Guide to the Good (College) Life

So you worked hard all through high school, and its finally senior spring. You got into college. You don’t care about your grades anymore. Life is great.

Summer before frosh year

First of all, if you’re lucky enough to not have to work the summer before college, for the love of god, please don’t. Watch TV. Hang out with your friends. Travel. Read books. Spend time with family. It’s rare to have a stretch of time this unscheduled. The fact that you know what comes next is what makes this a unique time in life. You don’t need to prep for freshman fall. Take a chill pill.

Frosh year

(or first-year, or freshman year) I went into college thinking I was the shit, and my single worst grades were in my very first quarter. I took a heavy courseload, and learnt a ton. And worked hard, spending a lot of time on problem sets. I had picked up some bad (or interesting, if you want to be neutral about it) habits in high school - I wasn’t looking for a perfect score on problem sets, and often let points slide. Good enough was my goal. My perspective was “if I wanted to (get good grades), I could”, the implicit assumption being I wasn’t really looking for that. I ended up taking a very different approach later on in my college career.

  • talk to everyone. I live with a bunch of close friends in San Francisco now, the plurality of whom I met my freshman year of college. Probably the first person I met at Stanford was this dude peeing in the stall right by me in my frosh dorm - he’s now my roommate.
    • notably, talk to people very different from you. I was under the assumption that there were smart kids and then there were bad kids. Smart kids didn’t smoke or drink or party or curse, and got good grades. Bad kids did all those things, and got bad grades. College shattered all these assumptions for me, completely. I remember distinctly my first weekend at school my roommate and I had a bunch of people in our room for a pregame. I was talking to this kid wearing a UoA hat who also happened to be smoking a joint. I asked him what he majored in, and he proceeded to tell me he was an aerospace engineering major. He was enrolled in bunch of grad seminars, was clearly smart. I had a short circuit moment, and have revised my priors ever since.

Rest of college

Sophomore year can be lonely. Or at least that’s how it usually goes at Stanford.

Try to live with your friends from frosh year, and most importantly, try to get meals with the friends you don’t see as often. It’s harder to bump into people in the hallway now - so you need to engineer these meetups. Great practice for the real world.

Reach out to professors and alumni as much as possible. Anything you are remotely interested in, read papers, do your homework, offer to buy coffee.

For me some of those things were, at various times of college, the DoD, reinforcement learning, operating systems, computer networking, startups, startups and more startups.

Talking to people is a phenomenal way to learn. Directed advice is very powerful. This piece has really resonated with me.

Other tips

  • go to the gym/workout regularly.
  • don’t watch TV, resist the urge to spend time on your phone
  • don’t take yourself too seriously, nobody around you has a plan and it is not a race
    • related: loosen up a little
  • you’ll be just fine