While traditionally overlooked by University administrations and the media, sophomore year has grown increasingly associated with a unique set of difficulties. However, Stanford has begun fighting back with a new program called Stanford Journeys, a guest-speaker series created to help students through the difficulties they face during their second year.

Although many University programs place an emphasis on helping freshmen adjust to life at Stanford, there have traditionally been fewer programs aimed towards helping sophomores and upperclassmen transition from year to year.

Many college students agree that sophomore year brings new emotional and academic challenges, giving rise to the term “sophomore slump.”

 

Bringing in outside reflections

Rob Urstein, Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Dean of Freshmen and Director of Undergraduate Advising and Research, said that sophomores often struggle to choose their majors and feel less supported than freshmen.

“There are so many things that are geared to helping the newest students at Stanford make a successful transition to Stanford. Everything from the whole Approaching Stanford process to NSO to all the very deliberate classic activities in freshman year,” Urstein said.  “And I just think there’s less of that in the sophomore year.”

Urstein was involved in creating the Stanford Journeys program and worked with the sophomore class presidents, the Alumni Center and the Career Development Center in the process. The program aims to bring back alumni for on-stage conversations that inspire students at this critical juncture in their time at Stanford.

“We have more than 200,000 living alumni doing every possible imaginable thing in the world — living all over the world,” Urstein said. “And if we could bring students who were once in the shoes of current Stanford students who can talk about what they studied at Stanford and the choices they made after Stanford … I think that could help students get a more expansive sense of possibilities.”

The first event of the program took place March 1, when Urstein held an on-stage conversation with surgeon and author Atul Gawande ’87.

Gawande pursued a number of different interests during his time at Stanford, ranging from reviewing concerts for The Stanford Daily to doing activism work opposing apartheid. After Stanford, Gawande worked in a number of positions, such as acting as Bill Clinton’s health care advisor during Clinton’s victorious 1992 presidential campaign.

Despite getting a C in his freshman writing class, Gawande has now become a bestselling and award- winning author whose books include “The Checklist Manifesto.” He also works as a staff writer for The New Yorker. After his on-stage discussion with Urstein, Gawande took questions from students in the audience.

 

Student perspectives on sophomore year

Kyle Abraham ’15 is a resident assistant for Toyon Hall who works to help sophomores in choosing their majors.  Since Toyon is a sophomore-only dorm, Abraham is familiar with the specific challenges sophomores face.

Abraham encourages students to ask house and University staff such as resident fellows and professors for help, but he also urges students to look to friends for inspiration.

“Sometimes it takes a friend to be like, ‘Well, the way I’ve seen you, the way you’ve been talking, the way I know you from freshman year, it seems that  maybe this is an opportunity that seems best for you,’” Abraham said.

Hali Mo ’17 sees the difficulties of sophomore year as encompassing more than just academic issues. For example, she explained that reaching out to friends from freshman year has become significantly more difficult.

“It becomes a very concentrated effort to see some people, whereas [in freshman year] it used to be you just ran upstairs and barged into their room,” Mo said.

 

Contact Skylar Cohen at skylark ‘at’ stanford.edu.