Perhaps that ending was a little too... conclusive. There's more, really.)
