"Succeeding" at Stanford
Surviving is a lot harder than getting in (and other things I would tell my younger self)
I remember coming across the transcript of a Stanford Admissions Q&A session on Art of Problem Solving, a website for competition math students. In particular, one question caught my attention: “What are some of the main ways that smart / high achieving kids fail once they get to Stanford? And what is the main advice you'd have for preventing (or recovering) from that failure?” The Stanford student gave this answer:
There are definitely new challenges here that can be hard to adapt to, such as the fact that you're suddenly surrounded by many more brilliant people, and the classes are much harder but also often more flexible, with the result that you're responsible for keeping yourself on schedule and not falling behind…accept that things are going to be harder now and that this is a good thing.
I find all of those things to be true. Now that I am in my third year, I have a better understanding of what it means to be a student at Stanford, and it really is a daunting place.
No one at Stanford is mediocre or unmotivated, but it is easy to feel that way when you see your peers raising tens of millions of dollars for their startup or doing research at the Pentagon. And when everyone around you is brilliant, thriving, and working incredibly hard, it is common to feel inadequate, or to feel like you are somehow not doing enough. Over the past few months, I have had many conversations with friends about feelings of inadequacy — friends who have been taking graduate-level classes since they were sophomores, working at top companies or venture funds, and doing competitive long-distance running for fun, all while maintaining near-perfect grades. My parents think that I suffer from low self-esteem, but I think this feeling is pretty universal. I often wonder if it takes some amount of delusion to achieve true confidence at a place like Stanford.
One particular challenge students face is that of positive reward cycles breaking: losing the feeling that you are “on the right track” and growing. As successful high school students, we often had dopamine-laced rewards doled out on a regular basis for our hard work — a good test score here, an award there — and often for “being the best.” But at Stanford, succeeding feels far more elusive, not only because there are far more brilliant people here, but also because there isn’t one unified axis everyone is competing on. People excel at far more and different things.
My friend Vincent wrote about this idea in one of his blog posts on structured and unstructured games:
Structured games have clearly defined rules and outcomes. [High school] is a good example. It has a clear win-condition (get into a prestigious university) and specific objectives (get good grades, join the right clubs, etc). This type of environment makes it easy to measure progress and identify next steps.
Unstructured games are much harder and more frustrating to play. Winning is often poorly defined and it's often unclear how to make progress. It becomes easy to adopt arbitrary rulesets to give yourself a sense of momentum and inertia. This is really dangerous, as you can end up spending a lot of time optimizing for things that ultimately don't matter.
In many ways, university is an unstructured game. If you're not following a established pre-professional or academic path, progress is hard to define and its extremely difficult to figure out what you actually want.
Lots of people have written about the topics I have discussed (i.e feelings of inadequacy, thriving in a hyper-competitive environment), but I want to focus on the feeling of being lost. I construe loss in two meanings of the word. The first is the feeling of “being lost” — you feel uncertain about where you are headed and how to get to where you want to be.
The second is the feeling of literally losing pieces of your identity. For my whole life, I have prided myself on my hard work. There’s a quote from Angela Duckworth’s Grit that particularly resonated with me when I was younger: “When I get knocked down, I’ll get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest.” At Stanford, there are days when I have felt immobilized by the pressure around me. I could not bona fide reassure myself that I was putting in my full effort, even though I had every ounce of the willpower that I had before. I felt discouraged not only because I was not measuring up to my own expectations, but because it seemed like I had lost a core tenet of my identity — someone who works hard. And I know that I am not alone in feeling this way. When you go to a school where everyone is extremely good at what they do, it’s a lot harder to hold onto an identity like “I was the math person at my school” or “I was the humanities kid.” When you are no longer best at what you used to be best at, it’s easy to spiral.
It breaks my heart to see so many of my peers doubt themselves — their drive, their passions, their joy — because of the pressures Stanford imposes on them.
When younger students, especially students from my high school, ask me for college advice, I sometimes blank. I certainly haven’t figured out Stanford.
These days, I remind myself that I am often my harshest critic. I try to be kinder to myself, to talk to myself as I would to a close friend. I tell myself to regain the sense of childlike joy that I thought had lost when I came to Stanford, to pause and wonder at everything I am learning. I remind myself that just by being at Stanford, I am living the dream I had when I was sixteen or seventeen - being around really smart people who love tech and the humanities, taking an entire class on Cicero, and getting to learn from and talk with professors I read about in high school. I’m challenged every day. The weather is great. And I have met some really wonderful people.
"Succeeding" at Stanford
> The weather is great.
uh...