Yesterday started in the same fashion that a weekday has for years. My alarm’s insistent buzzing prompted me to wonder why I, again, somehow lacked the foresight to avoid morning classes. I woke up groggily and stumbled around my room, trying to get dressed quickly and quietly. I completed my morning routine with one eye closed and paused, standing on one leg like a flamingo, to answer a silly e-mail on my phone from an old friend. I slowly typed with awkward thumbs and switched feet before I remembered: being just “a few minutes late” is no longer an easy and forgivable indiscretion for me.

Now, I ride the Marguerite to campus, and if I miss my bus, the next one doesn’t arrive for half an hour, surely pushing my tardiness into the “unacceptable” category.

Trying to catch my breath at the Marguerite stop reminded me again of how much has changed. No longer did I see familiar faces on my stroll down the Lower Row, but instead tried to discreetly wipe off my forehead sweat as I guessed the role of my fellow Marguerite passengers: Med School staff member? Engineering Ph.D. student? Definite GSB student. I absolutely adore this game, and my strife at having nearly missed the bus melted away, along with my baffled indignation that my 13-minute commute to the Quad has become a 30-minute journey with multiple legs.

I am a graduate student. I am a graduate student. It is taking a little bit of time to get used to.

To be specific, I am a co-term, and after four years of living happily, intensely, gleefully on campus, I have embarked on an adventure to branch out, grow up and move off campus. As such, my life has become a study in unexpected similarities and differences. My days usually flit between feeling just like normal–one more year of the same wonderful Stanford–and being completely jarring and disorienting–a year spent in the same geographic location, but completely foreign in its happenings.

When I set up my laptop at a quiet-looking table to attempt to and get some work done, the resulting fruitless search for an outlet and inevitable Gchat bonanza completely overshadows any productivity. It feels exactly like the past four years. Staying up too late with my longtime roommate looking at cute things on the Internet is delightfully the same. Though we are supposedly bordering on real adulthood, vacuuming regularly is still not a desire that seems to have set root in either of our hearts, unfortunately.

While my hip friends are trying out life as young professionals, I remain entrenched in student life. Though we no longer complain about classes together, and I have trouble participating in the inaugural griping about mundane office life, I still fall back into the old habits and inside jokes. Even our beat-up furniture that accompanied us through the first four years of Stanford remains, lending our new locales a sense of familiarity. It would be eerie, except my insistence on personifying all objects has made the coffee table and faithful futon seem like old friends who have been with me through a lot.

It’s interesting to find myself in this in-between place, when I thought I had so carefully engineered my life to allow me to avoid the distracting nostalgia for my first four years at Stanford. Initially, I lived in a state of minor fear that some deja vu would launch me into a sentimental sobbing fit, but increasingly, I appreciate these echoes of my older life. It’s unexpected, and while I run for the bus and learn to adjust to one more tier in adulthood, I am also learning again about handling and even embracing the unexpected. Unexpectedness is difficult for people like me, people with color-coded calendars, but I am beginning to understand that there is a lot for me to learn outside of the plan.

Jade’s not expecting any responses. Do the unexpected: e-mail her at jadew@stanford.edu.