“Things aren’t as new anymore.”

Junior year ages people. No more or less time elapses than any other year, but in their time as juniors, undergraduates shift their personal outlook when they’re on the second half of their Stanford career. With two years at Stanford under their belt, whether students feel like they are “masters of the game” as communication and international relations major Kenan Jiang put it or they are still trying to define their place on the Farm, somewhere in the course of their third year, juniors feel differently about their younger selves.

And it is these shifts, in perspective as much as in circumstance, that structure the murky transition from sophomore year.

Junior year focuses. For the student who’s spent two years slacking off, it’s a time to relearn and reapply the abilities that got them to the Farm in the first place. For the hard worker, it’s a time to act on the projects and accomplishments now within reach.

“Junior year is one of those years you really have to start planning for your future,” said Eric Molina, a pre-med working in a neurology laboratory toward his honors thesis. “Setting that up is pretty important to do.”

“I don’t know if it’s motivation, but it’s this sense of what you ought to be doing,” said Max Friedmann, a music and public policy major. “You start to see a lot of people around you doing interesting things.”

Junior year poses questions. Not only dialogues in classrooms and existential quandaries, but the tough, practical challenges of how to put a life on a solid foundation.

“It’s definitely been challenging,” admitted Jennifer Price, a Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) major. “It’s hard to get all the resources in order, professors in order, advisers in order, hopeful employment in order–it’s just been a roller-coaster. ‘Well, what will happen if that doesn’t happen?’ ‘What will happen if that does happen?’ It’s a lot of ‘what-ifs?’ and questions that will hopefully, eventually, get answered.”

“I think in junior year you really wind up focusing on your academics,” Friedmann added. “Everybody’s abroad. It’s just a big year of limbo. I think it’s really stressful. You’ve got all these big steps around the corner.”

Junior year categorizes, forcing people–for better and for worse–into set paths and defined fields. Deep interests and satisfying work can result, as it did for Juan Acevedo, a mechanical engineering major who focuses on control design–but even he notes the loss of variety that comes with specialization.

“I’ve found a particular niche that I’m in,” he said. “As opposed to freshman year, it seems like everybody does everything and a half…now that I’ve had to focus on a certain thing, it definitely looks less diverse, almost.”

Junior year scatters friends. If classes don’t line up, meals aren’t in the same hall and weekend homework starts Saturday morning instead of Sunday night, the times to meet and converse, even with the closest of friends, can become scarce.

“We have not seen each other for the last three weeks, and we live two blocks from each other,” said junior class president Pamon Forouhar of one of his best friends.

“I think what’s been really tough is, a lot of my really close friends are abroad,” agreed drama major Sarah Guerrero. “I was gone last quarter, then I have some of my really close friends abroad this quarter, some of them are going abroad next quarter. I think the fact that everyone’s in different countries was the tough bit of it.”

“But surprisingly, of the friends that I have on campus, it’s been really easy to keep up with them and to hang out with them,” she added.

Junior year happens elsewhere. Whether living or working off-campus, taking a quarter in the nation’s capital or heading to an overseas program in a whole new part of the world, many students spend a significant portion of their junior year at Stanford…away from Stanford. And new locales can lead to a new outlook.

“SIW, for me, was a really defining and focusing experience,” said Sarah Flamm of her time at Stanford in Washington, where she worked in the Department of Justice. “It’s not a function of me being amazing or anything, I just got a great situation.”

For Forouhar, as well, time in Berlin made for something new, which made coming back to the Farm a jarring change.

“For the first time, I understood how it was possible to live a life outside of school,” Forouhar said of his time abroad.

“It’s easy to get caught up in campus,” he added. “It wasn’t so much of a culture shock going abroad, as it was coming back.”

For other students, junior year is a wake-up call, a reminder that time in college is finite.

“I want to stay as long as I can,” said math major Ben Holtz. “I don’t see why anyone would ever want to leave this place.”

“I think that there is a little bit of finality to the college experience coming up,” he added. “I can sort of feel impending doom in the real world.”

Junior year can push people forward, even if they’re only partly on their way out.

“It’s almost like you have a foot in both of the doors,” Molina said of the approaching jump away from college to beyond.

Junior year opens perspectives. For many, the uncertain contours of life beyond Stanford become easier to grasp.

“You see everyone grow up a little bit,” said Keith Knapp. “People start changing. So you start being able to more clearly see, as opposed to freshman or sophomore year, what kind of people you can be friends with after Stanford.”

In the end, junior year eludes easy definition–like the juniors themselves. The ambiguous space between the clear tasks of arriving and departing encourages the uncertainties of a third year as much as it opens up unforeseen possibilities.

“Things aren’t as new anymore,” juniors say.

But they will only be older for a short time.