The smartest freshman I know at Stanford is my roommate. Since Stanford has a misinformed roommate assignment policy, I have to conclude that I just got incredibly lucky. It could easily have been a lot worse, I see other people’s roommates and it makes me sad. Anyway, the crucial thing is this ― if my roommate was not my roommate, I doubt I’d have ever met him and even if we had met, we wouldn’t have gotten beyond names and places.
At orientation, people ask the wrong questions (”Where are you from?” tells you next to nothing about a person but it’s always the second one in any conversation). Besides, everyone’s more interested in finding a posse than interesting people, because there’s nothing worse than not having a regular group of “friends” to hang out with post-orientation! (Sociologically, this phenomenon―the almost mad rush to find a posse―is extremely interesting). Classes seem to be a good way unless, of course, there are no freshman in most of your classes. As far as I’ve explored, student groups at Stanford are boring. Two grad students, both of whom have been at Stanford for a long time, independently agreed that there was no club for real intellectual discussions. Last week’s Stanford Happy Dev House had three attendees including me. Talks, workshops and other events are another avenue but I don’t see many freshman at most of the ones I’m interested in. After the first few weeks, it becomes awkward to sit at a new table and so, pretty much the only place where people meet new people is at parties. Of course, in this case, the word “meet” means something slightly different. Parties are loud, noisy and awful for conversation. More importantly, the people who party hard are probably not the kind I want to meet (although, I should note, I’ve met a few interesting people walking back early from parties).
So, these are the facts. I don’t know of any really smart freshmen other than my roommate. And despite Stanford’s terribly flawed admissions process, it’s hard to believe that there aren’t any others. There must be a more effective and efficient way of meeting smart people other than waiting for people to get smarter over the next 4 years, which I’m sure, a small but significant minority will become.
Addendum: It’s not my intention to define any term here. My definition of smart is, in fact, broad but also, selective. I don’t mean that smart people are the only people I want to hang out with either. I’d rather spend time with nice people (”nice”, as defined by me; to give you a sense what I mean by that, consider this – poor people are generally nicer people) than smart people. Of course, Stanford doesn’t explicitly claim to be home to nice people, whereas it does claim to have a high concentration of smart people.
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